The Fighter: The gloves come off

When you have a sporadic career such as your humble photographer, you do anything you can to stay busy in-between jobs to stay on top of your game or to cure your creative doldrums. It's been slow, it's been slow for a lot of people I know in photography from weddings to commercial, editorial to assignment, almost to the point of rethinking what we're doing this for in the first place. I love being a part of this community and at the end of the day it beats any other job I could find. When I start to get bummed and need to get the lead out, I look to personal projects that I've wanted to shoot and try to do what I can with limited funds. I always try to shoot with the intention that the images I create will motivate a client or potential client to hire me for something I'm passionate about. I have wanted to shoot a female boxer for a while so this was a lot of fun as well as a good stock shoot.

Our model is a familiar one if you follow my blog and no, she's not really a fighter but a freaking great actress. Amanda and I shot some images that ended up winning her the 2008 Guitar World Magazine readers poll a few months back and now she's moving out to LA to chase her dreams of musical stardom after 8 years of fronting the band Ginger Jake. We shot these images at my studio and at the Anoka County air museum, which is sadly being closed due to fucked up M.A.C rules and ignorant politicians who don't know what their taking away from the community. Go visit it while you have the chance, you can just walk around the back where the planes are. It closes for good July 31st.

Technical Data: Simple one light setup on location using the sun as the keylight. I set my strobe to full power (600WS) hooked it up to an Alien Bees Vagabond battery pack and used a 2x2 silver dome and a 48inch octobank. My best friends at the airport were my rolling C-stand and my 35pound sandbag. I set my camera to ISO100 shutter speeds varied between 60 and 160 at F11 depending on how I wanted my sky to look. I always keep my light about 5-7 feet off the subject as a rule and generally have them look right into it as we shoot.