Sheer Dumb Luck 1: Soccer Team Poster

You never know how things are going to work until you try. I got asked to create the cover for the 2008 Juneau Douglass High School soccer program this year. I wanted to try to set up a grunty kind of team picture. The general idea was to use a fog machine to create a curtain of fog behind the players. 

Turns out, fog machines don't create "curtains" of fog, they create nebulous blobs of millions of floating particles. Any sort of front lighting would light up each of these fog particles and negate any sort of backlighting I was hoping for.


After a frustrating practice session of trying in vain, none of the images at the test run actually came out.

The next day, I showed up with a full entourage of two assistants and the DJ/party guy to try to bludgeon the image into reality by sheer force. Working completely on a whim (since I scrapped all the plans from the unsuccessful test-shoot), I set up a soft box high and left to light the players as dramatically as I could from one, wide, soft light source. I had an assistant hold a flag and a barn door (both created out of posterboard bought that morning) at the soft box to minimize light spillage. Then, I set up a strobe with a blue gell behind the fog machine. Cranked both light sources up to max, and lit off the fog machine.

Before the fog turned the entire gym into an impenetrable cloud of solid smoke, I managed the shots seen here. I cut the players loose, and breathed a nauseously fog-tinged sigh of relief, chuckling at the thought of the cheerleaders who had to use the smoky gym next. It was all sheer dumb luck.