The combination of beautiful fall weather and a high school senior photo shoot makes for a great opportunities. This week has been particularly nice, with clear skies, fall rich fall colors and cool nights. I recently did a senior photo session for a gal who plays soccer for Bloomington High School. She wanted a few photos on the soccer field, but her home field is literally just that… an open field. And to make matters worse, it doesn’t have a scoreboard or any identifying signs.
No problem, we simply went to another soccer field, in this case, we used the Pekin High School field in Coal Miner’s Park. The photo below shows one of the frames, pretty much straight out of the camera. You can even see her father holding a collapsible panel to block the harsh sunlight. The light on Laura is coming from camera left from an off-camera strobe.
The problem, of course, is that the scoreboard says “Pekin Dragons” instead of “Bloomington Raiders.” The photo below shows the result of some retouching on the scoreboard. Now it has the Bloomington school name and colors. Notice that the time clock even displays 2011, her class year. The switch-out was made easier since I had taken a picture of just the scoreboard before I moved from my shooting position. That gave me an unobstructed view of the scoreboard so that I could retouch it, and then use it as the master in any of the frames.
If you’re interested in even more, behind-the-scenes Photoshop details, I also posted a tutorial showing how I extracted the BHS logo at the top of the scoreboard. It’s available on YouTube or on my Tutorials page of my main web site.
