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Rangefinder
Magazine Rf Cookbook by Karen Nadalin
When I first met U.S. Paralympic track star Roderick Green, I was working on a self-assignment at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado. During our shoot, this friendly, modest young man never let on about his remarkable journey as an athlete. Roderick’s right leg was amputated below the knee when he was three years old. In 1997, he became the first amputee to receive an NAIA full basketball scholarship. In the 2000 Paralympics in Sydney, Australia, Roderick won a silver medal in the 200-meter event with a time of 23.82 seconds; and bronze medals in the 400-meter and in the men’s long-jump. In this portrait of Roderick, I used a 10° grid spot snapped on the head of a Dynalight 2040 lamp for the main light and a blue gel on a barebulb for the rim light. I love the control that grid spots provide. It’s one way to really narrow your light source, lighting a specific area and allowing the rest of the image to go dark. This is quite different from using an enormous light source, such as an octabank or softbox, to wrap light around the subject. A 10° grid spot has a very narrow angle of light; a 45° grid spot has a wider light path because it theoretically spreads the light out to cover 45 degrees.
The grid spot was a perfect choice when I shot Roderick. The ambient light was ugly fluorescent, there were random water bottles, towels and training gear in the background, and I wanted to show only Roderick. A simple solution was to adjust the power on the Dynalights, shooting at f/8 at 1/125 at 100 ASA on the Canon D30. This completely dropped the undesirable background, and the resulting shot won recognition as one of the top three shots from a Sports Illustrated week-long workshop and networking session with over 50 professional photographers and hundreds of images. INGREDIENTS
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