Cross country gets a real media day
Cross country teams are big and spread out, and they almost never get treated like a marquee sport on photo day. At Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona we give the runners the same setup a football team gets. Full lighting rig, a proper team photo, and a portrait of every athlete on the roster.
Runners rarely get portraits that look like athletes. That is the gap we came to fix.
How we light an outdoor media day
The kit is four Westcott FJ400 strobes and a Canon R5, with the 70-200 and 24-105 doing almost all of the work. Two strobes sit behind the runners as rim lights and two sit in front as mains. Outdoors, we meter the ambient light with the camera first and drop it about a stop under a normal exposure. Then the strobes come up to fill the faces. The goal is even, soft light, even when the afternoon sun is doing everything it can to flatten the picture.
No light meter. The camera and a good eye get us there, and the power and angle of each light change with the sun.
Team, seniors, coaches, then every runner
A big roster makes the order of the day matter. The team photo goes first, while everyone is together and in the same uniform. Seniors come next, then the coaching staff. Then we re-rig for individuals.
Every runner gets the straight-on portrait the school needs. After that we look for movement, a stride caught mid-air or a runner coming straight at the camera. Distance runners are some of the most focused athletes on any campus, and the good frames show it.
Media day for your program
We photograph media days for high schools across Los Angeles County. See how the high school media day works for your school, or look through more athlete portraits on our sports portraits page.
