A tennis media day in Pomona
Diamond Ranch High School sits up in the hills of Pomona, and it is one of the longer drives on our fall schedule. The program gets the same media day we run for private schools in Los Angeles: a real team photo, a portrait of every player, and stylized frames the girls will actually want to share.
Tennis is an outdoor media day, and outdoor media days are a negotiation with the sun.
Balancing strobes and harsh sun
We light every outdoor media day with four Westcott FJ400 strobes on a Canon R5. Two rim lights go behind the players and two mains go in front. The first step is reading the ambient light with the camera, then pulling that exposure down about a stop. The strobes fill in the rest. Done right, faces stay soft and even while the sky and court hold their color behind the team. We do not carry a light meter. The camera meter and a practiced eye cover it.
The angle and power of every light shift depending on where the sun sits that afternoon, so the setup gets adjusted between the team photo and the individuals.
From the team photo to the follow-through
We start with the full team, then seniors, then the coaches. After that the lights get re-rigged for individual portraits. Every player gets the classic yearbook headshot first. Then we ask for tennis: a serve at full reach, a racket resting on a shoulder with a look straight down the lens. The 70-200 handles the tight portraits and the 24-105 covers the wider frames.
We want each player to look like herself, not like a number on a roster.
Bring media day to your campus
We run media days for high schools across Los Angeles County, from the San Gabriel Valley to the Westside. See how our high school media day works, or browse team and athlete work on the sports portraits page.
