Scholar Athlete Spotlight: Pedro Alvarez the Boxer.

Pedro Alvarez, 20 , Art and Animation major at SMC, poses as he does boxing drills, preparing for a boxing tournament in June, 2010 on March 29, 2010  in Los Angeles, CA. Alvarez has been a boxer since he was 10, his current record is 83 wins and 1 loss. (Photo by Alfredo Luna Corsair Staff)

"Whereas most 10-year-old boys spend their time playing with bugs or chasing girls around the playground, Pedro Alvarez found interest in other hobbies; some of which included fine-tuning his right hook" (Kevin Duron, Corsair Staff Writer)

Pedro Alvarez, 20, is an SMC student by day, boxer by night. A fantastic article on Pedro can be found here, however, I will only discuss the photoshoot here, as I believe Kevin has already done a bang up job.

After checking out this blog post by the great Joe McNally, I decided to apply/ape some of his lighting techniques to this assignment, which just so happened to be a boxer too! My images don't look as "bad ass" as his, but I'd like to think that I am getting there. Besides, I took a different approach. The differences between his image and mine are;

1. Instead of strip boxes, I used umbrellas, which produce a different quality of light.

2. I added full CTO gels to the rim lights at each side of the boxer to warm him up a bit.

3. Instead of bouncing some strobes into a silver reflector below the subject, I used a 30" x 60" Softbox at an angle below the subject for some fill.

By making these changes, I did learn a couple things. The first thing I learned was that the umbrella, didn't light as much of the boxers' sides as I would have liked. The strips would have lit up his midsection a lot better. Also, the next time I do a similar set up, I will bounce some strobes off of a silver reflector below to light up the bottom of the arms a bit more in conjunction with the softbox for more of a specular highlight under the arms.

Below is a set up shot for the lighting scheme I used for the majority of the shots.

 

Below is an different angle of the set up

As you can see, for the lighting set up I used; an AB1600 thru a gridded beauty dish directly above the subject, 2 full CTO'd AB1600's bounced off 45" umbrellas behind and at opposite sides of the subject for rim lights, 1 AB800 shot through a 30" x 60" softbox placed horizontally at the floor in front of subject underexposed by about a stop or two, and lastly, an SB- 800 shot through a 20 degree grid aimed directly at the subjects face, right in front of the subject at stomach level. All but one of these strobes were triggered via slave, one was triggered via cybersyncs. 

As for post processing, I sharpened the images and added some contrast in lightroom and applied a high pass filter in photoshop, that is all.

So, without further ado, here are the images;

For the shots below, all I did was switch off the beauty dish, the sb-800, and the softbox for a more dramatic look. For the shot directly below, I kept the rim lights exactly where I they had been, but for the shots below it, I repositioned the two lights directly to the sides of the subject to wrap the light around the subjects face and body, turning the lights from rim lights to key/main lights. 

Joe was right, people do look better warmer. What do you think? would these images have had the same effect had I not applied the warming filters?