A DIY White Room Anywhere Using An Octabox

1/12/2017 ISO 1200 Magazine 0 Comments

The Essence of an Ironman with Matt Hanson: DIY white room photography

This is a project I’ve been really excited about sharing and I wanted to be sure to give y’all an early taste here on the blog to begin with! I had this idea based on a few different experiences over the past year, as well as some different advice I had gleaned over the past few years of watching and studying some of my favorite photographers. This idea in particular came from a study I’ve been doing on Platon and the simplicity and complexity he is able to create within his portraits.

They are typically very simple in terms of lighting, background, and subject matter, but obviously captivating and extremely complex when you begin to study them more and more closely. Pair that with a piece of advice from Tim Tadder that has always stuck with me from the quick session he did on CreativeLive a few years ago: “Google the person or the subject you’re going to shoot and see what’s NOT there; and I came up with the idea of the Essence of an Ironman.

So I set to work creating a very simple setup to make it happen. I took the Large Elinchrom Octabox and used it as the backdrop ( a DIY White Room ) by blowing out the light behind him, creating a nice, soft, white, wrapping background light that added something to the face - said Payton-

With that said, here’s a quick selection of some of the images we captured and put together along with a quick behind the scenes video from the entire morning of shooting. A huge thank you to Matt for putting up with my tediousness on this one and getting in there and killing it for me for a few hours! It’s always awesome to get to work with a talented athlete, but its truly a pleasure to work with such a genuine human being. Keep killing it dude and we can’t wait to see some more of that magic out on the course in 2017!

This article and all the images were originally published on Payton Ruddock´s blog and shared with his permission

About Payton Ruddock:

Payton is a Houston, TX based commercial sports and portrait photographer. Creating heroic and epic portraits of athletes and making people look larger than life is his focus and photography, light, contrast, and shadow are his tools. Let's Get Connected: www.ruddockvisuals.com