My summer was excellent to say the least. And one of the real highlights of it was this job for mens health, photographing 4 top athletes for a story titled "are you fit?" As brenda and brandon put it during our meeting for the story, we wanted to look at 4 top athletes in top physical shape, and how that related to the sport that they excelled in. We wanted to shoot them all exactly the same on seamless background paper, so we could look at their bodies in the same way to see what they looked like. kinda like picking an athlete or warrior in a video game. Also I was going to shoot a gorgeous location shot of each athlete training in their own way, near their home. The athletes were patrick willis, 49's superstar, jonathan toews, hockey superstar, josh koscheck, UFC punisher, and craig alexander, premier triathlete. Logistically the job almost put me in the hospital for exhaustion, but thank god i had mark haddad at mens health producing and calming me down whenever i called him panicking. We went to canada to shoot jonathan, then san jose to shoot josh, then boulder to shoot craig, then BACK to san jose to shoot patrick (he couldnt do it the first time we were there). and do it all in about a week while traveling with 6 cases AND a seamless. enough to give even annie leibovitz the shakes......but, like her, i LOVE the location photograph, and couldnt wait to get on the road with my trusted sidekick johnny perez. the seamless shots were all pretty straightforward and easy, the hard part was talking each athlete into their skivvies, and shirtless, but i can talk pretty much anyone into that! the fun part was shooting the location pic of them doing part of their workout routine. I LOVE finding that perfect location..one of my secrets now is to use google maps to help me find the perfect spot. for jonathan, i put in the address of the hockey rink where we were shooting him in canada, then looked at the area around the rink from the sky and the road view. to my pleasant surprise, the rink was out in the middle of nowhere, so i asked his publicist (his mom...sweet right? especially for a guy who was the stanley cup mvp with the blackhawks, and olympic gold medal winner with canada all in one year) to snap some scouting pics around the rink outside to give me an idea. For josh i put in the address to the gym location, and saw this awesome park a few blocks away, so we got a permit to shoot there. for craig we just did a scout the day before in the mountains, and patrick we shot at the 49 practice field... all the guys were really great and put alot into it. even patrick, who was sore from a game the day before, give it his all on his only day off. the highlight of the shoots was josh doing his rope workout. i was laying between the ropes on the grass while he swung them up and down HARD on both sides of me while i shot, hitting me half the time, and it hurt. he actually destroyed a pocket wizard that was mounted on my camera when the rope came down on it at one point, ripped it right off... after the shoot in boulder we had a few days off, so instead of flying home to nyc for a quick minute, we headed north to wyoming to visit my parents in the bighorns (they summer there) and fish for a couple days. if you go to this post you will see and read about my special relationship with the bighorns...it felt so good to get back in a stream with my 4wt, and this time the fish were plentiful and the weather was perfect. i wonder what a fisherman athletes body looks like?? attached are a couple of iphone snaps from wyoming....
