Indoor Crossfit Photoshoot

Behind the scenes feat. Anaïs Maï-Lan Lancry

For those who remember, a few months back I met Anaïs, a CrossFit athlete who unfortunately injured herself a few days before our shoot. Resulting in a frustrating experience where we had to mostly make portraits and pictures of her standing still. We still managed to get a few nice pictures, but we had to reschedule and make the shoot we first wanted to make.

So this happened before the pandemic outbreak, and it took me some time to do them for 2 reasons:

Reason N°1, I did a short CrossFit video of her the next day:

...and reason N°2, If you follow me on IG you probably already know, I have those recurring back pains and it happened again. For almost 3 weeks I wasn’t able to do much, let alone standing for a couple of minutes and walking and I was sick for a couple of days too which obviously didn't help…

I am now feeling better, let’s move on

So what did we actually do during this second session?

I popped out my Broncolor Mask to make an easy shot. That’s what I usually do to get things started, I snap a few easy ones to get in the vibe. For those of you who don’t know what the Broncolor mask is, again linked in the description below, It’s just a piece of fabric that blocks part of my modifier and lets light escape around the borders only which gives me that effect.

BRONCOLOR EDGE MASK

Fujifilm GFX100 + GF 110mm f/2 R LM WR Broncolor Siros L (800ws) + Broncolor Mask 1/125sec f5.6 ISO100 at 110mm

I opted for a dark high contrasted look deliberately underexposing my background on most of my shots. It was my first time using continuous autofocus with the GFX100… Just the idea gives me shivers. this camera is not made for action, but guess what, it did a pretty decent job on most of my shots, I only had a few of them out of focus!

A little tip and this concerns the following images… I knew early on I needed her to go easy during this photoshoot because of the video shoot the next day… Plus she’s a coach/ trainer, working that weekend, and the last thing I wanted was to exhaust her out.

So the quicker we get the shot the better, and one little trick you can use is to isolate and simplify the movement you want to capture. This increases your success rate and you won’t have to ask your athlete to go up there a hundred times. You are still capturing movement, giving you convincing results.

Fujifilm GFX100 + GF 50mm f/3.5 R LM WR Broncolor Siros L (800ws) 1/125sec f6.4 ISO125 at 50mm

Fujifilm GFX100 + GF 23mm F4 R WR Broncolor Siros L (800ws) 1/125sec f6.4 ISO160 at 23mm

I mainly played with 2 lights and sometimes I used a nearby wall as a bounce like on the following shots The white wall helped a lot here, preventing me from having the right side plunged into darkness.

Fujifilm GFX100 + GF 23mm F4 R WR Broncolor Siros L (800ws) 1/125sec f4 ISO50 at 23mm

Fujifilm GFX100 + GF 50mm f/3.5 R LM WR Broncolor Siros L (800ws) 1/125sec f3.5 ISO50 at 50mm

Fujifilm GFX100 + GF 110mm f/2 R LM WR Broncolor Siros L (800ws) 1/125sec f4.5 ISO100 at 110mm

Then we took things outside where we wasted a lot of smoke bombs and the reason for this is because I didn’t have an assistant to manipulate the grenade for me. So after 10 minutes of frustration, I just gave up and my 360 camera gave up on me too… leaving me with no footage, so here is a before-after to help you understand how this shot was made!

Fujifilm GFX50s + GF 50mm f/3.5 R LM WR Broncolor Siros L (800ws) 1/1250sec f4 ISO160 at 50mm

ENOLA GAYE Smoke grenades

So that’s it, all of these are really easy to set up… it’s up to you to choose according to your own taste, your overall background exposure first, whether you want to have it dark like me or have a more balanced image and then, of course, you bring in your lights and expose your model correctly.

I shared another CrossFit photoshoot with you a while back, that I made on a rainy day without strobes. This can give you an idea of all the amazing things you can do, outdoors, indoors, with or without flash and these are only 2 examples.

Outdoor Crossfit Photoshoot

I hope I will be able to show you other examples in completely different situations in the near future, the lockdown should be over soon in France, Let's hope I will be able to make new images soon... We’ll see... I hope you are all doing well, that you are safe and in good health... Take good care and see you in the next one!