Hong Kong Rugby 7s 2015 - Focus on the Fans
/The Hong Kong Rugby 7s 2015 is now well underway on day 2, it's Saturday afternoon and the fans are buzzing too and from the stadium in various states of dress and undress... This year for something different we decided to shoot only the fans on their way to the matches, using our profoto B1 TTL lights with a Profoto 3ft RFi Octabox to turn a little corner of the street into a little studio environment.
All the colour portraits in this post are shot by Gary Tyson of F8 Photography.
All black and white 'Behind the Scenes' (BTS) shots are provided with special thanks to Grahame Collins.
On the Saturday afternoon of the Hong Kong Rugby 7s 2015 I decided that I would take a small crew (4 people in total) to setup a small portrait stand in the street on the way to the stadium. I wanted to have one person dedicated to 'catching' potential subjects as they came past our location and convincing them it was a great idea to get a free portrait. I think if you are trying to organise a small shoot like this, even when its a non-paying gig, it's important to have a few friends help out, it takes away all the stress of organising and makes everything run smoothly and more fun.
I wanted another person dedicated to getting the models to sign model releases in case we publish anything (to do this we use an ipad app called 'easy release' which allows us too quickly get the subjects details and email address (as we also want to send them a copy of their photos of course), and allows us freedom for publication usage. We have never really had an issue with using images of people we shoot, but I think its good practice to get a model release signed when you may have intention to use in a magazine feature, etc, and we explained our intentions very clearly to everyone that approached us, and had no problem with volunteers. Transparency is imporant, trying to undo problems is much more difficult.
"If you're not having fun, you're in the wrong job!"
We had a good range of people coming by our portrait stand, couples, ladies and gents, it was great to see that everyone was up for having some fun along the way, of course the Hong Kong Rugby 7s always pulls in a massive crowd and everyone lets their hair down (or up as can be seen in some of the images) for the weekend!
We loved these 3 French ladies above and we were stunned at how cool their hair looked and quizzed them as to how they had managed to get their hair to stand up on end, we eventually figured out that they had used only water....(water bottles under their hair...pure genius).
The two guys in red shirts below had flown in from Canada for the weekend. It never fails to amaze me how many people come to town for Hong Kong's premiere sporting event of the year.
Below are more selections from the portraits we shot. We spent about 3 hours hanging out in the street, meeting some great people, taking some cool portraits that they all loved and will receive copies of and most of all HAVING FUN!
Our fantastic little team at the end of the shoot only had to walk 50 yards for a well earned 'Ice Kirin' beer at the end of the shoot. As I mentioned earlier, the main objectives of this shoot for me were to get some fun portraits of the fans and most importantly, HAVE FUN. If you can't do that, then your in the wrong job ;-)
F8 Photography is a commercial photography and video company based in Hong Kong, we shoot photo and video for many clients such as Ducati Motorbikes, Coca Cola, Swire, UBS amongst many others. We also run photography workshops around the world for budding photographers in countries such as Japan, India, Cambodia and Sri Lanka, with upcoming workshops in Istanbul in late Summer.
To check out our website, please see us at www.f8photography.com.hk
If you use Facebook, Gary has a public page where he shares his personal and travel photography, please check it out here.
