Army Sports Shoot
Adrian's latest shoot for the Army involved shooting some of its sporting stars, and even an Olympic Bronze medallist!
Comissioned by Haymarket publishing on behalf of the COI Adrian's latest shoot involved several Army athletes and was shot at Aldershot. The shoot was Art directed by Nina Udeen from Haymarket Publishing.
The idea behind the shoot was to capture some of the Army's sporting starts who combine both life in the Army with life as athletes, some competing at the highest level within the sporting world. As Adrian says " the brief came through from Nina as a selection of the different sports we had to shoot, rugby , netball, boxing, taekwondo and
athletics. The images are for use in the latest RLC and Infantry recruiting brochures and as such we had quite a free reign to shoot as we saw it."
There's always an element of surprise when shooting these things especially as we had not pre selected any of the athletes and only knew which disciplines they would be from.
We set up for our shot of the 400m sprinter and one of the athletes came over and asked if we would like to take a picture of him with his medal. 2 seconds later he handed me his Bronze Olympic medal from the last games!!!" These images were shot on the second day of shooting and are of Musa Audu.
We wanted to start the shoot with a series of portraits and then move onto some more iconic/gritty images. We had of course planned for good weather but we had a grey day and a little rain, nothing compared to the previous day shooting where we had torrential rain and waterlogged rugby pitches." I wanted to capture a sense of anticipation and focus as Musa prepared himself and stretched as though in a pre race warm up. I also wanted to keep a low camera angle so that the background was as uncluttered as possible and to exaggerate the body positions of the athlete to give him a statuesque feel."
The final part of the shoot was to capture Musa running, however having discovered Musa's Olympic pedigree and the fact that the 400mm was never Adrian's strong point at school (he's much more of a long distance runner). Adrian opted for a more controlled Starting block type shot!!
