It was nice to have met Mihály Szeróvay, an assignment for Helsingin Sanomat.
Mihály a former Hungarian football player retired from playing football and moved to Finland where he took his Master’s & Doctor’s degree before becoming a University lecturer in football in Southampton.
The reason for the assignment was that Mihály had just become Finlands first Football Professor at the University of Jyväskylä and was returning to Finland.
Behind The Picture
If you have an assignment to photograph a Football Professor then you need to have an image with some association to the sport – which was not easy in lockdown England. Having spoken with Mihály he was also like minded and he suggested a sports complex near Southampton.
When we arrived it was closed. Naturally. But some young helpful lads showed us where we could take some images.
It was around midday when we met up and it was glorious bright sunshine – the worst possible conditions.
My workaround was to use goal netting to create a portrait with focus on the subject with an aperture (ƒ5) that allowed for the background to be blurred out with the netting just showing and also out of focus.
This picture would have been impossible to have been taken without ‘High-Speed Sync’ and my shutter speed was a crazy 1/4000.
Over the years I have tried and tested various high-speed sync systems all with miserable results, but with Profoto I can obtain perfect results every time! Without fail.
The set up was a Profoto B10 with a fitted OCF Softbox on the right as the main light source with Mihály holding a Profoto A1 on the left for some fill in flash for the shadow from the B10.
The eagle-eyed will notice that the netting I used was a Hockey goal … due to the circumstances I can live with that.
