This weekend I had the pleasure of meeting Rosie – an inspirational 9 year old girl who a few years ago was incredibly poorly with leukemia. After a successful bone marrow transplant she’s now fighting fit and training hard as she prepares to represent Great Britain at the World Transplant Games 2019 in Newcastle and Gateshead during 17-21st August 2019.
My wife has known Rosie’s mum for many years so I’d followed Rosie’s story and was delighted to be able to meet up with Rosie and her mum at the track to take some promotional shots. Athletes at the games need to pay for travel and accommodation amongst other things so I was keen to capture Rosie’s determination and commitment in the shots so they could be used to approach potential sponsors.
Rosie and her family are based in Harrogate so I arranged access at a local track for us to spend an hour for the shoot and we had a great time, albeit on a particularly blustery day – pretty good for getting dynamic hair, not so good for delicate satin shoot through brollies (one of which is going to need a little TLC now). In the end we had to forego attempting to use brollies at all so instead I went with defused direct flash off-camera for a slightly more aggressive lighting approach more akin to the floodlights at the track. As always, it’s important to be able to adapt to the conditions.
Rosie was an absolute superstar. Aside from explaining each shot and giving her direction on where she needed to be I only really gave her one piece of direction and that was that I wanted to make her look ‘badass’. I wanted to see her game face. She delivered in spades.
Aside from a range of lifestyle and action shots I had one specific shot I wanted to create. Initially I’d hoped we could get on the track early on a cold morning so we could communicate the commitment required but we needed to work around track availability so that wasn’t possible. For the following shot I underexposed the ambient light by around 2 stops to give a similar appearance to early morning light, I also used tungsten white balance to give the whole shot a blue tint to give a cold feel to the scene. I then lit Rosie with an orange CTO correction gel to bring the key light falling on Rosie back to something akin to early morning light. I wanted the shot to scream attitude, strength and determination.
It was such a pleasure to spend some time with such an inspirational, strong and fun young lady. I can’t wait to see her bringing her game face to the games. She’s an absolute superstar.
Go #TeamRosie
