Accentuating an In-Action Boxing Portrait for ESPN The Magazine [RF Video of the Week]

August 29, 2014

By Laura Brauer

We’ve featured an in-action boxing portrait fairly recently, in Rangefinder‘s July/August edition of Photo Finish in which photojournalist Benjamin Lowy got a dramatic shot of Floyd “Money” Mayweather. Well, we’re highlighting another, also shot for ESPN The Magazine, but this time of the undefeated World Boxing Organization middleweight world champion Peter “Kid Chocolate” Quillin by Dustin Snipes (who luckily didn’t blow out his lights in the process).

It seems winning portraits are taken by photographers who truly understand their subjects, and the techniques used to accentuate what’s important about that person’s character. Snipes did just that by highlighting Quillin’s most prized features: “What we really try to do with this section is take a muscle that identifies with their sport and see how they use it in-action,” he says in the video. With that in mind, he and his team focused on Quillin’s upper pectorals, abs and obliques.

Snipes had help from a variety of gear, including some Broncolor Scoro S 1600 power packs, rim lights and front lights, set at 1/5800 of a second to freeze Quillin’s swings and punches. He also opted to shine a beauty dish overhead to “really cut into the muscles,” placed a reflector behind Quillin’s head and shoulders to bounce back the light and fixed two side lights on either side of him.

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