Photographing LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers for ESPN The Magazine

I'm going to share the process of what goes into an editorial photoshoot for a national magazine. This was by no means a huge photo shoot in the editorial world but it was a personal milestone for me. I'll share the process, technical details and experience of shooting during the NBA's famed Media Day.

In 2016, I was commissioned by ESPN The Magazine to make portraits of the Cleveland Cavaliers during their media day event. Media day happens every year and signifies the start of the NBA season. It's known to be a circus where every conceivable media outlet piles into a practice gym or some facility and does interviews of all the players and coaches before going into the season. There are hundreds of reporters, photographers, video crews, etc. all capturing content for various outlets and uses.

This was a particularly exciting time to be photographing the Cavaliers as they had just come off of winning the NBA title the season prior. I had grown up in Cleveland so getting this call from ESPN was really a dream come true. I had been itching to photograph LeBron James for years at this point and this opportunity couldn't have come at a more significant time in his career.

ESPN asked me to get one main shot — a photo of LeBron James, Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving, or "The Big Three." They also asked me to photograph the other players individually but we had to get this main shot of the big three.

ESPN gave me very loose direction otherwise. They asked that I shoot the photos on a blue seamless(Superior #06 Nassau, to be exact.) seamless background, that was it. I pitched them a few ideas regarding props. Since the Cavs had just won the championship, I asked what they thought about using some little trophies, #1 foam fingers and some confetti champagne poppers. They obliged and said have at it.

I wanted the photographs to be fun and I knew it would be hectic in the facility on the day. Since I wanted the images to be playful and have the big three interacting with each other, I decided that I wanted to use a broad light source. This would let the players move around in the frame and I would have to have them stationary in one position to get great lighting.

I started by testing the lighting with my wife a few days before the shoot. Since we would have limited time and limited space to setup in the facility, we needed to know exactly what we were doing and how things would look.

Simple lighting + prop test:

We tested the basic lighting setup and some of the confetti props. This helped us understand how the props would photograph and the best way to direct the players to interact with them. I don't do this for every shoot but I knew that we were going to be very tight on time for this shoot. I wanted to explore what worked and didn't work before being on the actual set with talent.

On the day of the shoot, we arrived at the location 4 hours before the athletes were scheduled to start making their rounds with the media. This gave us ample time to load in all of our gear, stake out our assigned area and test lighting without being too rushed.

We were shooting on a Canon 5DSr with a 24-70 2.8 II. I like to shoot on a 24-70 in these situations to give myself the latitude to explore focal lengths on the fly without wasting any time at all. When working with any type of celebrity (athlete, actor/actress, CEO, etc.) its a given that you will not have much time. Even if you are promised 20 minutes, the publicist will probably cut that down to 5 minutes once the talent is on set. You always have to plan for the worst. The 24-70 allows for no wasted time and flexibility. It also gives the ability to make different crops without moving. In this instance, I was standing onto of an apple box behind a soft box so I couldn't easily walk closer to the talent for a close up. The 24-70 allowed me to shoot tight and wide without physically moving and wasting precious time.

The Canon 5DSr was tethered to a laptop running Capture One Pro. This is the industry standard tethering program that links the camera directly to the computer allowing you to see the image better and manipulate the color, cropping, etc. on set.

Capture One Pro interface:

After getting our seamless background set up, I instructed both of my assistants how to rough in the lighting setup that I had tested previously. We then went through lighting tests where my assistant would stand in (on an apple box to mimic the size of an NBA player) to dial in the lighting.

Lighting test with assistant standing in:

After tweaking the lighting to our liking, we place a mark on the ground where the light was the best. This is a general reference point in this situation since we had a relatively broad lighting scheme as discussed earlier. We used Profoto lighting for this shoot. The main setup used three lights, all frontal. The Profoto Pro heads were all powered by their own Profoto 8a Air 2400w/s packs. By connecting each head to its own pack, the lights recycle faster which makes it possible to capture the split second moments happening without waiting for the power to recycle. This also reduces the flash duration to help freeze the moments without any blur.

The key light was a white Profoto beauty dish. The light was high and above the subject just in front of their mark. This light modifier gives a flattering but relatively hard light. I wanted to use this source to help the subjects pop and ad that glow to their skin. This also helps so give a little shadow and shape to the face. We then used a 7' Elinchrom Octaback right behind the photographer to fill in these hard shadows. The bottom of the frame was still a little dark so I added an extra large Chimera strip box lying sideway on the floor in front of the photographer. This helped to even out the lighting in the frame as well as gave a little extra light to the subjects eyes which really made them pop.

The 4x4 floppy (a 4'x4' piece of black duvetyn in a frame that extends to 4'x8' when you undo the velcro and drop down the other piece of duvetyn, hence the name floppy) is used to suck up any light on the sides of the athletes. This helps to give more shapes to our subjects (very noticeable on their faces). It also acted as a great barrier to our neighbors who were just outside of the frame.

Lighting Diagram:

Just after we got our light perfectly dialed, the athletes started pouring out of the locker room. The more low key veterans started just walking on to set and had obviously been through the media day circuit a time or two.

Channing Frye was one of the first (also notice the Magnum reflector we used as a hair light on this shot, I decided I didn't like this look for the rest of the subjects):

We then had a few of the more hyped players shuffled over to our set by their PR attache.

Kyrie Irving:

Tristian Thompson:

After a few minutes with most of the athletes, my crew and I were feeling good and waiting for the King to come out of the locker room. You could see all of the players floating around doing various media and photo shoots. We were the only photographers that had music playing on our set which got the athletes stoked once they got onto our set. After a bit of a lull, everything got kind of quite and you could hear whispers that LeBron was about to come out of the locker room.

Once the King came out, it was game time. The real media frenzy began as photojournalist and writers swarmed LeBron and followed his every move around the facility. We waited patiently on our set. I grabbed one of the main PR women to see when we would get LeBron on set. I had previously asked her if she could kindly try to wrangle Kyrie, Love and LeBron for a few minutes. She was very helpful earlier in the day but when I asked her at this time she said, "I'm not sure if you're going to get the Big 3 on set."

There was a frenetic energy in the facility and we had no idea what was going to happen next. The NBA official photographer was setup next to our station and had the big three on set grabbing stills stills for the players official portraits.

Being a Clevelander, I had obviously been following LeBron and knew he was a huge fan of rap. He regularly posts InstaStories on Instagram of what he was listening too. At the time, I knew he was into Drake & Future's song "Big Rings." Right as LeBron was about to finish up shooting on the NBA set, I cranked the song up to grab his attention. LeBron instantly started singing the hook to the song and was obviously hyped up.

It's starting to feel super surreal at this point. LeBron is standing to the left of me hyped on the song that I just started playing and as I look to my right, Kyrie Irving walks onto the back of the seamless and grabs the props. Kyrie immediately starts throwing confetti everywhere before I start photographing them. Kyrie's shenanigans had LeBron laughing and then Kevin Love came over and grabbed a bunch of props, as well.

The set was starting to get out of control at this point. There was no time for pleasantries or introductions. I told the athletes to stand on the mark and we went from there. They were all so stoked on the props and were interacting with them more than I could have hoped. LeBron started acting like he was drinking the confetti out of the champagne bottle.

I walked up to LeBron and said, "Look if you just twist the bottom of the bottle, confetti will blow out of the top." LeBron instantly looked straight down the neck of the bottle and I yelled, "JUST PLEASE DO NOT LOOK INTO THE BOTTLE!"

I stepped back into position behind the soft box and LeBron hesitantly started to twist the bottom of the champagne bottle prop. The bottle made a huge BANG and confetti shot everywhere all over the Cav's practice facility (image seen above).

After the Big 3 settled down with the props, I had the opportunity to grab this shot.

The Big Three:

And that was it, we had 3 minutes to shoot the main shot. The GIF about includes all of the images that were made during those 3 minutes. The whole time we were shooting, we had a swarm of photojournalist, videographers, reporters, and everyone else in the facility crowded behind our tiny set. It was definitely a scene.

After our time with the Big 3, they retreated to the locker room and that was the end of media day.

And here are the images that ESPN The Magazine ran in their NBA Preview issue:

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