johnsonlim.com

I’ve been meaning to do this shot for a while now. Toying with the idea for a few months actually. Reason for this is that we’ve been playing a whole lot of squash lately and there’s also some tech talk about racquets and strings, shoes, grips, overgrips, tension and floors. courts, temperature. This one is about balls. Not all squash balls are made equal. Depending of the compound of the rubber, some are more bouncier than others with the blue ball being 12% larger and having 40% more hang time to the double yellows pro standard official balls of WSF,  WISPA and PSA which are kinda not so bouncy at all. Here’s one that’s poking fun at ultra super slow balls for those ultra super pros!

The concept was drawn up in my visual diary a.k.a. sketchbook. One soft light over everything with balls dunked in ice water. I had thought of using a straw as a prop but unfortunately non was available. Also during the shoot I decided to go for the 85mm as oppose to a 50mm because the space was working on was quite tight.

Finally, the shot was done by using only one 550EX with a stofen diffuser  firing into a scrim over the setup. I settled for ISO160 f/2.8 1/60th as I didn’t want the other stuff to come into focus. That was the easy part. The hard part was getting the darn squash balls with the two yellow dots to face the camera while floating in a glass of ice water.

Cheers

J