Our original photo, taken in a Fresno park, was the best we had available.
So we knocked out the background and added a new one that made for a much better photo.
Backgrounds, whether it be a portrait or a person, a group of people, a photo of a car or truck, or a house, there is usually something in the background. But not always something that makes for a better photograph.
Backgrounds are often overlooked.
Many amateurs and even some professional photographers don’t see what in the background. They concentrate on the subject and forget about what in the rest of the photo, but they can make or break a photograph. A good background focuses the viewer’s eye on the subject; a bad one will distract from the subject.
The best background is simple, without a lot of distractions to take the eye away from the subject. But, as a professional photographer, I often find myself in a situation where the only background available is filled with cars, fences, houses, or people. Distractions that take away from the subject that I am photographing. In an ideal world, I would find a better location for the photos, but most of the time, that perfect world has to compete with someone else’s idea world, and that someone else is my client. That soccer field where the teams play, filled with fences, trash cans, and buildings may be all I have to work with, and I need to deal with it.
In the two photographs used to illustrate this post, the original one on the left was what we had to deal with. The Special Olympics basketball team that we were photographing practiced at this Fresno park, moving to a location with a better background, was not an option. It was the park or nothing. The photo on the left is the best background we had available, so we decided to knock out the background and use a studio background we had been using for indoor shoots.
In the film days, photographers did not have a lot of options.
For years, professional photographers were stuck with bad backgrounds like the one on the left. In the days of film (and I spent plenty of those years shooting film), there was nothing you could do other than try to persuade the client to do the photos at a better location. That’s been the same for the digital era, at least up until recently. Oh sure, we could cut out the images in photoshop, but that took time and was not practical in volume photography. We still had to deal with it.
But no more, now Roy Dressel Photograph can offer what we call Knockout Team and Sports Photos. We no longer have to take what we can get, we can deliver great photos no matter what the original background is.
So if we have a good background for the photos, then all the better, we’re happy, and parents are happy because we deliver excellent images. Still, if we have a situation where the background is less the ideal (as in the photo above) or maybe terrible, we can now change that background, knock it out, and put in a good background.
We call this the Knockout team photo program, and the background we add-in can be just about anything; it can be an outdoor background or a painted digital background like our sample.
The program is available inside, outside, or anywhere else. (is there somewhere else?)
We can do this program anywhere; we do not have to go inside too what is known as green screen, we can do it on a basketball field, on a soccer field, in a gym, on a baseball diamond.
Want more information, see our sports page, or call us for a consolation. 559-734-2110, or just fill out our contact form. And if you’re worried about COVID-19 getting in the way, we have developed a program called Virtual Team Photos, no more grouping players together for team photos. We do it all in the background.