Shooting Scottish football team members for EE

This was a fun little assignment photographing three members of the Scottish football team for an EE campaign for Locate Productions involving the launch of a new gaming console. One of my favourite photographers Jack Boniface was photographing the English, Welsh and Northern Irish teams and our task was to take portraits that were consistent with his look for the Scottish team.

The kind folk from the Scottish Football association took us through the Glasgow Stadium maze to our photoshoot location which was a pretty big warming up pitch situated in the very belly of the stadium (apparently it is the largest warming up pitch in Europe). So far so good - we had lots of space available with ample headroom but also just one socket for all our lights at the very end of the room. There were a couple of quick adjustments (some situations were now to be taken also with our talent sitting down) and soon the footballers were on set.

Jack was helpful with useful suggestions but the most indispensable turned out to pack an apple box to stand on. His advice was priceless as it turned out that to get dynamic angles the client was after I had to be sometimes way taller than the footballers and as Jack said ‘they are way taller than you think’ which they indeed turned out to be! The footballers also turned out to be very cooperative and taking instructions very well from a very sweaty woman making sure that she keeps the shutter speed right (our indispensable colleague Kat Dlugosz was watching the files tethered to the computer like a hawk).

So apart from helping with all the quite complicated set up Simon also had the special job of holding on to my trouser’s belt when I was precariously balancing on the apple box while maintaining a casual banter with the subjects. Time flew and soon we were done with our list of images all ticked off for the agency team to deal with in post. We realised that in the fervour of the photoshoot we did not take any bts so moments before we left the pitch we grabbed a wee group photo of our wee team and went back to Edinburgh. You can see the results of the campaign, my favourite portraits from the day of each player and our adrenaline-peak group portrait after the shoot.