Realistic . . .
By
John Terence Turner
Stock Asylum Columnist
June 4, 2006
©
2006 John Terence Turner
My son isn’t a boxer. Just
out of college, his regular interests were music and going extremely
fast on skis.
But at this time in his life he was seeking an intense cardio-workout and he was training at a dilapidated gym in an area of Seattle known as Columbia City. A friend had told him what great effort it required and how much cheaper it was than a yuppie gym membership.
One day he told me about an attractive professional woman boxer who regularly trained there. “It might be a good stock shoot,” he said. He added, “She could probably kick the ass of any guy at the gym.” I should add that this conversation preceded the movie “Million Dollar Baby” by a couple of years.
 The author was after realistic looking boxing images for this shoot involving a professional woman athlete. ( © John Terence Turner ). |
Before I started the boxer and location research, I checked some stock agencies to see what kind of images of women boxers they had on file. The choices were all very much the same. These faux boxers were clearly models that did not box.
They were skinny with no muscles, great cheekbones and full lips. They were made up as if for a fashion shoot and didn’t have a clue about looking like a real boxer.
The most memorable aspects of these shots were the pouty, heavily lipsticked lips exclaiming “Ohhh!” Additionally, the pictures were done in studios and the authenticity meter read ZERO.
 Turner chose to shoot in black & white because of problems created by mixed light sources. ( © John Terence Turner ). |
So the female boxing pictures were largely of one kind and my inclination to not imitate them was validated. From the beginning, I had in mind pictures that were realistic rather than teenage girls’ fashion fantasies.
The gym was on Rainier Ave., which was so named because, on a clear day, you can stand on the low hill where Rainier Ave. South intersects South Jackson St. and, if you let your eye follow the street, you will see 14,411-foot Mount Rainier looming eighty miles to the southeast. Rainier Avenue points like a four-lane asphalt arrow, right at the mountain.
This is a gritty historic area that could be the location for any number of reality-based movies. The Rainier Valley has been the recipient of many waves of Seattle immigrants over the years. Once it was home to Italians who lived and had their businesses there. African Americans followed the Italians. Today Southeast Asians predominate.
 A single strobe balanced against the available light was used for this image. ( © John Terence Turner ). |
I found the gym and met the potential model. Sharon was attractive in a “don’t mess with me” sort of way. Her looks were authentic and she was clearly in great shape. She was very muscular which fitted her style of fighting. “I’m a puncher, not a stylist.” She said.
The building had terrific potential as a location for an authentic boxing shoot. Clint Eastwood would have loved it.
The operation was named “Columbia City Boxing Club.” It was a blocky, two-story wooden building. Three-quarters of a century old, it showed every year of its age. It was perched on a sloping lot with a daylight basement that opened onto Rainier Ave.
The first floor housed a large room with a boxing ring decorated in red-white-and blue bunting and a bar in the back area. There were about a hundred folding chairs arranged around the ring. Once-a-month professional fights were held there.
Upstairs, with an entrance from the alley via an elevated walkway, was the heart of the place. There was a ring, heavy bags, speed bags, an open areas for rope skipping, a small office and some dressing rooms.
 Available lighting can be used as effectively as created lighting. Here the ambient light highlights the model's arms. ( © John Terence Turner ). |
It was dingy, dark, poorly illuminated by green fluorescent lights. Everything smelled of sweat, liniment, disinfectant and unidentifiable stains were numerous.
At any given time, there were 8 or 10 people working out or supervising the boxers. There were usually a couple of guys sparring in the ring, somebody else making a snare-drum sound on a speed bag and another pugilist pounding a heavy bag.
Sharon was the only female in the room, which made her stand out from everyone else. That she could work harder and longer than anyone else was an most important trait for my shoot.
Sharon and I discussed what I had in mind and made arrangements to shoot at a later time.
A week later, we met and began the shoot. I wanted to have a mixture of action shots and environmental portraits.
My favorite is the shot of Sharon at the heavy bag. There was a row of three punching bags along a north wall, one of them appropriately patched with silver duct tape.
By having her work on the middle bag, the light from the middle window lit her as she pummeled it. I positioned the camera so Sharon was silhouetted by the window.
That position gave me the eye-catching contrast of her upper body against the bright window. The window we don’t see behind the middle bag threw enough light on her so that detail is evident and she wasn’t totally in silhouette.
Usually the first comment I hear about this picture is, “Wow, look at those abs!
The shooting itself was fairly routine, Sharon was a pro. She did what I asked and made good suggestions as we went along to keep things authentic.
I shot black and white, because the mixture of green fluorescent and daylight would have constrained my location choices considerably or made everything much more time-consuming.
For example, the shot with the heavy bag is lit by daylight from the windows and fluorescent light from above. Had I corrected for the overhead green fluorescent light, the daylight would have turned pink. Fluorescents are always hard to work with because they do not emit the full color spectrum of light. Human eyes adjust for this, but neither film nor digital cameras can fully compensate, though some digital cameras seem to do better.
As you can see, I needed the daylight from the window to silhouette the fighter and would not have wanted that to be a distracting pink. To put a strobe with a soft box outside that window would not have been easy. It is a second-floor window with a very busy sidewalk below.
When I used a strobe, as with the speed bag (I employed a Dynalight 400 with a medium softbox and balanced it with the ambient light). I didn’t have to gel the strobe to balance with the filter on the lens to compensate for the green of the old fluorescent lights in the room.
On my instructions, Sharon threw a series of right crosses at the heavy bag (left-handed punches caused her left shoulder to partially obscure her face). The result is a gritty, authentic view of a moment in the life of a professional woman boxer. Hard work, sweat, no glamour, no makeup, but it is a picture of a real person practicing a sport chosen by very few women.
These pictures have had modest success. I suspect that the market still wants a fantasy of pouty-lipped models whose arms are so weak they can hardly hold up their boxing gloves.
But that is the way the business works. Sometimes, what we envision and create isn’t what the market wants. You can argue about authenticity all you want, but a picture’s success in the marketplace isn’t always based on its authenticity.
(John Terence Turner has been shooting stock photography for 20 years. His work can be seen at Getty Images, Alamy and, of course, The Stock Asylum, where his column appears twice a month. He lives and works in Seattle, WA.)
Turner's web site can be found at: http://www.johnterenceturner.com.
For more of his images: click here.
For all of Turner's columns: click here.
