My Shoot With Bret Lockett for Sweat Equity Magazine

I recently shot NFL New Jersey Jets safety Bret Lockett for the Canadian fitness/yoga magazine Sweat Equity. Debra, Editor-In-Chief of SE contacted me for this last minute shoot and explained to me that they already had Bret prepared as the cover story, they just didn't have any images of him and needed shots with Bret in yoga poses and football gear. Although it was extremely last minute, and the turn-around time for the photos had to be within a few days of the shoot, I said yes, and took the assignment. That's really how this industry works a lot of times though--one minute you're free, and the next minute an assignment is knocking at your door (not literally knocking, of course).


We had a lot of fun on this shoot. Bret is a pretty big footballer, so I thought it would be very interesting to see how well he could shift his body into those very technical yoga poses. He did....okay (lol). The shot list the magazine sent over was very specific, so there wasn't a lot of room for my own personal creativity, but I think I did pretty well with what they explained they needed, while still adding my own personal creative touch. The one thing that made this project different from any other project I've done is that for 2 out of the 4 images used for the editorial of Bret, I did not retouch. For all of my work, and for every project I'm commissioned to do, I'm the photographer and the digital artist for ALL of my images. It's a commodity in this business, to be both a photographer and "retouch artist." It's an even bigger commodity when you're actually exceptionally good at both! But they needed Bret to be composited in to a different background than the studio one we actually shot in, and due to the time constraints with their deadline, I knew I wouldn't be able to create the composite they needed in such a short time-frame and with my schedule. In the end, Debra and SE loved all the images of Bret, and we even got a couple extra really cool photos out of the shoot, including one with my puppy Rebel that was used for PETA on PETA.ORG.