Rickey Ray - CFL Edmonton Eskimos Quaterback

If you have been reading my blog a while back I wasn't posting a lot of images, although I was shooting a lot. The reason was because alot of my work could not be shared because the assignments had not been released yet. Here is one of those projects.

It's a cover and a spread shot for the AUG issue of Avenue magazine. Its of CFL Edmonton Eskimos quarter back Rickey Ray. I was really glad the art director chose me to shoot this story. The first reason is because I really enjoy shooting athletes. They are to the point people and often have a confident demeanor to them. They are also very busy and I like shooting under short time periods. I find I work better and more efficient when under the clock.

That all being said, Rickey gave me as much time as I needed to shoot him.

We shot the spread at a really cool restaurant which provided a whole whack of shooting options. We arrived at 8am for setup. Restaurant manager was really cool and pretty much let us move whatever we wanted to. So Nat and I took him up on that and basically re-designed the space.

The art director arrived at 845 and Rickey arrived at 9am, he arrived by himself without an entourage. Which is cool because it makes things go so much quicker.

We shot about 5 outfits in about an hour. Rickey shot really well and did everything I asked of him.

What shocked me was that Rickey was so soft spoken, and such a nice guy. There was 0 ego. He was also taller and much slimmer than I thought he would be. He told me during the session he had infact slimmed down for the upcoming season.

We had just wrapped up shooting the opening shot with Rickey against the slate wall. I said the shoot was done and that was a wrap, then he said to me "Ok great, I was just getting nervous that I was running out of time on my parking meter"

here is a production photograph (never made it to print)

How cool is that?  Here is this pro athlete worried about his parking meter, most guys would have just been "ok man I have to get going when is this going to be done?" Or did the Curtis Comeau - "whatever its just a parking ticket, until you have to renew your registration and find you have $450 in parking tickets!"

All in all it was a great shoot. but I can't help myself when I look at the opening spread wondering if  Ricky thinking about the time expired parking meter?

Enjoy!

C