Behind the Scenes: Sergio Brown Photo Shoot

Today's Irish Insider featuring Sergio Brown features a pretty cool cover photo with an even better story behind it. After two weeks of planning, lots of emails and phone calls, three assistants, and hours of setup, waiting, and takedown, I fired a grand total of one frame.

Thankfully, it was a good one.

I am always sensitive to the time and energy that we take from a football player every week to do these cover shoots, but this one was particularly unique. We were asking a guy who just finished an afternoon of football practice to do backflips for us on command.... and while I'm fairly confident that Sergio is more comfortable flipping than I am, say, jogging, there's still some inherent risk, which assistant football SID Michael Bertsch made sure to reminded me of a few minutes before the shoot when he politely asserted that we'd better get this shot in one take.

No matter how prepared you are, it's still a photographer's worst nightmare to be forced to get a shot in one try... there are just too many little things that can go wrong. The strobes that I used for the shoot would only fire once in the time it takes to flip, so I was resigned to the fact that I would literally have one frame to choose from.

I talked with Sergio about how I wanted him to flip, and to look, and then it was really just up to him.

Boy did he ever nail it.

If there's one thing to take away from Sergio Brown, it's that he has the innate ability to make the impossible seem effortless.

Even a one frame photo shoot.

Thanks to assistants Pat Coveney, Suzanan Pratt, and Vanessa Gempis, Sports Editor Matt Gamber and Managing Editor Bill Brink, the football SID's, and of course, Sergio. Without everyone's individual contribution, this wouldn't have happened.