Had the pleasure of meeting Connacht and Ireland rugby player Bundee Aki for a promotional photoshoot with Supermac’s. It can always be a little daunting meeting a well known personality, random thoughts can run through your head, I’m obviously speaking about myself here and the ultimate fear being not looking like a complete Neanderthal with camera in hand. Apologies to any fellow Neanderthals that may be attempting to read my jibber jabber.

I didn’t need to have such fears as Bundee Aki is and was an absolute gentleman during my time photographing him. The man is a specimen of a professional athlete and whilst his chosen profession requires high intensity controlled aggression his demeanour was that of a chilled out dude happy to go along with my attempts of being a professional photographer. Thank you for your patience with me Bundee.

The reason for the photoshoot was to announce Bundee Aki as Brand Ambassador for the ‘Fresh” range at Supermac’s. The shoot took a couple of hours and incorporated promotional images photographed on a neutral background which would later be cut out and combined with backgrounds to suit an intended purpose. A series of horizontal and vertical images were captured with Bundee holding different props. With these type of commercial photoshoots the client will always have the final say in what the finished image will look like, especially in the case of images for cut outs as they will be used more than once to suit specific purposes.

As a professional portrait photographer you are there to fulfil a brief, artistic control of the finished images is not in your control so leave that requirement in your camera bag.

However in this case I had planned an idea in my head for a shot of Bundee that was food for my own artistic needs. Ran the idea by Padraic from Supermac’s and he said go for it always open to ideas which is great, asked the main man and he said no worries. It involved Bundee coming through a sheet of green representing the colours of Connacht Rugby, white being another colour represented by the white t-shirt and a blue gel on the dark background behind Bundee.

It was the literally the last set of six frames that took three minutes. Having previsualized the image and then seeing the pixels become a reality well I was delighted to come away from the shoot with artistic control in this instance.

Thanks to Supermac’s for using my professional photography services and Bundee Aki for his patience during the shoot a true professional.