Photographing Raul Meireles
Liverpool's Portuguese midfielder Raul Meireles photographed at the club's Melwood Training Ground
Last week I had one of those increasingly rare things: a commission from a national newspaper.
The Sunday Times had arranged a chat with Liverpool’s Portugese midfielder Raul Mirealas and asked me to go down to Melwood to take a couple of portraits to accompany Duncan Castle’s article.
Commissions from newspapers are as rare as hens’ teeth these days, but even rarer is the opportunity to sit down with a Premier League player for a photo-shoot.
Football clubs control their media output very tightly these days, and now they have affiliations with big photo agencies they are increasingly limiting access for the photographer from ‘outside’ media.
Raul was very amenable. He arrived after training for the interview dressed in a black and white striped tee-shirt, worn and ripped drainpipe jeans and a pair of converse boots. He has a hispter look going on, which is even more emphasised when he wears large black rimmed spectacles. On this occasion he wasn’t wearing his goggles.
The look is topped off with some of the most amazing tattoos I’ve ever seen on a football player. Forget your David Beckham angel wings which have been much copied and become a cliche. Raul sports full colour images of women and flowers, almost in a Alphonse Mucha style, on his arms, back and neck. There so many words inked into his skin I’ve read shorter books!
I spent around five minutes with Raul in the booting area at Melwood. There are two walls which both provide a different sort of background. A concrete wall painted bright red and a wooden panelled wall which the light falls off nicely. Strangely the corridor containing all the players’ boots on the wall was deemed off limits, which was a shame as it would a provided an interesting background for a portrait.
The set up for these pictures was kept simple, one off camera flash fired through a brolly, and a few shots with a ring flash. Just as well I kept it simple judging by the look on the press officer’s face when I say i wanted to set up some lights. The Nikon SB-900 was fired from a commander unit on the camera.
We were due to start at noon, but it was closer to 2pm when I finally sat Raul down for the portraits. By this time shafts of sunlight had crept into the atrium and sneaked into the bottom of my shots. Without anywhere else to set up there wasn’t much I could do about it.
