It has been a personal project inspired by two of my most idolised photographers, Chase Jarvis and Zack Arias. Chase and Zack have always been advocates for setting yourself personal projects to help develop your creative skills and to extend your portfolio. Chase is also a great believer in sharing your knowledge. This prompted me to create my BTS video which after just over 1 year has been viewed over  21,000 times and I really have to thank one of my favorite bloggers Udi Tirosh who featured the video on his blog diyphotography.net. His website is a great inspiration to make the most of your gear and budget.

Seamless White Background @ Home Tutorial from Scott Bourke on Vimeo.

I have had loads of emails asking for more BTS from the series. So I have decided to put together a timelapse video from my rugby shot. I’m really getting into the timelapse stuff of late.

So thanks to everyone that lent me gear or gave my words of encouragement. Whilst it is my first ever body of work I still plan on adding to it over time so stay tuned for plenty more shots, who knows ping-pong may be on its way.

To finish off here are a few of my recent setup shots you guys seem to crave.

After putting my skateboard shot off for long enough due to the fact I had no idea how to execute my idea, I finally gave it a crack and it came out better than expected. I think this could be one of my best ever Self Sportraits.

After the success of my Tennis Sportrait int he stairwell I decided to give it another go with a few modifications for my AFL shot. These setups take much longer to position the camera angle and lights and even more time to get an image I’m happy with. The shadow has been dropped-in in post.

My laptop is still down and out so these edits have been made on the wife’s machine only using Photoshop. I prefer to use Adobe Lightroom2.0 for my edits as it allow for a better work flow and is much easier to do a bulk bunch of similar images.

Once again any athletes wishing to get digital copies of the images please contact me via the contacts page and supply me with your race number. I have uploaded more to my Flickr Page and will keep on uploading of the next 2 weeks.

This was my first ever attempt at a panning shot. Running athletes are not the easiest  to track while panning as their running action is rather accross yet they move up and down. Something you wouldn’t get with cars and bikes. I hope to have a tutorial on panning up over the next few weeks.

With this shot I was trying for a technique called balance. There are 2 main concept for a balanced photography. The balance in this shot is that the foreground runner is in his set position and the background athletes are also in a similar position. This photo is actually my weekly entry in a favorite site of mines competition. Digital-photography-school.com has a weekly competition and this weeks theme was balance. Check the other entries here.

I would have preferred that i got the athlete looking up but mst of these guys keep their heads down till well out of the blocks. I also would have prefered to have his back foot in the image.

Australian Olympic Silver medilist Sally McLellan who actually won the women’s 100, 200 and 100 hurdles. I have quite a nice set of her start in the 200m sprint and will upload a time lapse soon. Some people have remarked that a crop on this shot would be nice so once my laptop is back in order I’ll give it a go.

Matt Davies the  100 and 200 Qld State Champion. The backgroup is rather annoying but I quite like the body shape and determination on his face.

This was the event I was hanging for. Its one of my track favorites, the steeplechase. I swapped my 70-200m lens for my kit lens the 17-85mm f4-5.6 IS. I got some interesting shots but due to the lack of a larger aperture my backgrounds are a little sharp. I’ll upload a series of steeple hots soon.

Both these girls meant business in the 200m final.

More uploads and some time lapse photo’s latter this weekend.

Have a good one and keep shooting.