Memorial Day weekend was a SOCCER WEEKEND! May 28th | filed in: Random Mutterings

Last weekend wasn't full of beach parties and BBQ's for the Schumacher family.

If you're a parent in club soccer, you know that last weekend kicked off SUMMER TOURNAMENT SEASON!

I'm SO PROUD of Mat's team because they entered their first tournament under a HUGE umbrella of question marks,
but they didn't let that intimidate them.

We took the team from last year's club, got a coach from yet another club, and joined a club
where the costs are low (HUGE releif for a lot of families on the team).

The team practices on fields far away from other club teams,
so not may folks know what we've been up to for the last few months.
Everyone (including the local soccer community) was wondering how on Earth this new team would fare
in their first big test.

And how did they do?

We took them to one of the biggest tournaments in town, and THEY WON THE WHOLE THING!

They made it to the championship game, and went into halftime down 2-0.
That wasn't good enough for them.
They came charging back and won the game 3-2!

All of the boys and the families were SO EXCITED and SO PROUD of the boys and the coach.

Next stop is the Pegasus Cup tournament in June.

By that time, we'll have our cool team banner all ready, too!

Last year's banner was a HUGE hit, and this year's is going to be awesome, too.

I took the pictures before the boys' first weekend game during warmups.
I brought my lights & my portable power to the field, set up a little photo set in the corner of the field,
and quickly pulled boys out of warmups one-by-one to get their pictures done.

Here's the final team image for the banner:

Don't they look tough!?

Here's how I created the images...

I took each boy's picture individually with two lights.

One light was to my LEFT, pointing at the boy from his right side, with a big softbox on it.
Another light was behind the boy to my right, pointing at the boy from behind his left shoulder.
That rear light did not have a softbox on it, and I had the power set lower because it was just for accent.

I triggered the lights with a remote trigger attached to my camera's hotshoe (where a flash usually goes).

Here's Micah... I took the shot, brought it home, erased out the background with a layer mask,
and brought Micah into the banner on the black background:

I did that with each boy,
so the banner image got REALLY big:

Once I had each boy in the banner as his own layer, I arranged them the way I wanted,
then I put in a totally black layer over the top of them.
I set that layer style to "OVERLAY" instead of normal so that they took on a really cool over-dramatic look.
I really like the effect! I put in a layer mask on that layer and brought back in a little detail on the boys' faces.

I added in one more layer and put in a gradient to fade their legs out to black.

Now I have to add in the team logo & our sponsors' logos, and get this banner ordered!

I think it's going to be a head-turner for sure!!

I've gotta go get to work on this banner layout.

Have a great afternoon!

~Carey