Tim Sharp Of Sharpbodies.co.uk

I recently had a great opportunity to photograph one of the most sought after personal trainers in the UK, Tim Sharp. He's recently been in the news as the person responsible for the amazing change that Jodie Marsh unveiled to the world. Along with being a celebrity trainer, he's also a drug-free natural bodybuilder with an amazing physique.

Over the past few months he's been training for the British Natural Bodybuilding Federation (BNBF) Final and a few days before the final we scheduled a shoot to capture his body at the peak of his fitness.

Going into the shoot I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do, I did plenty of preperation work by researching bodybuilding images and also what the current trends were in fitness modelling. I discovered that much of the pro bodybuilding photos were fairly old-school and the fitness style photos were much more modern.

The first thing I did in the shoot was get my assistant for the day to stand in so i could get an idea of how the light was going to look before asking Tim to start posing. I pretty much nailed the lighting on the first shot with a small adjustment made to stop down the aperture and we were good to go.

The first set up was a triangle light with two bare strobes behind right and left, and I decided to use a small softbox on a boom overhead to one side aimed almost straight down. At this angle and being a small size I'd get lots of shadow detail in the muscles and keep the light from hitting the metal part of the background too much.

This is a wide angle shot of the set up

I asked Tim to do a few bodybuilding poses and zoomed to 85mm to compress the background.

I wanted to get some other shots that were a bit more relaxed for the site and we went outside onto the roof of the building where there was a great metal wall running along the side of the building. The sky was slightly overcast and so I took a shot using ambient light and realised that I could drop the ambient light a couple of stops to make the metallic wall go a dark grey and change the tone of the photo. I added two speedlites from the right aimed at Tim's head and torso angled downwards so I'd still get the shadow definition in the muscles. The metallic wall was reflective enough to add fill from the left so I didn't need another speedlite to bring up the shadows.

I also took a couple of natural light portrait shots for the site which you can see here