Many photographers have direct clients that they work with. I worked with 24 Hour Fitness for a number of years, and shot a variety of different types of photography for them. I worked with a fellow Brit, Creative Director Tim Brown which was a lot of fun. A couple of assignments stood out during that time.

The first one was photographing athletes sponsored by 24HR fitness for the 2004 Olympic trials. If any of their athletes made it to the Olympic team there would be posters and other Olympics related items in gyms around the county.

I wasn’t a sports photographer, so this was quite a challenge to get poster sized finished products with a camera not designed for sports . I had Canon's first full frame digital the EOS-1Ds at the time , which cost $6k and only shot 3 frames a second with a small memory buffer to capture only a few seconds worth of photos.

I had to photograph wrestling, judo, swimming, track and field, cycling, weightlifting and softball. All different types of photography than I am not used to shooting. Good sports photographers usually know and love the sport they are photographing.

To add to this most photographers were there to shoot the event, but I was there to shoot specific athletes. At the track and field and swimming photographers were given a bib to wear for specific shooting spots. There wasn’t enough bibs to go around for all the photographers, so you each got it for a short time. This made it tricky for me to get a prime shooting spot for just the time I needed. The hardest was the swimming.

Even though 24Hr fitness was an Olympic sponsor I had a hard time getting a bib for shooting poolside. In the end I lucked out and had a British Reuters photographer lend me her bib for one event. I wouldn’t have ended up getting the close up shots of Eric Vent without this.

Also some sports require specialized lenses such as a 600mm lens that i had to rent for swimming and road racing or remote camera triggers that I used for track and field. The most difficult shoots were 110-meter hurdles and 50 meter swimming. Both these athletes only swam or ran for a short time in each event.

I also shot Magic Johnson which was a lot of fun. I had the pleasure of shooting magic a few times over the years at the 24hr fitness annual convention, a tv commercial in LA and a gym opening in Texas. He was very easy going and professional every time. One commercial had actors dressed as carbs, which made for some interesting stills.

Shooting at the Magic-Sport / 24 Hr fitness gym opening in Dallas in 2002. I needed two rolls of seamless paper to get the background big enough!