For the past 46 years, the Salem News Student-Athlete Award has been a showcase for the best and the brightest of North Shore high schools. In recent years, it has also been a time for the visuals staffs at the paper to showcase their skills and ideas. Here’s a look at how this year’s played out:

The concept was the brainchild of staff photographer Matt Viglianti, whose inspiration was the sprawling group portraits Annie Leibovitz takes for Vanity Fair. Matt’s idea was to go for that type of composition, in a library-type setting.

The setting: We couldn’t find a library that had the right look and space to handle photographing a large group. We needed a large studio, and North Shore Music Theatre kindly made their rehearsal studio available. We would use Photoshop later to make the room look like a library.

Equipment for the group photo, taken March 28, included:
Camera: Canon 1D Mark II
Lens: Canon 100mm f/2.8 for headshots
Canon 16-35mm f/2.8 zoom for group
Light: 2 Calumet power packs with Calumet strobe heads
Light shaping: Two large umbrellas to bounce light into
Two Nikon Speedlights trigged by PocketWizards for hair light
Props: “Educational texts” including Calvin & Hobbes, a random cook book, and a really boring business of photo book.
Tables, stools, chairs, and benches borrowed from the Music Theatre
“Great kids”

Composition: Matt and Boston-based freelance photographer Ellen Callaway got the equipment set up and worked on the composition of the photo, as well as putting 13 high school students at ease for the right look. Matt’s approach: “I didn’t want to give any one kid prominence; it wasn’t about a competition to me so much as it was a recognition of the hard work of a talented group of kids, so we needed everyone visible and relaxed. I tried to make everyone have fun, and to mix and match colors/heights/genders in a balanced way.”

Adding the background: Matt sent me the photos the next day, and my job was to lift the finalists from the background, so “bookcases” could be dropped behind them. In Photoshop, I made paths of each finalist and separated them into layers. Matt photographed some bookcases at Wenham Town Hall, and a wooden floor at Masconomet Regional High School. Compositing mostly involved shading and softening some overlapping edges. On the floor, the only way I knew to capture the natural shadows of our finalists was to use the Overlay layer mode; that allowed some of the funky white speckling from the Music Theatre floor to show through, but I think it was a good effect.

Web components: The night of the group photo, Matt and fellow staff photographer Linsey Tait had the finalists bring in some of their own photos — family, friends, childhood images — to go into audio slideshows. Linsey recorded the audio that night and edited it later. Matt and Linsey combined the audio and photos into the audio slideshow (using SoundSlides), which gave readers a more personal sense of the student-athletes and added some interactivity. The group portrait was assembled in Flash CS3, using ActionScript 3. The group photo and audio slideshows (built using SoundSlides) are all loaded through one Flash file, with each slideshow loaded dynamically, depending on which finalist’s photo is clicked.

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