If you’re a fan of cricket you can’t beat a good day out at the home of cricket Lords, even if it is a day in the nets at the Lords MCC Academy, and that’s exactly what we had last month whilst shooting a massive editorial feature for The Cricketer Magazine. The now annual Good Gear Guide testing day sees editorial staff, competition winners and coaches from the MCC Cricket Academy, put the latest bats and soft goods from the Lord Cricket Store through their paces to round up the very best buys in a whooping 26 page article. Given free reign to pick up whatever gear they liked the lucky testers piled up over £10,000 worth of cricketing essentials before heading into the nets, hitting some balls and assigning scores out of 10 in a range of categories including handling, performance and appearance.
In what was an action packed day of photography for us as well, we worked closely with the magazine’s art director to ensure we recorded a good range of reportage style shots to convey the days action, not to mention capturing high quality product shots of all the tested gear as well! So it was an early start, and with a mini portable product photography studio in our kit bag we got to work shooting over 60 bats, as well as all the soft goods, in the first 2 hours of the day. With those shots in the can (and a well earned coffee and breakfast devoured!) we turned our attention to recording the testing itself and ensuring we got some first class action shots, as well as portraits of the testers for their profile pictures in the magazine.
The resulting feature in the recently released February 2014 feature looks fantastic. See a selection of the shots used below, or click HERE to see a gallery of pictures of the magazine itself, showing how our images were eventually used.
Editor of The Cricketer magazine Andrew Miller sizing up the bats in the Lords Cricket Store
Editor of The Cricketer magazine Andrew Miller sizing up the bats in the Lords Cricket Store
The Cricketer Magazine competition winner picking out the bats he’d like to test
Testers for The Cricketer Magazine 2014 Good Gear Guide pick out some soft goods to try out too.
Andrew Miller sizes up bats for testing whilst competition winners talk shop with Jim Hindson
Competition winners pad up before the testing commences
Editor of The Cricketer Magazine Andrew Miller discusses performance and scores with his editorial staff
Jim Hindson from The Cricketer Magazine testing bats for their 2014 Good Gear Guide feature
MCC Academy coaches discusses performance and scores with editorial staff from The Cricketer Magazine
Jim Hindson from The Cricketer Magazine testing bats for their 2014 Good Gear Guide feature
The Cricketer Magazine competition winners get their bowling assessed by Hawk Eye at Lords Indoor Cricket School
Products shots of all the bats and soft goods were also shot on the day by Paul Carroll Photography
Our mini product studio was set up just to the side of the nets so we could shoot all the products quickly and easily before the testing began.