Ghostly Runner, Santa Monica, CA
Ghost Runner
Photo by Brad Rickerby
Limited Edition Prints Available
This was a stock shoot for Getty. Typical girl on the beach running at dusk. The concept was fitness, exercise, determination, drive etc. etc. etc. Just another in a long line of standard shoots with an expected outcome to fill the files of a stock agency that has thousands of other images just like it. Right?
Wrong! Not for me. To stand out, to make your product different and therefore more salable ay a premium price, you have to make your image unique. It has to jump off the light table (well, these days, the computer screen - I guess I go back a long way) and say to the buyer, "I am one of a kind. No other image that you can find will be like me". I repeat this point often, because it is so basic to your survival as a photographer.
To differentiate my image on this day, I had the model, a women, keep running back and forth in front of me. Thirty feet one way, then turn around and go thirty feet back to where she started from. I had her jog rather than run. I knew if she ran fast, I would never get the image I wanted. I set the shutter speed at about a 30th of a second (at around f4) and shot away. In decades of looking at photographs I don't recall seeing many others like this one.
This is another image that has sold well through out the years.
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