So for the past couple of seasons, I have had the pleasure of getting assignments that entailed shooting stadiums to be used in the graphics of Singapore Premier League. This year, in the spirit of learning in public and forcing myself to #showyourwork, I am going to break down my process of approaching the shoot and the mistakes I made.

PRE-PRODUCTION

To prepare for these kinds of stadium shoots, I search the area around the stadium on Google Earth to find good vantage points. This helps me determine if there are any high vantage points available for stadium shoots.

So in the case of Bishan Stadium, there weren't any publicly available high vantage points. So I had to walk around just shooting from the ground up.

Next, I will do a quick search of the kind of shots that has already been done just to make sure that I can cover all the bases as well as if there are any interesting angles of shots that other people have taken.

I will do a quick search of the kind of shots that has already been done just to make sure that I can cover all the bases as well as if there are any interesting angles of shots that other people have taken.

By doing this, I can use it as reference or even follow the approaches that they took. And from there I can also put a twist on how to do things my way and to just create a more refreshing imagery. Once I've done my research, I'll do a shot list and pack the required lenses accordingly.

Once we reach the ground itself, I just make sure once again to take a look around and see that my research checks out because you can't trust everything you see on the internet.

If every thing checks out with no new information, we start the shoot. Usually I would have a shot list or not, depending on how complex the various angles are. So for this shoot, I didn’t have one.

SHOOT

Since my research checks out, once I reached the stadium, I worked my way around the pitch — from the corners to the goalpost – making sure that I was keeping off the grass as much as possible. The one thing that I changed up this time was bringing along a fisheye lens to force myself to get new kinds of images and stretch myself a little bit more.

Basically, I used my usual tried and tested angles with a 17-35mm f2.8 before throwing on the fisheye to see how it would change things up. Here are some of the images on my IG feed.