There is no photoshop involved in this shot. What you are seeing is a football, mere seconds before it hit my camera. Luckily, the camera survived perfectly and the resulting shot looks pretty cool to me. It is almost as if the football has legs and feet and is just casually taking a walk. I called this my ‘walking football’ shot.
The story of the shot
Like a lot of good stuff: this picture happened totally accidentally. I had a slightly different final image in mind at the time. Me and my brother were in an open field near the coast in the south of France. What do boys do in an open field? Right, they fetch a football and play soccer! What does a photographer do in an open field after playing soccer? Taking pictures of course! I thought it would be cool to have a frozen action shot of my brother kicking the ball in the air. I wasn’t very good at photoshop yet at this point (this happened a few years ago) so I thought the only way to pull that off would be for my brother to actually kick a football in the air while I was at some distance, taking pictures in burst mode.
We had just played soccer and he had demonstrated his skills with a football. It seemed like he could control his shots pretty decently. So as the photoshoot went on, I took more and more risks, getting closer and letting him aim the football closer in my direction. This was destined to go wrong at some point.
We had a lot of shots already when I asked my brother to kick the ball up in the air one last time. I start shooting. Next thing I know, I feel the football hitting my camera. My brother came running towards me. I turned my camera around to assess the damage, fearing it would be totally broken. It turned out, however, that my camera somehow survived the impact without a scratch.