Photographing fitness in Japan

Like a lot of other things in life, a series of (seemingly) random events lead me to be shooting the amount of fitness photography I do.

I’ve always been interested in fitness. While I wouldn’t call myself a gym-rat by any means, I always enjoyed working out, getting strong, and being (relatively) healthy. So shooting fitness was something I thought would be really fun to explore. Unfortunately I didn’t really know anyone around me who “looked the part” so to say to practice shooting fitness properly.

However, one day a I was invited to a friend’s birthday party (actually a girl I met on tinder, but we ended up just being friends,) and she had also invited her personal trainer. He was a young Japanese guy, maybe in his mid 20s, and was in fantastic shape. I mean obviously I didn’t know what he looked like without his shirt on, but you can usually get a pretty good idea just seeing them in a t-shirt. So I started talking to him, and mentioned I was a photographer, and expressed my interest in wanting to shoot fitness. I asked if he might be interested in maybe modeling for me. He was actually really interested, and having never taken any “real” photos, was super excited for the opportunity. He asked if it was okay to bring a friend who actually competed in fitness competitions, and I of course said yes! Two for the price of one !

At the time I didn’t have much experience with studio photography, but owned a few strobes, and had a friend with a pretty big living room. So I bought a roll of gray seamless paper, and some stands to hang it from. And I set up a little make shift studio in the living room.

Make-shift studio in my friend’s living room.

For it being my first time shooting anything like this the photos came out really well. I was able to experiment with different light setups, and even play around with color. They were also really happy with they way the photos turned out. One of them even said, “I can’t believe this is me!'“

So after doing a few more shoots with these guys and started posting them to Instagram, a few other people started reaching out to see if I would shoot them. I was happy to have the extra practice, so did a few other shoots with people who were in to fitness. It was a lot of fun and gave me an opportunity to learn and experiment without the pressure of a paying client.

One day I got a DM from a Japanese guy who liked my work and was curious if I wanted to possibly work on something together someday. I didn’t think much of it, but he DM’d me a few more times and wanted to meet up and talk in person. His Instagram profile was pretty bare so didn’t really have any idea what kind of projects he had in mind, but figured they would be no harm in at least meeting. Lost story short he recently kind of fell into a job of shooting video so a small but growing fitness competition. He actually was a camera guy at all, but was kind of in the right place at the right time. Being slightly over his head he was looking for another cameraman he could bring on board to help with shooting stills while he shot video. The pay was really small, but I was happy to shoot something like that and maybe make a little spare change.

Without going into lengthy details, I ended up shooting the promo videos for this competition for about 3 years. It was a really good experience, and justified the purchase of new equipment (Panasonic GH5 and gimbal.) But over time the work I was putting in was nowhere equal to the amount I was being compensated, so I ended up leaving.

But one of the good things about this job was I had the opportunity to meet a lot of fitness competitors. So one day I asked a few people if they were interested in letting me take their photo in a studio. I figured it was a good chance to practice shooting in a studio and start building a portfolio of fitness photography. So I covered the cost of the studio and met up with two women who were excited about shooting together. Up to this point I had only shot men so I was happy for the chance to shoot some female fitness competitors.

And, I guess you could say the rest is history. One they started sharing the photos on their Instagram, I started to get a few DMs from other people who were inquiring about photo shoots.

Now, I had to start thinking about pricing…. But I’ll save that for another post.

For now, you can see more of my fitness work here.