Bodybuilding: Lean to Mean

If you’ve been reading our fitness blog I know what you’re thinking: “Uh oh. Foxhound with their shirts off again.” Yep. Our first official bodybuilding photo-shoot has become our second official Foxhound-team-effort-photo-shoot (if you missed our first one, the grad shoot, it’s right here).

So what makes this one special? Well. It took a lot of work, mostly in the gym. The photo-shoot itself was also rather tough. Flexing isn’t as fun as our smiles make it seem. But that’s the test of a true bodybuilding pose, right? Can you hold it while smiling. So we tried our best to smile our hearts out. A lot of effort went into the poses themselves, too. There are a lot of particulars to each pose.

The photography is probably what you’re curious about though. They aren’t HDR photos and they aren’t painted—in fact, they aren’t even touched up! We got this effect by combining four things: Dynamic lighting, olive oil, boosted clarity (Adobe Lightroom) and Jared’s Photoshop sharpening algorithm. I know everyone paints on muscles these days, and it’s more or less accepted. But this isn’t 300 or Twilight, this is our attempt at a legitimate bodybuilding shoot, so we tried to keep it real. We didn’t brush on muscles with make-up, we didn’t paint them in Photoshop, we didn’t selectively boost shadows—we didn’t even remove pimples or smooth out pores. This is us . . . albeit well lit and covered in oil.