Sick on Set: Shooting Matt Hanson for NormaTec in Storm Lake, Iowa

2026 note: Shooting from the back of a moving truck, or with a lit runner alongside one, is dangerous. A fall or a misstep can be life-threatening. Please don't copy these setups without a professional driver, closed roads and real safety planning.

It's no secret that I love working with the talented, hard-working Ironman athlete Matt Hanson, so when his sponsor, NormaTec, wanted a shoot with Matt in his own backyard, I was stoked. This is why I preach about building solid relationships with the athletes you work with: if they enjoy working with you, they'll bring up your name when their sponsors need new images. The timing was perfect, too. I was heading home to Iowa for a visit and could bounce over to Storm Lake for the shoot. Easy, right?

Not exactly.

Powering through

A couple of days before the trip I came down with a fever of about 102 degrees. I convinced myself I'd beaten it, and I got myself and 100 pounds of gear to Iowa. Then, at 4:45 a.m. on shoot day, the fever came back with a vengeance. We piled the gear into a small rental car (lesson learned: get a large SUV) with my wife Sam and my buddy Pat, who was assisting, and I spent the drive feeling like I'd been kicked in the head by a mule and going over the shot list.

When we arrived, Matt, gracious as ever, offered us coffee before the first of three planned sections: the outdoor bike and run, scheduled first to make the most of the morning light. Light cloud cover dimmed it a bit, but I knew I could still create a punchy image with the Profoto B1 and B2s I'd brought. Then I climbed into the back of a truck in 52-degree weather to get blasted by wind. The motto of the morning was "power through and persevere."

On the bike

We started on a typical farm road that's part of Matt's regular training ride. I used the sun to backlight Matt and boomed a Profoto B2 with a collapsible beauty dish out of the truck as the main light, as I'd done many times before. With everyone in and secured, and Sam flying a drone to capture some new behind-the-scenes angles, we rolled out.

On the first stretch, I wanted wide shots that used the sun, so I shot my Canon 5D Mark III with the 16-35mm f/2.8 at around 16-20mm. The goal is to get wide enough to pull your subject into the image, but not so wide that lens distortion stretches and skews everything. There's a sweet spot in the frame where you get that beautiful bend of the wheel while the rider and the rider's face stay relatively undistorted and pleasing to the eye.

On the ride back, toward the sun, I switched to the 70-200mm f/2.8 for tight crops, essentially a portrait of Matt on the bike. Here the sun was the main light, and the beauty dish filled in its harsher shadows for a more flattering light on Matt's face.

Running alongside

Next we looked for a place to shoot running, and I tried something I'd never really done before. I've never been completely happy shooting a runner from a stationary position as they go past. It always looks a bit off to me, because the motion blur is in the runner and the background stays still. I prefer shots where the athlete is sharp in the frame and the background moves. That's how your eye sees the world when you're actually running, and it draws me into the image.

So I used the same truck setup I'd used for the bike and had Matt run beside it at his normal clip of about a 5:45 mile. The results were better than I expected, and a picturesque barn and some windmills really said "Iowa." Tall summer corn would have made it perfect, but it's still one of my favorite action images of Matt from the day.

By the end of the run I was shivering, so we warmed up with more coffee before stage two: the garage, Matt's "pain cave."

The pain cave

For many triathletes, the garage is the most real part of training: hours in one position, sweating, holding the mental fortitude to finish, then doing it again the next day. I wanted the images to carry that grit.

For the bike, I used the beauty dish as the main light in front of Matt and a 4-foot gridded strip box on a C-stand as a top-down light to pick out his body lines and sweat in a punchy but appealing way. I shot with both the Canon and a Mamiya 645DF+ with a Credo 40 back. The medium format captured every detail in the skin and sweat, while the Canon let me go wide, get into Matt's space and put the viewer in the cockpit with him. I asked Matt to crank it up, like the last efforts of a hard workout. He brought it, and the images were exactly what I wanted: intense, dramatic, gritty and, most of all, isolating. These workouts can be lonely, and I wanted to show Matt alone in his space, bettering himself on the bike.

The treadmill was trickier. I didn't want to tear his space apart, so it stayed against the wall, and spill from the front beauty dish was throwing ugly light onto that wall and making the lighting obvious. I try to avoid that and use "motivated light," light that looks like something your eye would see naturally, rather than light that seems to come from a UFO. To offset the spill, I put my large 69-inch Elinchrom Rotalux octabox at my shooting position to fill Matt and the wall with even light. That cut the spill enough that I knew I could remove the rest in Photoshop, which, given how sick I felt, was the best I could hope for. I try to nail the light in camera, but sometimes you know you'll be doing some work on the back end.

The third light was the gridded strip box behind Matt, about 8 feet high and angled down to accentuate his body lines as he strode out and add drama in the shadows. I let him run a few minutes to get some color in his cheeks before I started shooting. Here I preferred the Canon frames for their wider view.

Recovery, and the team

Finally it was time for the NormaTec recovery boots. To tie the story together, we planned two setups. The first was Matt on the garage floor in the boots, recovering right where he'd trained and looking just as wrecked from the effort, with a recovery drink and snack beside him and the edge of the treadmill and a hint of a bike rim in the frame.

By then I was so sick I could barely think straight. I'd rehearsed the lighting enough on paper that I knew what I wanted, but I needed help finding fresh compositions and creative angles. I'd always wondered what I'd do if I were sick on the day of a shoot that couldn't be rescheduled, and now I had my answer. First, you persevere, because you have a job to do and you have to nail it. Second, you need a team you can trust to get the result no matter the circumstances. Photography seems like an individual pursuit, but it's absolutely a team sport. Assistants, makeup artists, digital techs and creative directors are as much a part of the process as the person pressing the shutter.

I kept giving direction and feedback, but it was Sam stepping in with outside direction and new angles that helped me recharge and create the images the client needed. Without her help, I don't think the results would have been nearly as strong.

The last setup was Matt on his living-room couch around noon, with his bike brought inside as the tie-in. The idea: Matt in from an outdoor ride, in his training gear and NormaTec boots, with his recovery drink of choice (a cappuccino) and some help from his faithful companion, his dog. My favorite frame was from Matt's own perspective, looking down his legs at the whole recovery setup. It puts viewers in the boots and helps them picture themselves as the buyer.

The lighting was simple: one large octabox overhead and to camera left to spread even light across the room. I made sure every overhead light was off so no other artificial source could add a strange color cast.

It's still one of the most difficult shoots I can remember, and it taught me never to take for granted how essential your team is. I know it's cheesy, but teamwork makes the dream work.

The behind-the-scenes film from the shoot is below.

The film

Watch the behind-the-scenes film

Originally published on the Ruddock Visuals blog, January 2018. Lightly edited in 2026.