One of the early footballing moments that’s etched into my memory is Thierry Henry’s first touch in the middle of a game against Blackburn (slide six). The way he jumped what felt like an unfathomable height and, with the elegance of a gymnast, contorted his body to control the ball and bring it down was like nothing else I’d seen. He had a habit of making the most difficult actions feel effortless.
Moments like that are a big part of what inspired this series. This project is the first in a set looking at the art of movement within sport, starting with football. We wanted to capture that point where chaos and energy meet control and precision. We started from iconic football references, Rooney’s overhead, Higuita’s scorpion kick, Zlatan’s bicycle kick, then quickly widened the pool to include how other worlds depict movement, specifically Wuxia cinema, anime and manga. Blue Lock (slide seven) and Shaolin Soccer (slide eight) kept coming up as specific reference points. Blue Lock for how it renders speed, drag and texture so acceleration feels visible, like movement leaves a trace. Shaolin Soccer for how it pushes motion beyond realism as a way of describing what those moments feel like in your head when you’re watching.
Working with Liam on the movement direction, we built out actions that stayed grounded in football but were composed to read more abstractly. Oscar’s experience playing helped keep everything natural. Eddie and I then used a combination of constant lights and strobes to hold onto that sense of trace and aftermath, so you see the moment and what lingers just after it. My favourites are the first and second images, but I’m curious which ones others are drawn to.
Photographer Tayler Prince Fraser 1st Assistant @eddie.davi3s
2nd Assistant @031999130t0sr 3rd Assistant @ianman__
Movement director @liam_jhill
Model @oscareggz
Quiet enough that you could hear the bowstring stretch, and the snow crunching outside when someone stepped out to get the arrows.
More from the session with the Kyudokai at Mishima Taisha.
I had the opportunity to visit and document the Kyudokai practising in the grounds of Mishima Taisha. Kyudo here isn’t just sport, the group also train to perform the shrine’s archery rites, some going back centuries.
The practice is meditative, ritualistic. You get very aware of the space you take up, physically and audibly, especially when you’re working out how to take photos in it. I could tell they weren’t used to having photographers in there, and the space clearly means a lot to them.
As the session went on though, they seemed to relax into having me around. They started walking me through hassetsu, the eight stages of the shot that structure every kyudo session, holding each position and working with me to catch the moment. By the end there was a real sense of collaboration, and what felt like genuine excitement about documenting a craft they’ve been doing for years.
Mishima Taisha Kyudojo, Shizuoka. Thanks to @ek_6000 and the practitioners at the shrine 🤲🏽
A question that kept coming up during this shoot was what makes an image read as sport, and what makes it read as editorial. Where does it stop feeling like a sporting moment and start living in something more cinematic, abstract, or constructed.
We tested a few different background builds and a few different ways of executing them. What we kept coming back to was the visual language of traditional sports photography, that super shallow depth of field that isolates the subject and turns the world behind them into shapes, tones and texture rather than information. We wanted that familiar separation, but in a way that still felt intentional and slightly unreal.
Oscar was in lifestyle product for the original frames, which naturally pulls the images towards editorial. The movement becomes more graphic, and the setting reads more as a made environment than a real place. So we ran the same idea again with a full kit as a comparison, to see what happened when you put that exact same motion back into a recognisable football language.
Sitting with them afterwards, I stopped thinking of it as choosing one over the other. The kit version feels more anchored in a real sporting moment, which pushes it closer to abstract sports photography, still heightened, but with a clearer link to reportage. The lifestyle version leans further into editorial, where the “stadium” is more of a reference than a location, and the image is allowed to stay a little more ambiguous. Same movement, same intent, but context changes what you think you’re looking at.
The aim with this series of images was to freeze footballing movement and let it resolve into abstract shapes, without losing the honesty of the action. Liam’s direction was key, less micromanaging, more giving Oscar an end point and letting the movement happen naturally.
We kept the house lights up, then placed a strobe off camera left in front of the subject, and another off camera right behind. Playing with curtain sync let us decide where the blur sat in relation to the sharp moment, so the movement reads as intentional rather than accidental. It meant we could keep leaning into that drag and texture I mentioned earlier, a quieter nod to the Blue Lock way of making speed visible, but translated into a photographic language.
When I came to edit, what surprised me was how quickly these frames stop reading as football. Once you strip away the usual context, kit, pitch, crowd, even a ball, the body language starts to feel less like sport and more like choreography. Some of the shapes ended up closer to our wuxia references, House of Flying Daggers or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, than they do to traditional sports imagery. That drift into the surreal was intentional, real movement, but abstracted enough that it becomes its own thing.
That shift is what I’m most interested in, when something starts in a very specific world and then loosens into a shape you can read however you want. It’s still football, but it doesn’t need football to make sense.
Probably the most tedious images we made were these long exposures. The aim wasn’t just motion blur, it was to isolate a sequence of pivotal beats across a two to three second movement and let them sit together in a single image.
We approached it methodically. We mapped the movement first, timed it, and worked out where Oscar would be at key points. The sequence itself was built around taking on an opponent, shoulder drops, roulettes, feints and stopovers. From there we built a base exposure using overhead constant lights to carry the full action, then placed a strobe at the end of the movement to give us a clean, decisive anchor. The rest was repetition and refinement, with the flash manually triggered at specific moments to freeze the positions we wanted to keep. The balancing act was keeping enough ambient exposure to describe the full path of the movement, while making sure the strobe hits were crisp enough to read as intentional stops within the sequence.
If I was doing it again, there are a few changes I’d make. A lighter background would have helped separate the layers more clearly. I’d also introduce additional strobe positions so that as the body rotates, you still catch the face consistently rather than falling into back light. Whilst a lot of the shots we took didn’t quite land, we were happy that the process taught us a lot about how we’d build this kind of image more efficiently next time.
Photographer Tayler Prince Fraser 1st Assistant @eddie.davi3s
2nd Assistant @031999130t0sr 3rd Assistant @ianman__
Movement director @liam_jhill
Model @oscareggz
In the forests of Nagano and at the peak of summer, we built a world around ARUKU YAGI, @mrbailey ’s latest collaboration with Adidas.⠀
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The work looks at adaptability not just as a design principle but as a way of thinking, exploring how materials, structures and people evolve in response to their surroundings. We were fortunate to photograph within the original Capsule K house, and deeply thankful to Kurosawa’s son for allowing us access to such an historic space.⠀
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Created alongside @johnchxn and the @conceptkicks team, the project reflects a dialogue between biology, architecture and movement, a quiet study of how form adapts when nature sets the brief.⠀
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@mrbailey@adidasoriginals ⠀
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Production – SHIFT⠀
Creative Director – @johnchxn ⠀
Photography – @taylerprincefraser ⠀
Assistants – @eddie.davi3s@ek_6000@rryoma_kawakami ⠀
Film / BTS – @ttspooner ⠀
Wardrobe – @___gathering___
Make-up – @kumico_ando ⠀
Hair – @wg97__4kblife ⠀
Casting – @tiago.tokyo ⠀
Models – @tsugumiyyy_@yutashioya@shunsuke.sano ⠀
Drone – Tatsuya Komori
