It’s a Banner Year for Sports!

It’s a Banner Year for Sports – If you happened to drive down Brawley School Road in Mooresville last spring, you saw that Lake Norman High School hung all of their senior sports banners on the fence in front of Brawley Middle School. It was great because a lot of those amazing athletes never got to play their senior year. The pandemic shut everything down in March. But by having them hang on one of the busiest roads in 28117, more people probably got to see those banners than if they hung in the gym or the stadium during a normal season.

It was also great for me because LKN Images creates those banners for Lake Norman High School and several other high schools in the area. It’s always a thrill to see my work on display in public like that. And especially last year, it was extra special because even though they couldn’t play, the senior athletes of the class of 2020 looked like sports heroes hanging on display for everyone in 28117 to see!

But the 2020/2021 athletic school year was going to be even more bizarre than last season. The North Carolina High School Athletic Association announced a plan in the fall to compress the schedules and move sports to later or different times of the year so the athletes would at least get to play. But not too many miles away, South Carolina had other plans. They limited their schedules but played their sports during the traditional time of the year. So, we found ourselves at Fort Mill High School in August 2020 shooting their football team… but we wouldn’t have any North Carolina football teams on the schedule until February of 2021!

For my business, January and February are traditionally the time of year where I get to take a breath and plan for the coming year. But not this year! The NCHSAA schedule pretty much packs everything into the winter and spring. So, even in the few days leading up to Christmas, we found ourselves on the basketball courts at Mooresville High School and Lake Norman High School. It was kind of surreal (but a lot of fun) to be shooting sports with Christmas music pumping through the gym speakers!

Once January hit, we have been shooting banners as well as team & individual pictures for dozens of high school teams as we keep up with the packed NCHSAA schedule.

Banner shoots are a lot of fun. We bring in special lighting and backdrops so we can extract the athlete and place them in custom-designed art that is unique to each school and each team. For the first team of the season, we have to show them pictures of how the final banner will look. But once we get to the second team, we can just point at the banners already hung on the wall and say “you’re going to look like that!”

Here are some “before” and “after” images from a recent banner shoot at Lake Norman Charter High School…

When the shoot is over, we post all of the images in a special gallery so that every athlete gets to select their favorite image. And just a few days after that, they find their banner hanging on the gym or stadium wall!

Celebrating the senior athletes of the class of 2021, here are some samples of just a few of the banners we have done so far for this school year. And we’re just getting started!

LKN Images, a Mooresville NC photographer, specializes in high school seniors, sports, dance, family portraits and business photography across the Lake Norman and Charlotte area.

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