Dylan Coulter sent over an email the other day to tell me about the work he’s been doing with Nike and the “Oregon Project” (Sounds like it involves Jason Bourne, no?) and we got to chatting. I thought I’d share the conversation.

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Hi Dylan! Tell me about the Oregon Project!

I recently was commissioned by Nike to photograph 15 professional long distance runners. These elite athletes comprise a team dubbed “Oregon Project” with the goal of returning the United States to distance running prominence. They live and train in Oregon, often running over a 100 miles a week in all types of weather, on both trail and track.

For this shoot, like the other, I used Kino Flos, 4×4 banks – they look like long florescent tubes bundled together. They are a constant source light and have a very low output, so the subject needs to hold still to enable as much depth of field as possible. In any event, the depth of field is narrow, generally f4 at 1/60 sec at 100 ISO. I really love the quality of light of the kinos.

I have a shot on my site that shows a similar lighting setup:

How did you get into photographing athletes and various extreme behavior (Pyro!)– are you someone who values adrenaline, or are you an athlete yourself?

I studied design and advertising in college and started my career as an art director. One of the companies I worked for was Adidas and I ended up art directing many of the athlete shoots. I started to formulate opinions on how sports could be photographed differently. Informed by select fashion and portrait photography, I was interested applying it to sports. Beautiful lighting, minimal sets, shorter lens. So I jumped head first into photography. It was a more difficult transition than I anticipated, but looking back I wouldn’t change anything.

I’m athletic, but not an athlete. I grew up playing soccer and basketball. More recently, I’ve taken up surfing and yoga. I follow sports for work, but definitely would rather participate than watch. Having a sports background does though, I think, help me relate to many of the professional athletes I work with as well as have a sense of what types of movement work and don’t work in a still image.

Tell me a bit about your work for the Beijing Olympics. The running portraits are amazing. How were you able to create this effect, was it mostly done in post?

That series of work was shot for Nike throughout Asia. Some of the images are composites, composed in post, others created entirely in camera. Since the featured athletes were usually only available for a short amount of time at a specific place, I photographed them against black. Sometimes this was done in fairly random places, like a conference room as in Melbourne, Australia or a outdoor school playground in Taipei, Taiwan. Then “extra” athletes or competitors were cast and photographed later as well. All the elements were then composited together in post.

I was surprised to see that you live in Brooklyn, I’d assumed you’d be in California, or Maine, since you have so much adventure in your imagery. How do you balance an urban existence with your outsdoorsy interests?

I’m originally from Portland, Oregon and lived in San Francisco and Portland until 5 years ago, when I moved to New York. I really like the energy and culture here, but, I also spend a lot of time outside the city. I grew up playing team sports – basketball and soccer and more recently I’ve taken up surfing.

The balance of urban and rural time is really important to both my work and state of mind.

Thanks, Dylan!