Le Minerale: Tim Nasional Indonesia

Sports photography carries an expectation baked into the genre itself: sky, sweat, motion, the sense that something is happening right now, mid-air, mid-effort. Le Minerale's collaboration with Timnas Indonesia asked for exactly that feeling, but with none of the unpredictability that comes with actually shooting outdoors. My job was to fake the sun convincingly enough that nobody would question it.

We built the lighting around flash, engineered to mimic the particular hardness and clarity of direct sunlight against an open sky. That choice mattered more than it might seem. Natural outdoor light shifts constantly, clouds pass, the angle drifts, but a studio setup replicating that same crisp brightness gave us total control over shadow and highlight while still preserving the visual language people associate with real athletic performance. Every element in frame needed to read sharp and defined, professional in a way that felt energetic rather than sterile.

The talent brought their own challenge. Four footballers, each occupying a different position on the pitch, striker, goalkeeper, midfielder, each needed to feel individually heroic while still reading as part of one unified team story. Athletes photograph differently than typical commercial talent. There's a physical confidence in how they hold themselves, a directness that comes from bodies trained for performance rather than posing. My work was mostly about getting out of the way of that natural presence, letting genuine athletic intensity carry the frame instead of layering on artificial drama.

Makeup and skin treatment split into two distinct stories. One version leaned into the reality of exertion, subtle sweat texture on skin, hair with a touch of dampness, enough to suggest genuine physical effort without tipping into something exaggerated or unflattering. The instruction was precise: no large glycerin droplets sitting artificially on skin, just a natural, believable sheen that said this athlete has been working hard. The second version stripped that away entirely, clean and composed, hair styled sharp, the kind of groomed confidence you'd want representing a national team in a still moment rather than mid-play. Both had to keep the same underlying rule, sharp and put together, never veering into anything that read as awkward or unpolished.

What made this project satisfying was the tension between control and authenticity. Everything in that studio was engineered, the light, the backdrop, the sky itself painted digitally afterward, yet the goal was always a photograph that felt caught rather than constructed. That's the quiet skill in sports commercial photography: building an entirely artificial environment precise enough that viewers forget it was ever artificial at all, and simply see four athletes doing what they do best.

Adhitya Himawan
Co-founder and photographer of HIRA Imaji, Jakarta.