Chairman’s Value Awards 2009

I was really busy in August and September traveling around the country photographing the ten Americas finalists for the Ernst & Young Chairman’s Values Awards program. In past years, we’ve shot the finalists the day of the awards event when they are all in New York. The photos are used not only in the stage presentations and signage, but also in the printed programs which in the past have been printed digitally only hours prior to the event. This obviously made for a high stress, no time for mistakes environment on the day of the event.

This year, in order to relieve some of this pressure and to get a better feel for each person’s home environment, I traveled to each of their home cities and photographed them in their offices, both traditional sitting portraits and then I followed them around through their day to create some journalistic-style day in the life shots. It was an exciting project and I was very pleased with the overall results. Below are some samples of the banners that were made with the three Americas winners.

You can view a gallery of the Chairman’s Values Award nominees that I shot for the program here. I also shot the abstracts of the trophy for some of the collateral.

This is the fourth year that I’ve shot the Chairman’s Value Awards, and interestingly CVA 2006 was the first professional gig that I had as a photographer back in 2006. The look was very different back then and I wasn’t involved much in the planning stages. In fact, I’d never shot high key before and had to spend the weekend researching techniques. Unfortunately Zach Arias’ tutorial on white seamless hit the net a couple years too late to help me at the time. But I muddled through and didn’t completely screw it up. Would I do things different now? You betcha. Would I be in the position I am today if I hadn’t shot this campaign? Probably not. This project opened up a lot of opportunities for me. Which goes to show you: if you don’t know how to do something, don’t run. Figure out what you need to do and go for it. Here’s the final product that ran as a national ad: