Corporate Portraits

A couple of weeks ago, I booked a shoot for a corporate portrait. Like most of the assignments I’m getting these days, this shoot was scheduled for a conference room, and we had plenty of time to accomplish what we had to do. Plus, there was the added bonus: the clients had budget for hair and makeup. Shocking. After some negotiation, I booked a guy who I’ve worked with as an art director and we were all set.

Then, of course, the client started adding people. Once the word got out that I was shooting portraits, we started getting calls. Before I knew it, the project manager had five portraits booked for the same time period, and then the next day another client added one more. Six total, in the time we’d budgeted for one. I scoped out the conference room that was booked, which featured nice, soft, northern exposure daylight…and not much else. White walls, conference table, windows. Oh, and it was tiny. I had to leave space for the makeup guy (Alberto) to set up, I needed space for lighting, space for the client, space for the subjects…it was a tight squeeze. No space for a massive light set up.

The challenge was to shoot six different and unique portraits within the space, in a very short time period. I ended up using a single hensel monolight and a shoot-through umbrella to push the interior light a bit, and then leveraged that great northern exposure light as much as possible. In the end, I’m pretty pleased with the results.

I was pretty nervous about the shoot for a number of reasons, and I felt that while I was shooting I was totally winging it. The subjects all commented during their sessions that they were having fun, and that I was making it easy for them, which I guess means that my banter covered up my nervousness. Every shoot I do is a new challenge for me, and I often wonder at what point it gets easy and my shoots flow smoothly. As long as my subjects and clients don’t see how nervous I am, I guess I’m doing something right.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 8:05 pm and is filed under On Assignment, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.