Corporate Portrait

As I mentioned last week, I hopped a plane to Dallas last week to shoot a portrait of an employee for a career magazine for people with disabilities. It is the first editorial type shoot that I’ve done and I was a bit nervous about the whole thing. As I mentioned, I was worried that the subject wouldn’t have much time for me in the first place, let alone time for me to fiddle with lights and experiment with things.

I arrived in Dallas late Thursday evening and was chauffeured to my hotel by a driver who pretty much confirmed my worst assumptions about Texans. He praised George Bush, complained about the Cowboys and made a bad joke where he thought he was comparing evolution and creationism, when in fact he was comparing creationism with intelligent design. It was almost amusing how many stereotypes he confirmed in a 25 minute car ride.

That night, I had a couple drinks with a coworker in the hotel bar where I was perplexed to find a sign warning of fines and imprisonment for carrying an unlicensed handgun in the bar. I couldn’t figure out why this sign was necessary, but then it occurred to me that in Texas it’s totally cool to carry a gun around to most places, which is why it is important to specifically mention the places that are illegal. Gotta love Texas.

The next morning I scouted out possible locations for the shoot and then met my subject at noon. He is much younger than I was expecting and luckily enough for me was good looking as well. And most importantly, he was completely into the photo shoot which made the whole thing go very smoothly.

I’d picked out about five different spots to shoot in the area, one of which was outside in front of the building. It was a bit tough to work without disrupting the people working around us, and with the exception of the conference room we’d reserved, we couldn’t do much with lights. I used some small portable strobes for a couple of the shots with mixed results. In the end, I’ve got four or five safe corporate shots for the magazine.

Unfortunately there weren’t any large signs with the company name anywhere, so that was one of the shots I couldn’t get. An in the end, I wasn’t able to get the outside shot either because we were chased away by building security. One thing I’m going to research and carry with me is a photographer’s bill of rights, for situations like that in the future.

Overall the shoot went very well. 90% of the shots were standard issue corporate shots based on the specs given to me by the magazine. At the end of the day however, I asked the subject if he’d mind hanging around a bit while I did some experimentation. He was actually excited about the prospect, especially when I assured him that I’d make him look cool. The resulting photos were really exciting to me as it was stuff that I’d never done before, and they turned out really excellent. Below are two quick samples of the two different kinds of shots I took: on the left is a sample of the corporate shots and on the right is one of the more creative shots taken at the end of the day – obviously a bit too fashion for corporate work but fun just the same. The great thing was that both of these shots were taken in the same room with the same resources.

We’re going to submit one of the more creative photos for the magazine cover, along with the safe ones and we’ll see which way they go. I assume they’ll choose one of the safe ones, but you never know. I’ll be posting more from this shoot once we get through post production and make the final choices for the magazine.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 12:07 pm and is filed under On Assignment, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.