Shots You Don't Plan

Most of the professional work I have done over the last year has been high-key white seamless work for my company’s latest advertising campaign. The general brief is for portraits of a number of individual employees for a particular ad or poster with the understanding that they used individually, or comped together in group shots with their peers. In most cases, the group comps are only made from people photographed in the same day, which means that for the most part, the lighting and setup is identical, and is pretty easy. Often though, individuals from different shoots are comped together as well, without rhyme or reason, so I need to be as careful as possible with my lighting setups as possible, so that all of the final photos look as though they were made at the same time. Additionally, for the most part, we don’t have a hair/makeup person or a stylist, so I make the photos with whatever the subjects arrive in.

Consistency is sometimes difficult when I’m traveling. Most of my shoots take place in conference rooms, and in many cases, the tables can’t be moved, or they give me a closet-sized room with dark panel walls and not enough space for a backdrop, let alone lights. The most stressful part of my travel shoots is the moment I walk into the space I have to work with, have small panic attack, and then get busy working out a solution. Sometimes the results are passable with some post-production, other times they are spot on and seamless with the other images in the campaign. Sometimes though, I get some really interesting photos as a result.

This image is one of my favorites from one of the travel shoots I did. This shot was made in Atlanta, in probably one of the smallest conference rooms I’ve had to work with. The room was so small, in fact, that my background lights were only inches behind where the models had to stand. I was pressed up against the floor-to-ceiling windows with just enough space to get my head between the camera and the glass, praying that the window could handle my weight without either shattering or popping out of the frame, causing me to fall ten stories to my death in a W hotel parking lot. Rather than set up a backdrop and stand, I cut a sheet of paper from the backdrop, and taped it to the wall, reaching up as far as I could while standing on unstable and wheeled office chairs. It was a hoot, lemme tell you.

The set-up worked pretty well, except when the subjects strayed off mark and stepped back too far, catching some overflow light from the background. In retrospect, I should have flagged or gobo’d those background lights to cut off that overflow, but there seriously was so little space I couldn’t have done it without having to edit the flag out in post for every shot – which at the time I wasn’t prepared to do. In the end, I had to do a good bit of post-production on the comped photos to remove some of the hot edges I got as a result.

The upside is that among the shots that weren’t optimal for the campaign, I made this shot:

I love this image, and I’m at a loss to say exactly why. While Jill Greenberg has made a career out of shiny highlights and glossy skin through retouching and I’m sure some comparisons could be made to her images, that wasn’t the intention. I think I just like this woman’s expression, and the facial shine give her an uplifiting and, for lack of a better word, angelic look. Perhaps it’s because her skin and features are faintly Nordic which give it a European feel to me. Additionally, while I wasn’t a fan of her shirt when she showed up, the color matches really well with her hair and pattern are working for me when I see the image completed. I love the fact that even though I never would have chosen it, the shirt works. This is one of my favorite images from my travel sessions.

I’m working on a collection of images like this from my corporate shoots – images that don’t fit the bill for the client, but images that work for me on a visual level beyond the “big-smile-right-at-me” picks that end up in the ads.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 2:40 pm and is filed under On Assignment, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.