I spend a lot of my time shooting editorial portraits to accompany interview features. My job is to arrive in the daily hectic lives of very busy people, make some great images, then get out again. A sort of photographic SAS raid. Its a fact of life that busy people don’t have all day to spend on a photoshoot and often I have a time frame of 30 mins to do my thing. An hour is a luxury.
The timeframe of a shoot dictates what can be achieved. Lighting and composing a good editorial portrait often takes longer than shooting it. But I always err on the side of quality over quantity so pre-planning is key.
This shoot was to feature the busy CEO of a national building society and was commissioned for a Swedish magazine via Getty Images. I had a time frame of an hour, so on the way to the location (the company HQ) I was thinking through all the different angles I wanted to achieve.
When I arrived at the location it turned out that due to conflicting meetings I only had 15 minutes tops to light and shoot a range of portraits. A very quick recce showed that it was going to be better to shoot outside so I set up a small softbox and decided to use both the modern architecture of the building and the greyness of the overcast sky to my advantage. The great thing about a grey day is that the overcast sky isn’t throwing any harsh light around.
Peter, the CEO was brilliant and took my direction like a trooper and smiled all the way through it too as I dragged him round a whistle stop tour of the exterior. Thanks Peter!
My favourite shot from the quick session was this one, using the symmetry of the modern building to frame the portrait. It was toned slightly cooler and desaturated slightly in post-production.
You can see a larger version of the final in the “people” gallery on my website portfolio
Until later….
J
