Now, in my experience, corporate jobs always tend to be somewhat of a constantly changing creature. What I mean by that is that no matter how much planning you do before the shoot, inevitably something always changes come shoot day, whether its adding more people to the shot list, changing locations to a much smaller room because the large boardroom suddenly became unavailable, people running late, etc. Fortunately I’ve garnered enough experience in my years of shooting to know this is just part of the gig, and I’ve dealt with so many of these situations that it’s not even an issue anymore, just a quick problem solve then business as usual.

Whenever possible I always head to the location a few days before the shoot to scout out a few possible spots for what I need to make the photo I have in my head, especially when you are dealing with the heads of large companies who’s time is usually pretty tight windowed. Spending a 1/2 hour walking around the offices a few days prior to the shoot saved my ass when I showed up on the day and found out that they had decided to double my shot list for individual portraits, going from 6 people to 12. Knowing things like this happen I always schedule ‘buffer’ time to allow for additional photos, but doubling the amount of portraits I had planned for ate up any time I would have needed to scout a location and set up for the group shot. Pre-scouting for the win.

When scouting I had decided on the presidents office because of the large window and the fact that the sun wouldn’t be blasting through it given the time of day, the downside was that I was going to have to tear apart his office to make it happen, fortunately he was an awesome fella and just told me to do what I had to do. 15 minutes later my assistant Jeremy and I had everything moved and the lighting set, 10 minutes after that we had the final frame and the shoot wrapped.

Here is the final group shot:

This is how it laid out in the report:

And this is what it looked like from where they were sitting:

The two octa-boxes on the right were used to evenly light the group, with the PLM on the left with the diffusion panel acting as a fill to bring out the shadow detail on the left side of their faces so it wasn’t too contrasty. I then shot a separate frame of just the windows without the lighting to mask out the reflections in post.

Hopefully if you’re looking to get your feet wet in the corporate photography world this post will act as a little heads up for what you can expect. If you have questions, use the comments section. Thanks for reading.

Cheers

This is the natural light image. The entire scene is in the shade, so the lighting was nice and even, but I also find it to be rather boring. There is no punch to the image and no real direction. I find that my eyes travel all over the scene.

I added in a 46″ octabox, then set it to over power the ambient by one stop, and put 5 stops of neutral density on my lens to retain my shallow depth of field. The results give the whole scene a completely different feel, and really direct your eye to Alina’s face.

Here is a diagram of the lighting setup. It’s very basic lighting, but placement of the light was key in creating the shadow detail I was looking for. The octabox is placed nice and close, just barely out of the frame, and slightly behind Alina’s face (so facing into the left side of her face). This allows the light to feather across her face, and produce shadow detail on the right side of her face, creating shape. Had I placed the octabox on the opposite side, lighting the right side of her face, all of that shadow would disappear leaving the photo looking flat again.

I shot one more image using almost exactly the same lighting (one stop over ambient, placed slightly on the left side of Alina’s face, with 5 stops of ND on my lens), but this time slowing my shutter speed a little to produce a little more ambient fill.

Thanks for reading. If you have questions, sound off in the comments, and if you’re interested in doing your own One on One lighting workshop drop me a line using one of the contact buttons above or below this post. Cheers.

Photography and Concept: Nathan Elson Photography
Hair & Makeup: Sarah Byrne
Model: Jenn Mi

Some Behind the Scenes photos of the setup and how we managed to create the floating hands:

To view Sarah’s work, visit her site at: http://www.sarahbyrne.ca

It’s been a great year, and I truly thank each and every one of you for sharing in it with me. I’m not the kind of guy who makes New Year’s resolutions, but I have made a promise to myself that I will roll out a lot more of the portrait ideas that pop into my head. 2013 is going to be fun. Safe travels and a Happy New Year to all of you. See you next year!

The thing with shooting in a grocery store is that they are full if tight aisles, and that poses a lot of problems for light placement. I also didn’t want to just take a typical grocery store photo, being that Community isn’t a typical grocery store. After doing a lap around the area I came across an area of bulk organics, all packaged up in similar containers (which I thought looked cool), and located at the end of an aisle making it possible for me to have some room to work with as the aisles were somewhat staggered. Win – win. The result was this:

And the lighting setup looked like this:
Beauty Dish with grid as the main light, focused on his face, and a 64″ PLM set up as an on-axis fill.

After I finished up that shot I had one more photo in my head that wasn’t environmental based, but Nathan has the right bone structure for it, so I set up a quick makeshift studio in the back warehouse area using a piece of black foam core for the background and shot this:

And again, this is what the lighting setup looked like:

If you’re the organic foods type, or thinking about trying it out, you can check out Community’s website here: http://www.communitynaturalfoods.com/online/

-Cheers

So I’ve decided to put an end to this madness, a madness that I realized can be stopped. The simple solution would be just to photograph these scenes and locations as I stumble across them, then light my subject to match, cut them out, and drop them in. Seeing as that seemed like the simple solution, that’s what I’ve decided to do. The image below is an example of that. Two photos, one of road & trees, one of Aly, and merged together.

This shot was more of a test than a planned end product. I knew I wanted to take some background plates of the fall colors before they disappeared, and this road (where I also shot the first part of ‘The Briefcase‘) is a 5 minute drive from my house. I put the 24-70 on my D800 and shot a few different focal lengths, as well as a few different levels of depth-of-field, which gave me a good selection of variety. The photo of Aly was actually taken on a city street a few days ago as part of a lighting course I was teaching, but the way she was lit turned out to be a decent fit for the background. I masked Aly out of the city scene, put her in the fall scene, and voila.

There are those who will scoff at this form of photography, saying that “it’s not real”, but I look at it as a huge ass door that just opened up to an awesome new world of possibility and creativity for me. I’ve began planning everything from crazy conceptual portraits to more toned down and simple portraits like the one of Aly here. Keep an eye out, there will be some interesting things to come.

As a side note, I’m pretty pissed off that I didn’t shoot more photos of streets and eye level views in general when I was in NYC… live and learn.

The actual process of this shoot was somewhat foreign but awesome. I’ve always pre-scouted locations and had a rough idea of what I was going to do with them when I got there, but up this point my shoots have always been more… organic might be the right word. I’d have an idea of what I wanted to do, but had no issues with abandoning that idea for something else entirely. Now I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that approach, but for this shoot I had a very specific shot list, and a very specific style of light that I wanted to create, all of which I followed exactly how I had planned. It opened my eyes to a completely different approach to photography, one that really pushes you to create in an extremely calculated way, and one that you will be seeing from me a lot more in the future.

So with that, I present “The Briefcase”, a short story (and an engagement shoot flipped on its head). Cheers.

So what would happen if you took a different approach? Well, that’s the conversation David and I had when discussing his needs for new imagery to coincide with his branding. Yes, we still shot some images on white seamless for things like postcards, granted not in the same manner in terms of lighting and posing as you would normally see, as the whole objective was to create the kinds of photos that pop, the kind that grab your attention when you see them. In short, we shot like we were shooting for a magazine, and I love clients who are willing to take that approach.

So with that, if you’re in need of some new branding imagery, and you truly do want something that isn’t so cookie cutter, drop me a line, we should talk.

And of course as with all good Realtor’s, you’re on call 24/7, so I snapped a candid of David doing some business which turned into a solid street portrait.

David’s new site will be launching soon where you will get to see the rest of images we shot. I’ll be posting a link to it here when it goes live.