When I started off in sports photography, at the end of a basketball season, or after a number of days shooting at the racetrack, all the photos began to look the same to me. As a result, I’ve always tried to keep doing things outside of my usual boxes in order to stay fresh, and to hone some of the skills that I’m trying to develop that I can apply to my main business areas.
Today was one of those opportunities. A longtime friend called me up yesterday, saying that someone in marketing at her firm in Manhattan asked her if she knew a photographer for a last minute assignment, and, since I’d done a session with her child a few months back…
The assignment was pretty straightforward. Make a few images of some key people on the trading floor in some work related situations for a brochure the firm was putting out. The images had to be done quickly, since deadline was the following day, so images would have to be turned around before I left the site, and emailed to marketing, which was in Memphis– meaning that I’d be working without the direction of an art department or anything of the sort.
I was introduced to the four principal subjects, and quickly realized that they regarded this photo shoot as slightly more painful than the average root canal. I was given some basic ideas about where on the trading floor I could shoot, and a vague idea what they were hoping I might convey.
One of the locations I was given was a desk that was vacant for the day that was in the middle of the floor, meaning I could incorporate a lot of the action around me into the photos. More importantly, it gave me an opportunity I always seize: give everyone a chance to start off with something successful. I set up a studio light right near the desk, and kept a couple of items I thought I might need nearby. After one or two frames with Carlos, we added a reflector to fill out his face, and the result was a confidence booster for him when he saw the image on the back of the camera.
They asked me to show some collaboration type scenes, and I tried to get input from Carlos and Helena as to what felt genuine rather than staged, and they brought out some documents that they could use as props.
With Bobby, I wanted to give a more relaxed feel to his portrait. So I let him turn his back to the desk, which I’ve always found gives a confident look to guys.
As we sent some of the initial take back to Memphis, they asked for some specific shots, including one vertical shot with Miyuki, Helena and Carlos, that had to have a video screen in the background. I went back to that empty desk, and used the same setup from the earlier shot– one light and a reflector is simple, yet does a great job of separating them from the clutter. I kept encouraging them to get close, not only to keep them in the frame, but to encourage interaction, which gives the photo a little more life.
We ended up swapping the three of them through each spot to give the marketing folks some different psychological feels, but that was essentially it. Everything was one light, simple, non-intrusive, and kept the distractions for the people working around them to a minimum.
It was a little different to do a job like this without as much direction as I usually get for this type of assignment. But the people who I was working with, both onsite and in the home office, were flexible and were willing to try things, which makes it fun to do something out of the usual routine.
