Every once in awhile, I do a little work completely outside of weddings. It keeps me fresh, and makes sure that I'm still expanding my skills. Right before Christmas, I got a call while doing the usual drive from Long Island to Lexington, and it was the art department of a technology magazine based in New York, saying they needed someone to do some corporate portraiture for an article they were running in their February issue. As you can imagine, they found the pickings pretty slim out in Morehead for photographers with magazine experience, but when they expanded their search to the nearest sizable city, Lexington, my name came up. Since I was someone who had New York magazine experience, it was a great fit.
Due to logistics, we ended up getting this one done a few days into the new year. I met with the PR department of the hospital I was shooting at (the subject was their chief information officer), and we did a walkthrough, looking for usable locations for a portrait. In a lot of ways, it's not much different from looking for wedding portrait locations- you want an interesting background without a lot of distractions, and nice, soft light. We found about 4 locations that were usable, it was time to start.
For the first time all day, I finally sat down with my subject. Randy was pretty relaxed, having just gotten back two days before from a Disney vacation. Since I had taken my little guys out there back in July, and they were about the same age as his grandkids, we started from a little common ground. This is really important. Most of your subjects, whether they're brides or executives or kids, they're not professional models. They don't spend their lives in front of the camera, and they don't know whether that big 77 millimeter eye is going to hurt them or not. You have to get them to see you as a friend, and you don't always have a lot of time to build the relationship. I brought out photos from our trip that happened to be on my iPad, and that helped us transition into talking about technology, and what new toys like that mean to people in his line of work. Eventually, it came out that I once, deep in my past, was a network technology recruiter for 6 years, so the article we were illustrating, about a shortage of tech workers in healthcare, was something I actually understood a little about.
By the time we escaped the office to get to our locations, we had a good rapport, he was able to stay confident looking, and he was up for whatever I asked him to try. We went through our locations from the walk through and got about 15-30 frames at each spot, and I felt like we had most of it down. There was still one shot I needed to do in front of a white background (so if the art department needs, they can clip out the subject & throw him in front of any background), but by and large, the photos we had were what a PR department considers nice, but didn't say they didn't say technology. I mentioned to Randy that it was a shame the server room I'd seen was so cramped that it would be hard to shoot in, and he told me, "Did you know we have a new server building just outside of this one?" Nope, no idea! I just got here!
20 minutes later, I'm in a new, open, and clean server room. We open up a rack to show all the flashing lights, I pull out a prop or two, and in 10 frames, we're done with the shot above.
The moral of the story? No matter who you're photographing, spending time getting to know them and getting to help them find their comfort zone is time well spent.
