Simon Ridgway Photography

One of the more common assignments I get is to shoot corporate portraits. Simple head and shoulders or full length portraits of staff/employees/executives at companies and organisations, to be used on the web and in corporate literature, powerpoint presentations, annual reports etc.

Now that I have done this so many times, I have a well tested setup for these shoots that has served me well in many different locations. However, it does involve a fair bit of kit and some setup time. Once the setup is complete I can shoot as fast as the people can put themselves in front of the camera!

This shoot for the Wales Audit office was carried out over two half-days and the client wanted three different backgrounds as well as headshot, half-length and full length portraits, looking left, looking right and smiling/serious. This added up to a LOT of different combinations and I had to work out a system to make sure I got all the required shots for each person as efficiently as possible.

Here’s the setup…

As you can see, I’m using red gels on the background lights to give a red background for one set of shots. Removing the gels gave me the pure white background and over on the left you can see the black cloth background clamped to a boom stand which I was able to swing into position for a pure black background. (with the back lights switched off of course!)

The main problem I had with the gelled red background was the low white ceiling causing a lot of light to bounce around and wash out the red colour. Since there was nothing I could do to prevent this (other than painting the ceiling black!) we got the best red we could and the client was happy with the results after checking them on screen.

I shot tethered in to the Powerbook you can see on the left so each person was able to see their pictures immediately and I was able to check that all the lights were firing and I wasn’t getting any nasty reflections in glasses etc.

Here’s just a few of the shots…

And that’s just one pose with each person! There were a lot more. Because all the lighting had been arranged carefully, I only needed each person for around 10-15 minutes to do all the background and pose combinations. In an ideal world each pose and background combination would have been lit differently with the lighting tailored to the individual picture, but there was no way we were going to have time for that. The lighting had to be designed to work as a compromise for all the shots.

Once we’d done all these I needed to get some more portraits of the auditor general. We had planned for around an hour with him in between meetings. However, at the last minute we discovered that he was going to be required for a live radio interview and then have just 15 minutes between arriving back (hopefully on time) and his next meeting.

I broke down all the lighting and worked on setting up lights around the office and corridors to enable me to move from one setup to the next as quickly as possible, so that when my subject arrived back we would be able to shoot straight away and not worry about lights, exposure, background etc.

I set up in four locations and did test shots with a stand-in. We waited for the arrival of my subject and then got to work…

Location 1:

Location 2 :

Location 3 :

Location 4 :

He got to his next meeting bang on time.

Are these photographs great artistic creations? No, not really. But the client got exactly what they needed with the minimum of fuss and disruption for their staff. If time is tight then my job is to make quick decisions about what is and isn’t possible under the circumstances. And then be prepared to change my plans when the circumstances change!

Being able to do shoots like this under pressure requires a thorough understanding of equipment and technique, good logistical skills, careful planning and a willingness and ability to change those plans and still get the job done.