Quick Business Portraiture for the Discerning Professional

Let’s face it: most of us don’t want to jump in front of a lens.  The revelation came fairly early on in my journey.  As a portrait shooter, I’ve found myself always trying to break down the invisible facade that gets thrown up every time a camera comes into the room.  (For the sake of my ego, I’ll assume it doesn’t happen when I come into the room )  Shooting portraits for business  professionals is no different.  I’m looking to ensure that the person appears approachable–and in fact, embodies the very nature of “easy-going.”  At least, that’s how I see it.  This is the main challenge of portraiture.  It is why I’ll never belittle a model.  A good model knows his/her body, and has a keen sense of what works.  In a way, I sort of wish we all had a modeling mode we could go into.  It’d make my life easier, anyhow.

Along with this challenge is the time-frame.  Always running against the clock.  Shooting portraits for people with schedules has to be quick.  Setting lights up beforehand takes a lot of this pressure off, but the thing is, you rarely get that time.  You walk into a place you’ve never seen.  You size it up, and start brainstorming with the client.  And hopefully, things go quick.  Sometimes they do, and other times you have to piece out a photon puzzle.  “Oh, damn, I can see my umbrella in that,” or “there’s not enough space to light this” are things that I often ponder in these fiery minutes of appraisal.

Once those details get worked out, I find my fundamentals, and get them in the bag.  Get the head shot—check.  Get the full body shot—check.  Is there a context shot?  Check.  Etc, etc.  Here’s a shoot I recently did with real estate sales representative Juliana Tibbet.  For the photogs out there, I’ll include a few notes on each frame.  Yes, because I’m that geeky.

Social media close up portrait/business card portrait. Lit from the front, two 430exII Speedlites shot through umbrellas. A very pleasing and flattering light is produced this way. Shutter drag of 1/30s to bring in the background. Shot with a EF 50mm f/1.4 @ f/2

A contextual shot. Here, the umbrellas are camera right and left, out of the family of angles of the background door. The vestibule was a dreadful void, so I put a 430ex on the floor in there, gelled Honl "chocolate" and pointed it up. Thankfully, it was triggered. Shot with an EF 24-105mm f/4L @ f/4.

Contextual shot: medium close up; relaxed. Here I was able to use the clamshell technique, again at f/2, but in high speed sync mode. The daylight was metering at about 1/1000s @ f/2, and I underexposed it 2/3 of a stop. Again, I love the context of the architecture, but also like to keep the background as subtle as possible.

Contextual long shot. Lit with a 430exII shot through a 90cm x 90cm Lastolite EzyBox, camera left. Slight perspective correction in Photoshop. The biggest hassle here was the wind blowing the EzyBox around and my client's hair to smithereens. Wait for lull, commence shooting. Shot with an EF 16-35mm f/2.8 @ f/5.6