Shooting corporate headshots on location can be one of the biggest challenges for a portrait photographer. Often times, I’ll be a location with tight spaces, such as boardrooms with large tables that make it challenging to position people and lighting . For example, I once had only an employee lunch room to work in that was no more than about 70 sq.ft. in size.
Using the Elinchrom Quadra as my studio lighting unit is one way I’ve been able to overcome this challenge. It’s small, relatively light weight, and more importantly, doesn’t require an AC power source for plugging in. This saves me from having to locate my power pack near a wall outlet, which is a big life saver when you are working at unfamiliar locations.
Also important are my Wescott umbrella-style softboxes, which fold up quiet easily for travel. They also have a smaller footprint and allow for easy setup in tight spaces, such as the boardroom in the photo above.
For this corporate portrait, I set up in the board room and moved some furniture around to get the exact look I wanted. There was a large window camera right, but it didn’t provide enough light on this particular cloudy Vancouver day. So as my main light, I set up my Westcott Apollo Orb on camera right and a Apollo Strip Box camera left and back to create some hair and background light.
The lighting ratios were adjusted to exactly what I wanted, which I accomplished by moving the rim light further back and by letting some light spill onto the frosted glass wall behind my client.
Posing and getting just the right look was one of the more challenging aspects of this shoot. I wanted something professional looking, conservative, but also welcoming and fresh. We spent about a half hour shooting and created a handful of photos that worked with what I envisioned. Further editing work was done with Adobe Lightroom 4 and Adobe Photoshop.
