These are headshots for a corporate financial group I had the pleasure of photographing in downtown Vancouver this past month. When I was first contacted about the headshot session, we were unsure exactly where we would be taking the photos. All I knew was that that wanted to use their office environment in their background – something of a mix between an environmental portrait and a corporate headshot.

When I visited their office, the biggest location we could identify was their boardroom. Lucky for me, the boardroom faces north, which makes it a little easier to control for sunlight on bright sunny days. At the same time, it also meant that the boardroom would need to be lit with flash, so the challenge was to determine exactly where the lights could go in the limited space I had.

There just happened to be enough space for the lighting setup I wanted. Three Elinchrom D-Lites lights with Rotalux softboxes and 2 reflectors were used to achieve the final headshot portraits. in their boardroom space. I was also asked to make each shot slightly different, so I used different angles to change the look of the background to include some of the chairs and different segments of the frosted glass wall behind while still keeping the lighting setup mostly the same.

The final photos were shot to about waist level, which is something I almost always do because it gives my clients the flexibility to crop their images to different sizes depending on the publication. If I shoot too tight, it limits their options for publishing headshots in different dimensions.