So one of the things we’ve heard that folks are interested in is more behind-the-scenes and diagrams etc of how we shoot and create the images we do for our clients. This shot shows one of the rooms that we had to use for some business portraits. A lot of the time space constraints are some of the biggest challenges we have so you have to be able to think on the fly and look at spaces with a sense of what you can pull off. Also, with business and executive portraits you often don’t have as much time and that was the case here too since we had to do one formal headshot as well as a more casual portrait (which we shot in this room that was next door to the conference room we took the headshots in).
This is the view of the room from the back closer to where the models would be sitting or standing. You can see that we just have one light – a softbox – bounced up towards the ceiling. Since this room had nice ambient light, we decided to soften the already soft light from the soft box by bouncing off the white ceiling which was also pretty low so the light scattered all around the room. We had it dialed down pretty low (that’s a Profoto ComPact Monolight with a Profoto softbox) since we wanted to shoot wide open as well. The resulting image looked like this: