Corporate Photography Update
By William Lulow
I have written many articles about how I do my corporate images on location. It begins with a clear understanding of what is required by the client. Usually, in a day’s shooting, we can do a number of headshots for websites as well as some collateral images that can be used for promotions, etc. They consist of shots around the office to showcase people working together and a bit of what the space looks like. All of which is important when the business is building brand images and telling a story about itself. I may be a bit different from many photographers because I use my studio lighting expertise as well as much of my studio lighting equipment for many of these location shoots. Some photographers rely on their portable lighting kits, but I like to try to achieve some of the same results you see in many of my studio portraits. Why? Because, the images usually look better. So, I pack my studio lights, light stands, backgrounds and my large, soft photo umbrella along with various power cords, head extensions and even my posing stool whenever I do a location shoot. It all fits fairly nicely on a single hand truck as well as in the back of my car. This doesn’t mean that you can’t achieve acceptable results with portable lighting, as a matter of fact, I usually use my portables for other location shots besides the main executive portraits. So, I actually pack both sets of lights when I do a job like this.
I then bring everything up to the space I am going to use. Different companies have different facilities. I usually like to find a conference room that is large enough to set up my lights and that’s also out of the way so that I don’t disturb other people’s workflow. This was the space I had on my last shoot:
In this case I had to set up in a common space. This is what the studio setup looked like:
Here is a shot with a subject: (Photo courtesy of Ron Idra, Media For Professionals )
For head shots, I travel with a small roll of no seam paper plus the stands to hang it, one case of light stands, one case containing two M1000 Watt/second Dynalite packs with about four or five heads. In addition to all my studio equipment, this shoot required many shots around the office of people conferring as well as some full-length shots. So, I also packed my portable lights in addition. They are easier to set up for locations within an office where it’s difficult to run electrical cables.
Here are a few of the shots:
This shoot involved shooting eight people’s studio portraits, eight full-length shots and a number of images around the office. We managed to finish the shoot within the allotted eight hours with time to spare.
