Shoot For Dorf & Nelson, LLP
by William Lulow
Kind of resumed a bit of work earlier this month with masks and as much social distancing as we could. This was mostly an interior/exterior shoot with four headshots added in. It was on the client’s premises, as are most of my shoots these days, but most of the office staff was still working remotely. It required me to set up my portable studio in their conference room. This is what it looked like:
The shoot involved the head shots plus several interiors all in the space of four hours. The conference room was small but adequate for the head shots. Some of the interiors were a bit more complicated and we didn’t have time to complete them all, so another half-day would be added. Here are a couple of the shots:
This shot probably doesn’t look all that complicated, but it was shot with a combination of available light and flash. Unless lit, the room all the way down the hallway would have been completely black since there was no daylight there. You can see that the wall in the back there was white, lit by the flash whereas the wall behind the desk here was a bit yellow due to the incandescent lights used to light it. Since electronic flash is the same color temperature as daylight, both the windows and the back room look normal. This shot is also a panorama created in Photoshop. If you are careful to align two or more images up in the camera and the camera is panned horizontally from the same position, on a tripod, the program can align the two images seamlessly, creating a nice shot like you see here.
We also had to shoot a dark conference room. This is that shot:
When you are trying to capture a room, or any scenic shot for that matter, with a wide-angle lens, the foreground is what is really important Backgrounds tend to reproduce very small and usually don’t make that much difference in the shot. Here we put some objects in the foreground to give the feeling of having some “product” there. The highlights on the dark chairs give the image some importance.
The headshots were all done on gray no-seam since because of the Covid-19 pandemic, we couldn’t shoot the rest of the attorneys in the firm. So, I wanted a background that was easy to duplicate at a later date. Since I was using my large, photographic umbrella, I didn’t really need a fill-in light. The little amount of shadow on the right side of the subject’s face give him a bit more definition. Here is one:
All in all, a successful shoot, but one that won’t be completed until after the pandemic is contained somewhat more, in the United States.
