Here’s one image from the second round of corporate portraits I recently completed for local university staff. I didn’t have the luxury of a photo studio this time, just a bare wall freshly painted in magnolia for a backdrop, but I managed to replicate the look of the original series by controlling the lighting.
This series of shots were all lit with the same 2 flash setup - one bare flash nuking the wall behind the subject, making sure it ended up white in the photo, and one flash through a brolly 45degs high left to light the faces softly but with enough direction to sculpt the features nicely, as evidenced by this shot of Jon. (I could post the other 39 portaits from the session to show how repeatable these results are, but I’m guessing that would get a bit boring, not least for me having to upload them all).
I controlled the depth of the shadows by getting each person to hold a glossy piece of white card on their lap to reflect the main light back upwards and lighten the under-chin shadow (it also gave the nervous folk something to concentrate on other than the shiny big lens pointing right at them). A full length reflector was placed just out of the frame on the right hand side to lighten up the unlit portion of the subject’s face. Finally, 30 seconds work in Photoshop gave the image the final sheen I was looking for.
