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This week it has been corporate portraits. 68 of them over two days on location. Each lit, cleaned up, retouched and placed (by me) in a powerpoint presentation to be ready tomorrow for the foreign heads of this company. They are flying in to see the American company they recently purchased. We used our gurney to move our studio to the corporation, set up in a conference room and shot on Friday and Monday. The people, all of them, were great. It really is an amazing company. They work very hard, for very long hours but they are all very nice at the same time!
Here is a hint for present day and potential commercial photographers: Learn the software. As much as you can. To shoot, I have to be an expert with Photoshop, Lightroom and CaptureOnePro. I have to have a passing ability with Illustrator, InDesign, and Quark, and I have to know Word, Powerpoint and Excel so that just like this portrait job, I can be as big a help to my clients as I can. Commercial photography is a service business. Service: the best photography, every time, and anything extra to make your clients life better. It's a great life!
This job was different (I guess every one is different).
This job came because a client gave my name to one of his clients and they hired me to shoot this job. Pearl Media does huge advertising displays just like the one above for Fox's new show Fringe. They wanted a lot of people around their display, so we shot during the All Star Parade (see the red carpet?). Even with over one million fans on 6th Avenue in NYC, my 6' tall 19 year old son and I (he watched my back and carried the laptop), got good spots in front of installations on 47th street and 57th street. The sun was hot and the day was great, the people were fun but nobody understood why I was shooting the buildings while everyone else was photographing the old baseball players. It's a nice way to make a living... hanging out on 6th Avenue in New York City on a beautiful day.
I know this looks like an office window. It might (I hope) make a nice background for a corporate portrait. My client at Gerber is hiring me to shoot 2-3 days of portraits. The shot that is 2 entries back was for him too, but required a great deal of stripping and retouching to include an office window background. This image at 5x6 feet will save me a lot of effort and time when shooting many people.
It looks like a real shot, but actually exists nowhere but here. I took a picture of one slat of a small window mini blind. Next I shot an image outside the window of trees and sky. I rotated the mini blind slat 90 degrees, transposed it to fill the image vertically and copied and repeated it across the image. I added some walls above and below the window and soft shadows where the blinds cross the walls, not the window. This image will please a good client. This image will make my life a little easier. This image could never have been created if I wasn't so experienced in Photoshop®. There you have it. To succeed, a photographer needs to expertly control light and focus, and know Photoshop® very well.
This week it has been corporate portraits. 68 of them over two days on location. Each lit, cleaned up, retouched and placed (by me) in a powerpoint presentation to be ready tomorrow for the foreign heads of this company. They are flying in to see the American company they recently purchased. We used our gurney to move our studio to the corporation, set up in a conference room and shot on Friday and Monday. The people, all of them, were great. It really is an amazing company. They work very hard, for very long hours but they are all very nice at the same time!
