The Human Condition #4: Corporate portraits

Concept and planning

Corporate portraits often seem to be about business people in suits and can appear dull and serious but it doesn’t need to be that way. Corporate portraits are about connecting a business and its employees with its clients and to the public. Increasingly businesses are looking to move away from the traditional, more formal 'boring suits’ shots and use more informal corporate portraits to say something about their personalities and the business ethos.

There are many examples of corporate portrait photography from the conventional...

Images from KPMG website (www.kpmg.co.uk)

and from the Amec plc website (www.amec.com)

...to the more contemporary.   Searching the internet for examples I came across the work of Simon Potter (http://www.simonpotter.com/)  whose work ranges from the fairly conventional...

to the less so...

I was particularly inspired by the images used by Urban Splash on their website www.urbanslpash.co.uk

To undertake this assignment I contacted a partner at a small firm of accountants and arranged to visit their offices and take some portraits of the senior staff.  Before I went I had a look at the pictures on their website to see what image they were currently projecting:

Outcome

On the day I was shown into the boardroom which was to be the location for the shoot. There were very limited possibilities. As shown on the diagram below,

 to avoid shooting against the window or the whiteboard meant there were only really two places where I could position people – (A)which had a very bright orange wall as the background

or (B) where, by squeezing people into the corner, I could get a cream background

In addition some group shots I was asked to do, I was planning to take four photographs of each person:

- a head shot
- an ‘at the desk’ shot
- a standing conventional ‘boring accountant’ shot
- something a bit different inspired by Urban Splash

so I decided to do the first two against the orange background and the other two against the cream background.  I had two halogen studio lights with me, so I set them up one facing each area A and B and worked with continuous lighting.  I used an umbrella on each light to soften and diffuse the light.

These are contact sheets - largely unedited apart from testing some black and white conversions -

Head shots

Desk shots

As expected, the bright orange background doesn't work that well so I selected one desk shot and tried some different finishes shown below:

1. Lightroom grayscale preset

2. Lightroom black and white high contrast preset

3. Photoshop curves adjustment layer used to reduce highlights, then 'brushed' to remove the adjustment from the subject. (A rough and ready adjustment just to test out the effect).

4. Lightroom sepia preset

5. Used Lightroom to shift the orange hue into yellow and reduce the saturation.  Doesn't do a lot for the skin tone.

6. The original.

7. Lightroom black and white low contrast preset.

8. Lightroom used to reduce the exposure and contrast.  Of the colour versions this works the best.

9. Lightroom aged preset.

Version 8 is the best colour version:

My preference from the above was 7, but as some of the facial detail was lost I took this version and increased the contrast and blacks slightly:

Conventional standing shots

Something 'different' shots and group shots

 

The key thing I had wanted to get out of the shoot was the slightly different shots and I do feel that these worked quite well, bringing out the personalities of the different people.  Here are some examples -

  Tony  

Peter

Helen

Neil