In 2010 was the new guy at the National Cancer Institute and was asked to do creative portraits for each of the creative communications teams within our section. Since my colleagues didn’t know me from Joe Schmo, it might be a challenge to convince them to humor me for a creative image that says something about their work. Thankfully, I was working with a bunch of creative people who were helpful and eager to do something different.
The first challenge of going from idea to photo is translating what they do or deal with regularly into a single image that conveys that. The Library Online (LION) team was a bit more challenging because they dealt with a digital library as opposed to physical books. And any physical publications they did have, they had to digitize. I’ll have to admit, I was kinda stumped with how to make librarians interesting and execute the idea in a short amount of time as to not interrupt their work too much.
It wasn’t until I saw a brown jacket and fedora that one of the team members, Charles, had hanging on a rack. It hit me: Indiana Jones!
Excited, I immediately got online and starting looking at screen shots and movie posters from the Indiana Jones series, particularly this scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The photo was going to be a play on words, and an homage to one of my favorite movies. I told Charles and Judy about my idea and they ate it up. The only caveat was that Charles would need to not shave for a few days so that we could get that scruff Jones has in the movies. Something I hear his wife wasn’t too big a fan of then.
Here is the shot:
The lead time I had waiting for Charles’ scruff to grow was really helpful since I only had a few minutes to shoot my idea in a cubicle-sized set. Ok, it was an actual cubicle. Once I found my inspiration, I looked at my gear and figured out how I would light the shot and what additional props might help to convey the identity of the LION team. A stuffed lion became the obvious and simple choice for a shoot with such a small time frame.
I used a wide angle lens to get as much of the scene into the frame and make the space look bigger. To light the area, I used three speedlights: one in a shoot-through umbrella, another on a boom with a grid, and the last one a desk. I like speedlights as lot because they’re small and quick. I set my camera to kill off the ambient light from the office fluorescent fixtures. I was at ISO 100, 1/125sec shutter, and around f/8 or f/11. In such a small space, no more than 10x10ft I had to worry about light spilling where I didn’t want it and the beige fixtures and white walls weren’t going to help. The shoot-through umbrella was going to present problem because it’s a broad source with not much control.
The solution was to move the umbrella in really close and drop it’s power so the light falls off very quickly into darkness. It was the main light for Judy, but became a fill for Charles too. It’s just outside the frame and running around -2stops below the main light for the stuffed lion.
For the stuffed lion, I used a speedlight on a boom with a 1/4″ Honl grid directly above it. While it lit the animal up nicely like treasure, most of Charles’ expression was shaded by the brim of his fedora. So, we laid out some printer paper on the scanner for an in-scene reflector. It also provided a fill for the stuffed lion’s face. Everyone’s faces are registering and we got plenty of shape and details where I want them. The series is looking great.
However, because of their dark attire and my camera settings, they were blending into the background. So, I dropped-in a Canon 430EX behind them and zoomed it to 70mm, rimming my subjects just enough to separate them from the background. The zoomed flash head prevented the beam from spilling all over the place. Only wanted each of my lights to touch certain portions, creating a more cave-like rather than office-like feel.
Here is the lighting diagram:
This was one of the most enjoyable shoots of the series I did for the communications teams for the National Cancer Institute.