Originally, I had planned the shoot in two locations(in a seating area on the 5th floor and another shoot in a conference room on the 7th) but just had to let the location on the 7th floor go...the windows in the room were full of cross reflections of each other and the art painting in the room (large semi naked lady) was not really appropriate as a backdrop to shooting CEO's of a global insurance firm. :)
Decided to use some interesting wall texture as a backdrop, I think that the tone and texture of the wall will work well with any suit that the CEO's (will be 5 men)will be wearing.
Here is the set up of the wall area:
I'll only be using one strobe/flash for this location with a shoot through and a reflector taped to the door,note the funky feet on the floor to place the model without much fuss or communication.
Putting feet on the shapes and turning to the photographer naturally puts the model in the classic 3/4 turn that I want from torso and head.
The tripod you see in the image wont be used on the day,I took it to do some test shots of myself before bothering my friend to step before the lens,I'll be shooting hand held.
(the following images were done on my old Nikon D80 with a 50mm Nikkor lens)
Here is a shot of my friend......straight from the camera...no retouch or post except a crop to post here
and the same shot with some post work done
I was quite pleased with the simplicity of the set up above...a no brainer in fact.
The seating area has a more involved light set up
In this area I'm using a Westcott Apollo softbox as the key light with an sb800 strobe/flash unit....on the extreme right of the image you can see an sb900 strobe/flash unit sitting on top of an armchair with a diffuser on it.Directly behind the seat where the model is sitting is an sb600 strobe/flash unit pointed up at the curved wall.All the flash units were zoomed in/out to slightly different widths depending on where I needed the light to reach.
This is the area set up
after more test shots of myself I asked my friend to come in and the following is the light that I am happy with (though the white specular light on the end of the nose bothers me.....for the sake of liking the light here I'll accept the additional post work on that) for the shoot with the guys on the day
