Myerson Photo Blog

Timed to coincide with some offline marketing we’re doing, I’ve just launched the new look of myersonphoto.com and myersonphoto.com/blog. It’s a little cleaner, a little lighter, and a much better match for the printed materials that will be going out this week.

There are still some tweaks to make: I have a few legacy details in the blog css to revisit, and I need to rewatermark the sample images on the site so that they all use the new Myerson Photo logo, rather than the old stylized “EM” logo. I hope the new look goes over well!

I just shot the Strobist assignment (5.2: Double Duty Light). The idea was to compose a shot using just one light, off-camera of course. After some false starts, here’s what I came up with.

The key light (OK, only light) was a Canon 430 EX. It was off to camera left, placed further back of the subject, sort of between the subject and the back wall of the sweep. That sweep, by the way, is a $4.99 piece of gold paper I picked up at Aaron Brothers. I’ve had it for years, and use it all the time. I also have one in silver. They’re really handy.

I put a yellow gel on the background half of the speedlight. That allowed the light hitting the back of the sweep to have a little extra warmth, and the light hitting the subject was allowed to stay white. A mirror placed camera right bounced some of that white light back onto the subject. That’s what’s illuminating the standing quarter.

A piece of foam core to camera right helped fill in some of the background shadows.

Here’s a diagram showing the setup:

If you want to go the easy route to lighting a scene with a single strobe, you can create a light tent or reflector box and fire away. You’ll get a flat even lighting all around the subject. Sometimes that may be exactly what you’re looking for. For this assignment, however, I didn’t want to do that. I wanted instead to create a scene that had the look of multiple lights. One way to do that was to create harsh reflections. I figured that would look more like a second light source, and less like a reflector. Mirrors do a great job of reflecting the light without any diffusion or light loss (if they didn’t do that, they wouldn’t be very useful additions to our bathrooms), so that’s what I used at camera right.

I’ve been looking through the Strobist Flickr pool, and there are some great examples of double/triple/quadruple lighting in there. Nice work, folks.

The biggest business news in Tucson of late is that Oro Valley-based biotech firm Ventana Medical Systems, Inc., has agreed to a tender offer from Swiss giant Roche. The result of this $3.4 billion buyout is that Ventana will become a part of the large Roche family of companies.

Recently, the CEO of Roche, as well as the CEO of the various business units that will house the new acquisition, were in town for a “town hall” meeting on the campus of Ventana Medical Systems. I was asked to shoot some images from this event for use in promotional materials, websites, and newsletters for the two organizations.

I shot the event with a Canon 5D, and a light set up that consisted of an umbrellad strobe (Alien Bees AB800)  and a Canon 480EX speedlight. The speedlight was synched via Pocket Wizards, and the strobe fired via optical slave. I had the speedlight mounted on a camera tripod, which made repositioning a snap. I had it aimed at the podium to serve as a rim light or backlight (depending on my vantage point), or I could pivot the tripod head to bounce the speedlight off the nearby wall to provide a larger, softer fill.

My goal in the light set up was to provide maximum flexibility with a minimum of effort. At first, I doubted my decision to go with a speedlight and a strobe, thinking that two speedlights, synched via PW and mounted on tripods, would be more flexible. That may be true, but in the end I think the set up I chose worked better - I had great coverage from the fixed strobe, and its recycle time and “always on” capabilities were huge factors. The strobe was high up on a lightstand basically in the center of the audience, and I wouldn’t have been able to adjust it or reset it if needed. A two-speedlight set up would have been more flexible, but at the cost of more time spent managing the lights. When shooting without an assistant, anything that can relieve me of a job is a welcome addition.

Corporate headshots have become a personal favorite area of photography. It may sound contradictory, but there’s a certain freedom in the limitations imposed by the realities of the shoot. Maybe not a freedom, per se, but certainly a degree of creativity that comes from the scenario.

The limitations in a corporate head shot session are many. The main one is that your time is dictated by the availability of people who are very busy and not very inclined to make time for a photo shoot. CEOs are no different from the rest of the world - given the choice between a conference call and smiling for the camera, the conference call will win every time.

Beyond the time factor, however, there are other limitations. The shoot will almost always be on-site at their offices, and their offices will often not be what they want to have published. Again going with the “CEOs are no different” theory, the desks of busy people tend to look, well, busy. That’s not always the makings of great photos.

So I was very fortunate when I did a recent photo shoot with the executive committee of Ventana Medical Systems in Oro Valley, AZ. The company needed headshots of the CEO, CFO, and COO - both individually and as a group and in two different sets. We did the studio background first. The background shown in the image at left is a white vinyl window shade (click the image for a larger view). We used several different color gels until we found a backdrop that made everyone happy.

After the individual shots, we shot the three CxO’s as a group. For this, we decided the easiest and best option would be isolated against a white background. That had its own set of challenges, mainly the height differences among the three men. One of the things I love about commercial photography is that many times it’s more about problem solving and engineering solutions than about aesthetics. I suppose that appeals to my inner geek.