Just yesterday we were up in Grand Rapids capturing a client's medical office for their Real Estate photographs. People don't really realize what goes in to high quality Real Estate photography (no HDR, not a casual walk through snapping cell phone-like images, etc), but needless to say we prepped for a couple hours prior, drove almost 5 hours round-trip to capture the photos, and photographed the tiny office AND staged the 7 rooms (since they hadn't quite done the requested detailed staging of taking every single thing off of counters, floors, etc) for about 3 hours with our studio lights set up everywhere meaning that it took us 8 hours from the point of leaving our home yesterday morning. We're setting to work editing these images today as we also set up our studio with backdrop, props, and all things Infant Session to capture Sarah's baby's Infant Portraits (she just started labor this morning a week & a half early, so as usual we're prepping for photographing her baby sometime in the following days- within the baby's first week of life!).
With Aileen & Ryan's wedding also coming up in just a few days for us to photograph 10 hours of, we decided to throw it back this week to a third Corporate Shoot that we did for a local bank here in South Bend last month. It's not even mid-Wedding Season yet, but we decided this week to focus something non-wedding since this week is a Real Estate Photography for a Medical Office in Grand Rapids (Michigan), South Bend Studio Infant Session, and South Bend Wedding Photography sort of week for our clients!
Last month in May in our 3rd installment of capturing corporate portraits for First Source Bank we were told to prep 3 backdrops at The Century Center here in South Bend for the various different styles of portraiture the bank needed within the short 1 hour slot. The bank said they needed 3 of us photographers at 3 portrait stations to keep things moving quickly, so we called in the help of our favorite Michigan photographer Eric/ Victor. We went in early that day, set up 3 full studio set-ups filled with lights, backdrops, cameras, reflectors, soft boxes, etc. and were ready to go. Minutes before we were to photograph we were told that we likely only needed 2 backdrops and two photographers, so we tore down some things from one of the backdrops and had Victor assist (and paid him the same in full since contractually we had been told we needed 3 photographers and he had come down from Kalamazoo the night before to be ready to work that morning). We only chose to rent a few things since we had most of the gear necessary for all of the crazy sets. In the end we provided them with group photos and individual corporate head shots that they needed for their website and documents.
Jason photographed the groups both massive and small. Jenny photographed all of the individual portraits (amounting to around 40 employees). Jenny decided to provide them with one serious and one smiling photo of every employee so that they could choose which looked better for the tone they were going for. The bank had their employees who we photographed all sign releases so that they could use the images chosen on their website. Afterward Jason did some heavy lifting and Photoshopped to extend some of the backdrops for the biggest, most massive group photos since there was no way humanly possible to make the backdrop just THAT wide for some of the largest groups.
If you saw the other blog post on other photographs we've done for the company, you'll notice that unlike the others that were more staged, lifestyle portraits that looked like stock photos or ads of the employees doing things and reading documents, these photos were more in the traditional straight-forward "headshot" style. The individuals were photographed from mid-chest & up, while the group photos were full body. Below is an example of a very large group photo that they needed and below you can see how Jason Photoshopped it to extend out the backdrop so that all of the employees would be on full, even white.
We hope you enjoyed seeing just a bit more of the corporate studio-style portraiture that we do for large companies! We're currently prepping for Aileen & Ryan's wedding in just a few days here in South Bend which we'll be capturing for 10 hours on Saturday as well as an Infant Session in our studio within the next few days or so, so we'll be capturing and editing 3 sets of client images until next Wednesday! Check back next Weekly Wednesday blog post for at least 150 images in Aileen & Ryan's Wedding Teasers (as well as wedding story) and in the meantime we'll be working diligently on editing and capturing these amazingly huge life events-!! Next week is 4th of July (on Wednesday!) so we hope you have fun things planned for the 4th of 4th of July festivities next weekend! (Jenny's sister & brother-in-law will be visiting from Arizona for 4th of July, so once we finish up all of the awesome shoots and work, we'll be celebrating with them!)