Executive Photography – Robert Seale's Blog

New Coronavirus COVID 19 working procedures for commercial photography

Robert Seale photographing in a “clean room” at NASA for a story on comet dust published in Smithsonian magazine.

COVID 19 has brought unprecedented challenges to many areas of the economy in the past few months. As we emerge from lockdown situations, businesses will continue to have a need for fresh commercial photography, whether it is for new marketing efforts, making portraits of new faces as leadership and staff undergo changes, documenting new facilities and infrastructure projects, or communicating with stakeholders about your company’s efforts to keep workers safe and healthy during this ongoing crisis.

After years of working with some of the world’s biggest brands in the industrial, oil and gas, and healthcare segments, working safely is part of our DNA. Careful preparation and proper wearing and use of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) is something we’ve always done. However with this new challenge, and with the guidance of the CDC, and OSHA, we are modifying our practices in some ways to still get the job done while keeping our photographic subjects, clients, and crew members safe.

Some of these new practices:

-Using minimal crew.

-No carpooling. Crew members and clients will arrive to the shoot location in their own vehicles.

-Social distancing, both between crew members and clients/subjects.

-Minimizing the number of people on set.

-Scouting/preparing lighting ahead of time to minimize subject time on the set.

-New remote digital tech solutions for client review from a distance.

-employing the use of digital composites when photographing groups.

-Wearing masks, and when appropriate, gloves/safety glasses, and other PPE as well.

-Frequent cleaning of equipment and hands with disinfecting/sanitizing wipes.

-Delineation of duties between crew members so that specific equipment is only handled by one person.

-If using a makeup artist on set, setting forth procedures for sanitizing equipment or using new supplies and application tools.

-Minimizing air travel, utilizing “road trips” over longer distances when required.

-Beginning each job with a JSA (Job Safety Analysis) meeting or Toolbox Talk to plan the shoot and discuss all safety hazards, as well as specific COVID 19 mitigation procedures.

Many of the things we do, like shooting outside in an industrial plant, will be largely unchanged, except perhaps for the wearing of masks. In other cases, particularly in more populated interior shoots, we will have to find ways to be creative. In most cases, most shoots can be completed in a touch-less way, with proper social distancing and minimal time on set for all involved.

As we adjust to this “new normal”, most corporations and ad agencies will still need great imagery and video footage to communicate with their customers and shareholders. New advertising will need to be created. Annual Reports will still need to be produced. Websites will need to be redesigned and updated. Companies will be selling new products and services. Executives and boards will change and new portraits will need to be made. When it’s time to communicate, don’t hesitate to call on us to provide your visual needs in a safe and professional manner.

Be Well. Stay safe and healthy out there.

Trade magazine covers for CDW

A recent cover of BizTech from a DNA testing lab.

Like most commercial photographers, we do a lot of work that is not necessarily viewable by the general public. Even though the work might be viewed by thousands of people, it’s not something you might see on a billboard or on the magazine rack at Barnes and Noble. This B2B corporate photography work can take many forms: a multimedia presentation within a corporation, an annual report to a corporation’s shareholders, a sales brochure, or in some cases a specifically targeted magazine with a carefully chosen audience. These are called “trade magazines” in the photography business, and they often lead to fun and interesting assignments.

CDW has been producing a group of these magazines for quite some time, and I’ve been fortunate to shoot for them quite a bit. Their technology solutions business is targeted to education, business, government, and healthcare customers, so they have a magazine for each industry titled (logically enough) EdTech, BizTech, StateTech, and HealthTech.

Over the years, I’ve been able to create cool environmental portraits of doctors, cops, and business executives. I wanted to share a couple of covers from some recent issues of the magazines.

For BizTech, we photographed a high tech DNA testing facility. The place was just as you would expect, a slightly mundane lab with lots of test tube vials being sorted by techs in lab coats, but with few good photo opportunities, as most of the techs were working at tables facing a wall. Ugh! I became fascinated by a large machine on one end of the lab…..it was a big blocky thing, but had a window looking through to either side. Inside were vials in banks on both sides, and in the center was a little robot arm, doing it’s thing – retrieving vials according to an automated program and moving them to be tested. I decided it would make a cool photo if we could get some light inside, but it proved fairly difficult. We ended up placing the subject on one side of the machine, booming a small strip bank above the machine, and then cross lighting the vials from each side in VERY tight quarters (with a slight green gel added), which also outlined the subject from behind. It was really tricky, since I was shooting through a window on the other side and trying to avoid window fog and condensation on the glass.

For the StateTech cover, we photographed local constable Alan Rosen for a story on body cameras. (It just so happened that our PR guy for the job was a former colleague, the famous Houston Chronicle political writer and generally great guy Alan Bernstein!) We picked an abandoned building with lots of character not far from my studio in downtown Houston and shot several setups with Rosen and a group of his deputies all showcasing their new body cameras. Most of the shots were horizontals and intended for an inside spread, but towards the end of the shoot, I remembered one of my old editor’s mantras: “No matter what you’re doing, no matter what the assignment is, ALWAYS GET A HEADSHOT!” That voice haunts me some days, but it’s really good advice. Your assignment might be to shoot a panoramic cityscape with an architect in the foreground, or an athlete in his home, or whatever – but remember that you’ll be the designer’s best friend if you give them a tight portrait they can run on page 3 or 4 of an article, or on a table of contents page, or in this case, if the story budget changes and your story ends up on the cover!

A recent cover of Constable Alan Rosen for StateTech.

Executive portrait photography for Barron’s

I recently had the opportunity to create some executive portraits for Barron’s magazine. Barron’s, founded in 1921 is a weekly publication published by Dow Jones, and each issue features a profile of a mutual fund manager. We’re pushed to shoot these fund manager portraits in an interesting way, often with an environmental portrait link to their hobbies or interests…something more creative than a person at their desk.

Our feature subject for the issue, Juliet Ellis, the Portfolio Manager of Invesco’s Small Cap Equity Fund, suggested a great location for her portrait, the Houston Methodist Hospital Research Institute, where she serves as a board member. I was already familiar with the space and the personnel there, having photographed healthcare annual reports in the past for the hospital. In the morning, we knew that it would make a fantastic “light and bright” portrait location….definitely a welcome departure from the average trading desk photo.

Although we had fantastic natural light for most of the shoot, we supplemented the ambient with just a low power “kiss” of light from a Profoto B4 with a Plume Wafer 100. We didn’t want to disturb any of the cool natural shadows around her in the background on these, so we stuck with the small source and even added a Lighttools grid in some of these to focus our light and keep it from spreading everywhere.

We couldn’t have asked for a more lovely and patient subject, and our friends at Barron’s of course created a fantastic layout with excellent display.

Juliet S. Ellis, CFA, who is the CIO, US Growth Equities, and Sr. Portfolio Manager at Invesco Advisers, Inc., photographed at Houston Methodist Hospital in the Texas Medical Center in Houston, Texas on Wednesday, July 15, 2015. © 2015 Robert Seale/All Rights Reserved. — I thought the inset in the wall made a great composition, framing her face nicely.