CEO-Portrait on a go-kart

Recently I was hired to shoot portraits for an annual report. They wanted me to visit their clients and have good photos from their business. This example is from an in-door amusement park, and their CEO.

We walked around the place and took portraits here and there, and finally we got to the go-karts. The Art Director wanted photos with a lot of copy space so they could place text on top of the portrait, so I arranged this in front of a black wall.

Two Profoto B1 and a go-kart

Shooting portraits which leaves a lot of room to place text is not always the easiest task. Backgrounds need to be very “calm” so the text is readable when placed on top. In this case I got lucky with the dark environment and black walls.

Trying to light a full-length portrait with such a low ceiling would have been hard, and probably not that fun. But, as it was a go-kart course, having the CEO sitting made sense.

I brought two Profoto B1 on this assignment, and two Deep Umbrella Large White (with a diffuser). For this portrait, I only used a light modifier on my main light.

A Large Deep Umbrella was almost too big for this room, but placed and angled right, it worked out fine. My second light I placed a couple of meters behind the go-kart, just outside the frame.

With no reflector apart from the built-in one, it gave me a harsh light to play with. Removing the lens hood from my Nikkor 24-70/2.8 made it possible to have some light hitting the front lens and create something haze-like in parts of the photo.

Moving around without moving the lights gave me a lot of good photos, but this was the best combination of main light, rim and a little gradient on the background.

The funny thing is that this looks quite Photoshopped, but it isn’t. All adjustments are made in Lightroom, and just the final touches in Photoshop. Thanks to the lighting, the location with a lot of contrast and a nice tan, it was one of my easiest portraits on-location.