Behind the Scenes and setup: Orange Magazine Women of Achievement

I recently finished up 3 weeks of shoots and several days of editing to get the finalized images for the portraits to be used in Orange Magazine’s 2015 Women of Achievement story. This is one of my absolute favorite shoots during the entire year. I was asked to come up with something different. Last year we shot the images inside picture frames. This year I wanted to go with something more dramatic. So I went through my archives and found this photo of Steve Borland I did as an experiment back in 2012:

I went with 3 different setups in the same studio space with my goal of not moving lights around. In addition to this I needed a 4th setup for several I am Orange shoots during the span of these shoots. I had all setup on different pocket wizards in the same space.

These are some of the test shots I did with photographer John DeSanto ahead of time in the studio.
#1 – is the beauty dish high above subject, which is used as the main shot

#2 – is the a gridded softbox where I had the subjects in a chair.

#3 – is a bare sb25 snooted to skip across the face of the subject.

#4 is the studio strobe setup I used for the I am Orange shoots

Here is John standing in for the test shots:

Editing all these down to 1 or 2 portraits per setup was tough. I had hundreds of images to cull down, then print out and make the final selections.

After all was said and done the final images (look for those in a few weeks) came out great. All 9 subjects were wonderful to work with. Look for an behind-the-scenes video about this shoot in a few weeks after the magazine publishes.

And of course as I usually do when I have a complex setup going I take the time to set the camera up on a tripod and shoot a few self portraits.