I’m not sure if you can really call them “published”, but I’m rolling with.  They were printed in a magazine that was distributed to at least 20,000 people, so that’s good enough for me.  The magazine in question is the “Team Spirit,” my company’s monthly publication that covers things going on in the business.  I’m guessing it’s a pretty typical corporate publication.  The one problem I have with it – the pictures that are usually in it are bad.  Really bad.  That’s wear I come in.

Now, I’m not saying I’m awesome or anything (though I do like to pretend), but I know I can do better than the stuff that usually runs in there.  Luckily for me my boss is an amateur photographer as well, so when the Internal Communications department asked him to arrange a shoot with the guys for last months feature story, he forwarded it straight to me.

The story was about our recently implemented “Order Online, Pick Up In Store” program.  Most retailers with both a web and brick-and-mortar presence (yay! for marketing class) have a similar feature these days, so in order to stay competitive we had to go along with it.  The guys involved spent A LOT of time working on so it was a no-brainer to run a feature article about it.  The director of Internal Communications wanted a technology-themed shot in order to tie the people and technology involved together.  Easy enough.  Take the guys, go to the computer room and shoot.

Except our computer room is nothing like the fancy data centers the really big companies like Google have.  So I didn’t have a lot to work with – but I was still determined to produce a better image than anything else that gets put in the “Team Spirit.”  I decided to keep it fairly simple, but still provide the tie-in between the guys and the technology.  Armed with a couple of small speedlights and the wonderful knowledge from Strobist I set out to make my pictures.

The picture above is a fairly simple two-light setup.  I stacked the guys fairly close to some exposed racks with lots of wires that would look techy to just about anyone (even though the real powerful machines are just in black cabinets).  For my key light I set up an SB-800 into a white umbrella, raised up fairly high and angled downward and away from the racks.  I wanted to feather the light as much as possible to control the spill.  Then for the fill I took a Vivitar 285HV and raised it up pretty high and just bounced it off of the white ceilings.  Nice fill and accents on the rack equipment.  Pretty simple two-light group shot.  Is it award-winning?  Hell no!  But it’s not bad and its 100 times better than the usual stuff we see in the “Team Spirit.”

After I had my safe shot done I wanted to try something a little more creative – the result of that is the image at the top of the post.

Everyone knows the blue lights mean high-tech, right?  Right?!?  Well, they do.  So, I needed some blue. Set my white balance to tungsten – instant blue.  But not blue enough.  This shot is also a two-light setup.  I set up my background light first.  I wanted it blue and glowy.  I used the Vivitar 285HV on full power with some CTB gels stacked on it.  It was behind the racks I had the guys standing in front of.  That gave me the nice blue I was looking for.  Of course it might everything blue, which I didn’t want.  For the guys I used the Nikon SB-800 with somewhere along the lines of a Full + 1/4 CTO gel at around 1/4 power through the white umbrella.  I positioned the light and feathered in such a way to try and make sure all 4 guys got an even amount of light from front to back.  Worked out pretty well.  Nice light and much higher quality than the usual.

I call the top shot the “power” shot LOL.  Makes everyone look strong and, well, powerful.  The guys liked it.  Mostly because it accents Hal‘s (the guy in front) crotch I think.  And who doesn’t love that?