company

Portrait of a company

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For individual portrait sittings, I insist on sessions of at least one hour, whether in the studio or elsewhere. This gives the subject time to get to know me a little, and allows us to work with two or three different lighting set-ups and changes of clothes. Photographing a team of fifty people or more in a single day presents a different challenge, because I have to find a way to put each person at ease extremely quickly. But it’s something I’m asked to do more and more often, and it’s a lot of fun.

I recently had the opportunity to photograph the whole staff team of Jean Wauters Aciers Spéciaux in the company’s enormous steel distribution centre in Molenbeek.

I’d been asked to make two separate portraits of each person – classic ‘headshots’ and full-length portraits that showed the company’s busy working environment in the background. Careful planning was needed to do this efficiently. To minimise the demands on people’s time, I decided to work with my two set-ups in parallel. I made a pre-shoot site visit and identified two locations close to one another, where I would not get in the way of the fork-lift trucks that whizz around the warehouse. I would have approximately ten minutes to make the two portraits of each person.

The first set-up gave me an unobstructed 270° view which enabled me to place my subjects at different orintations to the camera and my single light, so that I could get a variety of views behind them. For the second, I used a portable plain white backdrop, two lights and a reflector, all of which were hidden from the first set-up.

On their side, my client had done a great job in scheduling the subjects in groups of two or three, so we could make their environmental portraits and then move across to the other set-up to make their headshots. This saved additional time, so that I was able to finish the job ahead of schedule. The friendliness and good-natured cooperation of the entire team meant that everything ran smoothly and made a busy day a real pleasure for me.

Behind the scenes at a startup company

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Neuroventis is a young Belgian startup company operating in the rapidly expanding field of device-based healthcare support. Their first two product suites gather data from migraine and epilepsy sufferers and feed it securely to their doctors, making possible earlier and more tailored interventions. I was lucky enough to be asked to make portraits of the company’s team of 14 staff on the occasion of its fifth birthday. While I was there I also shot a series of informal ‘behind the scenes’ images for the website.

I absolutely love doing this kind of photographic reportage. A couple of times I did suggest something to a member of the Neuroventis team, or ask someone to hold a position for me for a couple of minutes. But mostly I just drifted around the company’s brick-lined office space snapping what was actually going on that afternoon.

They were very welcoming and cooperated eagerly in the entire process. I left them sharing a few beers at the end of the day to celebrate the company’s first five years of existence. I can’t wait to see how they use my photos on their website.

Photographs for a corporate website

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I am working with Brussels-based communication agency ESN to create images for its new website, which should be online by the end of 2018. It’s a work in progress — I probably have another day of shooting and editing still to do. But it’s already been a great learning experience and I wanted to record my impressions while they were still fresh.

The brief was to shoot three sets of images to give the website a real flavour of the agency’s human side — full portraits of key people and group shots, as well as simple headshots of the whole team of 50. We decided to shoot most of the portraits and groups at a handful of well-known locations in central Brussels.

For the group shots, we set up loose scenarios in which the subjects discussed an actual project. I found that if I could get them talking about something that really interested them we could avoid the kind of acting that always looks exaggerated and false in the photos.

I planned to crop these group images to the ‘cinematic’ 16:9 aspect ratio, since they will probably be used for page headers, so I tried to shoot for this format. But it still isn’t clear whether the agency is going to use them in colour or in black and white. In the end, I have delivered both versions of each image. Which do you think works best?

I’m doing the headshots in an empty office with simple LED lighting to balance natural light from the window. It’s a fascinating challenge to try and capture each individual’s personality in just a few minutes. As usual, a number tell me that they are not photogenic or don’t like having their picture taken, but I’ve gently insisted on making at least 20 or 30 images of everyone, and so far I think we have succeeded in avoiding the classic photobooth look. Some subjects gave me a little longer and were willing to play in front of the camera.