A couple of weeks ago I did a location photography shoot for PSIS, a New Zealand banking co-operative. Or, as they like to say: “PSIS is not a registered bank, but a very co-operative co-operative.”

PSIS needed a photo of three Christchurch branch managers for an upcoming print ad campaign. The image needed to fit with the style of photographs used in previous ads – showing the managers looking happy, approachable and down-to-earth, and shot outdoors using a window of a PSIS branch as a backdrop.

I scouted two local PSIS branch locations and chose one with the best setup – specifically a larger physical working space right outside the window (so I wouldn’t need to shoot it wide-angle and could therefore get a more flattering picture and better DOF separation).

I turned up 30 minutes before the start time to set up and get everything dialled in. The main trick was finding just the right angle to minimise any unwanted reflections in the window (like the giant yellow and blue logo of the Blockbuster video store directly across the road). A combination of fine-tuning the camera angle coupled with a polarising filter cut out any unacceptable reflections.

Lighting was by way of a single umbrella-plus-speedlight to my left triggered with a Pocket Wizard. The angle of the umbrella was feathered so that the nearest person didn’t get overexposed compared to the person on the far right of the photo.

It happened to be quite a cold day and the three branch managers did a stellar job to keep smiling while we took the photographs outside – they were all so nice to work with and I can’t thank them enough for their time and efforts in making the shoot go so well.

We did the group shot specifically for the upcoming ad, then took a little extra time to do single shots of each manager so PSIS could have extra pictures up its sleeve for future  print or web campaigns.

Here’s the tearsheet of the final print ad.

The new civic headquarters is an extensive refurbishment of an existing building, with a rather grand and architecturally interesting main entrance on the north side.

I figured out what time of day I wanted to be there for the best light (I knew I wanted direct sunlight for this shot) and trucked on down with Brence Coghill along as assistant.

The main front entrance is impressive, but the building is set far back from the street and is flanked by a tall hotel on one side an an older wooden heritage building on the other. The trick would be to capture the grandeur and detail of the CCC offices without it getting lost amongst the surrounding buildings.

The ‘obvious’ photo. But it’s not nearly as good as the ‘less obvious’ photo from a less obvious vantage point.

We spent a while moving around the street trying different vantage points and focals lengths. There just wasn’t one obvious ‘best’ solution – close and wide worked to a point (see pic above) but it made the carved pole in the foreground too prominent in relation to the building for my liking.

Backing up and shooting longer presented another set of problems where the framing just wouldn’t work to include what I wanted such as the New Zealand flag atop the building or a good sense of the large courtyard area with its rows of trees, rock wall and long narrow water feature leading up to the building.

After zooming in and zooming out and moving this way and that, I mused out loud to Brence:

“Really what I want is to be higher up so I can get a less foreshortened view of the water feature and courtyard, and to not be so close that the carved pole becomes overwhelmingly prominent.”

Luckily for me Brence came up with a superb suggestion.

“Why don’t we shoot through that window?” he said, pointing behind us to a small window in the side of the Christchurch Art Gallery directly across the road. The side of the Art Gallery is a large looming expanse of concrete, but it does happen to have one small window on the top floor, which just so happened to face directly out on the CCC offices. Bingo!

We gathered our gear and lugged it into the gallery. The window is part of the top floor display area and we easily set up a tripod right next to it. It was a bit persnickety to get the framing just right: keeping lines nice and straight, including what I wanted (like a foreground tree in the lower left corner), and excluding what I didn’t (like bits of window frame, as the window had many sections rather than being one giant expanse of glass).

Given that we were dealing with direct sunlight the dynamic range of the scene was fairly broad, so I anticipated making three frames – one ‘correct’ exposure, one ‘dark frame’ to hold detail in the bright white high rise to the left and the concrete paving stones, and one ‘light frame’ to pull more detail out of the building’s entranceway under the large awning, which was in shadow.

I also decided I wanted to include some people in the image for scale and a greater sense of life, but I wanted to show them with a little motion blur. In order to achive the slight blur I had to max out my settings to get a slow enough shutter speed while maintining correct exposure. I shot a series of frames at ISO50, f22 and 1/13th to achieve this. Initially I figured I’d shoot various frames as people walked past and then mask the people together later in order to get enough foot traffic in the image that was also nicely distributed, but as luck would have it I managed to get a frame that had a great spread of people happen naturally and it saved me some work later.

I then rejigged settings to get an overall good, dark and light frame – keeping an eye on that flag to capture it at full flap.

The frames were then masked together in Photoshop to even out the dynamic range. A pit of post-pro polish was added: slight colour pop and sharpening, and an annoyingly unavoidable power line that cut horizontally across the entire image was carefully cloned out as it was hugely distracting.

And voila – we’ve got a nice vantage point of the Christchurch City Council offices that shows off the building and gives a great sense of the interesting courtyard area, keeping focus on the subject rather than being swalloed up by the buildings surrounding it.

And doesn’t that flag look snazzy?

Christchurch City Council offices by Sharon Blance, Christchurch photographer

Accor Hotels is the world’s largest hotel and tourism group. In New Zealand they own a number of major hotel chains including Sofitel, Novotel, Mercure and Ibis.

I was told it’s generally quite difficult to organise headshots for the various managers because their schedules were so busy. Therefore the one-hour conference lunch break presented an opportunity to photograph them while they were all in one place rather than scattered around the country.

I turned up the next day at the Novotel Hotel in Cathedral Square (which, incidentally, is a very nice hotel!) to set up. I was able to use a dedicated boardroom with lots of space and nice plain textured white wallpaper as a built-in background. The subjects would sit far enough forwards of the wall to render the wallpaper texture moot, as it would not be within the range of focus.

I was hugely impressed with the Accor staff and how willing they were to have their photos taken, and the fun they had while doing it. I had a constant line of people waiting, often joking with each other and trying to crack up whoever happened to be in front of the camera.

I photographed 30 people, covering everybody needed a headshot as well as doing a few impromptu group shots. I always take multiple shots for each person and choose the best one in post to make sure everybody gets a good picture.

A lot of other headshot photographers will simply deliver the images straight out of camera or just with a bit of sharpening added, but my standard post-production process includes a lot more subtle tweaking and polishing to get a really professional image, including: adjusting skin tones, localized adjustment of exposure and exposure ratios across the image, hotspot  and ‘shine’ taming, plus tweaks to sharpness, saturation and local contrast enhancement in addition to my standard portraiture techniques of blemish removal, shadow reduction and skin smoothing.

Note that I didn’t light the background as I prefer to allow ‘white’ backgrounds to record as light grey (unless specifically requested otherwise). Pure white backgrounds look extremely clinical and can have a ‘stock’ (i.e. fake) feel. They also become problematic when used on websites with a white background as the whites blend together and the image becomes a floating dismembered head unless the image is given a border.

Here’s a selection of some of images created:

I went there this week to photograph the new cafe. It’s situated in a fantastic heritage building in the centre of town, and I’m sure it’s going to be hugely popular with locals (there was a steady stream of patrons on the Monday morning I was there photographing). In addition to the usual exterior and interior shots I do for Coffee Culture, co-owner Murray asked if I could get some ‘behind the counter’ action shots, as well as some general promo shots of him and some of the staff.

It was great fun and I got some fab images that Coffee Culture will be able to use for all kinds of promtional activities. Here’s a sample of some of my favourites.

This week I shot the interior of the Merivale Coffee Culture, which has just undergone a refurbishment. The place looks fantastic – very light and airy with really nice pistachio green accents.

Here are some of the shots of the interior:

One of my favourite clients is Canterbury-based cafe chain Coffee Culture. I’ve done a number of photography assignments for them over the years, including location photography for a number of their premises, as well as a commission for a large panoranic image of iconic Lyttelton Harbour that hangs in their Lyttelton cafe on London Street.

Earlier this week I went down to Coffee Culture’s newest location in Beckenham, at Colombo & Tennyson Streets. I had a chat to the owner a few days prior and he noted that the place took on a fabulous atmosphere in the evening due to the unique lighting design, and he wanted to capture this ‘cosy’ feeling in the photographs.

He was right – the light fixtures were amazing! It’s a fantastic interior design, and if you’re in the area I suggest you stop in for a coffee and a delicious Denheath custard square.

Here are a few of the final images of the Coffee Culture interior photoshoot: