PhD Portraits on UNM Campus Albuquerque New Mexico
Our very own Jessica graduated from UNM with her PhD in Medieval Studies! How do you note such an occasion? With a campus crossing portrait shoot using the giant U for university, the library where many books were checked out over the years, and the lobos on campus with which to run into the future with! Add in some close-ups and an epic jumping shot, and you have an amazing portrait session to remember an even more amazing accomplishment! Congrats Jess Jess!
You may recognize Barbara and Dr. Norm in these photos as they are some of my best, repeat photography clients here in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We have done some cool headshot style photos and then a Christmas Day family portrait shoot too. This time we met at the ABQ BioPark Botanical Gardens to make commercial portraits for their newly branded nutrition business, Purple Mulch. We started out in the giant garden section making good use of the landscape of props. We then shot on train tracks, a hacienda, a vineyard, and more! It is always great to photograph people you already know so that relationship is there and comes through in the photos. There is a sense of ease and with Barb and Dr. Norm also a lot of fun!
On a frigid November morning I was out in the actual desert with Maria and Glenn of 4Directions Branding for a drone video shoot. This commercial portrait shoot in the Botanical Gardens at ABQ BioPark in Albuquerque, New Mexico in April was thankfully, much warmer! Our goal was to make the indoor desert garden surrounded by cement and glass, look like a wide open desert. With a little creative composing and editing, we were able to get clean, green backgrounds for these commercial portraits.
Simplicity for diversity in commercial photography
With the right lighting and creative use of depth of field, one can turn an engineering building campus into a diverse photo shoot location for commercial portraits, like I did for these photos in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I left it up to each person if they preferred indoors or outdoors for their candid photos (after I made headshots of everyone earlier). Whether I shot indoors or outdoors, my lighting setup was the same. A very simple and flexible lighting setup of my new 42” Cheetahstand SoupBowl softbox powered by my Godox AD600 strobe light. Just using a different background and positioning the light differently allowed me to get a different looking commercial portrait for each person. Which one is your favorite style?
Christina was a former DSLR photo student of mine here in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She contacted me about having portraits made out on location because she was actually now leaving ABQ. I had long been wanting to use Albuquerque Civic Plaza as a location so I was glad she agreed to my suggestion to shoot there. Even though it was a middle of the afternoon shoot, I used my new 42” Cheetahstand SoupBowl softbox to be able to shoot in the harsh lighting conditions in numerous spots around Civic Plaza. The water fountains, unfortunately, were not on, but everywhere else was free of passersby and there was no lack of spots to shoot at.
One of the largest commercial photo shoots I have ever done was this past week at Bohannan Huston, a consulting firm specializing in engineering, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was over four hours of shooting on each of two days. Yet thanks to the great staff and their preparation, it went incredibly smoothly. So well that despite near tropical storm level winds on the second day of the shoot negating the ability to make candid commercial portraits outdoors like on the first day of the shoot, that finding a cool indoor setting was as easy as walking over to the neighboring building and using the psychedelic art tapestry background created by one of their own employees.
Having the right lighting setup is always important for headshots, and especially so for what I call head to toe headshots, or full body headshots. I previously shared commercial portraits I made of the attorneys and staff of Giddens Law in Albuquerque, New Mexico. These are the head to toe headshots made right in a small conference room in their office! The conference table had to be moved to feet the 9’ wide seamless white paper background, but other than that a full studio setup right in a lawyer’s office!
