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?
Almost every real estate photo and drone shoot in New Mexico has its challenges. And then sometimes a property has pretty much every challenge possible! That is the case with this home in Placitas, New Mexico being listed by Mark & Susan Ryerson. The first challenge as you can see from the above photo is that the front of the house is largely blocked by trees and it is up on a hill, so getting a direct front view shot was not really possible, not even with the drone. The interior had unique architecture, but somewhat small rooms with large furniture in them. Even using a 15mm lens I had to really search for angles I liked for the living room in particular. Then flying the drone itself, I never had a signal issue between the remote control and the drone until this flight, likely due to the massive power lines right behind the house, which also prevented flying from that direction. Then there was wind from being so close to the mountains and the aforementioned trees all around the house! Overall, this was one of the most challenging real estate shoots and drone flights I have ever done in the Albuquerque area. Thank you to Mark & Susan for their great help as they always provide on this shoot and flight!
What is it like to make over 70 headshots over two days of shooting? Well, actually, it was surprisingly easy due to how well organized the team at Bohannan Huston was. Thanks to Brian and Marylin for getting everyone to the studio setup very efficiently and to Jessica for assisting. This was still the single biggest headshot shoot I did, taking three hours on a Monday morning and then three more hours on a Wednesday afternoon. Thanks to my well established lighting setup, even a conference room can be a very effective photo studio. I was able to accommodate people of all heights, glasses or no glasses, and keep the results of each headshot consistent so when looked at on the company website, as you see here on my own site, there is uniformity to each engineer. After each day’s headshot shoot, we did however getting a little more creative with these psychedelic candid portraits!
This near Rio Rancho but actually still Albuquerque, New Mexico residential real estate property was actually the second property shoot of the day I did for Mark & Susan Ryerson. They are my favorite real estate agent clients to shoot for because they make shoots fun! I usually work with them on luxury real estate properties, like this one that sold in less than one week because they are great agents, and maybe also the professional photos and 4K drone video I made of the property, so there is no drone video of this property, but there are aerial drone photos. This property is quite unique I think because it has a sunroom! How many homes are you going to find in New Mexico with a sunroom like this?
One of the biggest compliments I can get as a headshot photographer in Albuquerque is when an actor from L.A. chooses me as his headshot photographer, and after our session, says my work is a good as those photographers in L.A.! Thank you Jake for a great headshot session, your Google review, and for making my job very easy behind the camera by being so good yourself in front of it. Hire Jake!
