I recently created head shots for a local office of a Fortune 100 company for use in their literature, organization charts and such.  My job was to shoot a group people in management throughout the group.  The shots were not glamorous, just straight forward business head shots.   I needed to shoot a torso up image that was acceptable to each person and provide 6 images of each person.  In other words  I  was to provide three images sizes of two crops of the same shot for each person.  The image would have  to look good in color or black and white.  The challenge for this shoot was more about getting into their conference room running the group of people through and keeping everyone happy than anything else.

The effort took most of the day but the pace was slow enough  to allow time to run the pictures through Adobe Lightroom between people.  We did about 5 people per hour.  Most people were happy in two – four shots and made a selection.

The setup:  An Alien Bee 800 beauty dish with a diffuser sock at F8 as the main light.  It worked  essentially making it a small round softbox just above and to the left of the subject.  I really like the catch lights of the dish and the quality of light is very nice for these type shots.  Just behind and over the head of the subject was a horizontal gridded strip box on a boom acting as a hair light at 5.6.  The back light was a SB800 with a couple layers of blue gel on a white back drop reading 5.6 in the center.  I pointed it at the middle of the back drop on full spread to get a nice gradient on the back ground.  The last “light” was reflector on the table.  A white foamcore board provided just a little fill under the chin and eye sockets and gave everyone a nice clean place to lean.  It was a bit of a problem for some of the bigger guys to keep their arms inside the limits of the board.   Here is a setup shot of the images:

The shoot was a lot of fun.  They turned out to be an interesting group of people – one guy was getting ready to go tornado chasing!

Here are a few larger images to get a better feel for the head shots click for a larger version.