So as some of you might know, as well as working as a photographer I also work in the IT industry as a computer security specialist. Yep that’s right, I like to break things! (Well these days I actually seem to spend more time helping developers make things which can’t be broken so easily but hey, breaking things sounds cooler). The company I work for is one of those big evil American ones and it turns out some of our American brethren wanted to see what we looked like. As such muggins here was drafted in to take a team photo. After a bit of persuasion, I managed to convince everybody that the standard ‘against the wall smiling’ shot wouldn’t suit us and that we should go for something a bit more fun…

Allow me to present a slightly scary version of the UK Security Engineering team…

Apologies for the slightly rough photoshop. More on that and how the photo was created after the jump…

I knew in advance that for the security team I really needed something which was quite harshly lit, almost film noir style. I decided to individually light and photograph each member of the team and then comp it together in photoshop afterwards. This made things a touch difficult since we only had the meeting room for 30mins and only another hour afterwards before the Americans needed the photo. Cue a mad frantic rush to setup and shoot 7 individual photographs and then photoshop them all together.

Here’s one of the individual shots:

I chose to light it using a single Ranger Quadra into an 18cm gridded reflector. This gave a really harsh and constrained light. Just what I was looking for. All 5 sitting people (including myself) are photographed in this way, as are the two standing at the back.

Unfortunately two of our team work out of a different office. In a bid to get them into the photo I grabbed a photo of them both together, split it apart and added them to the left and right window. I quite like the effect and it almost looks like they were projected.

Anyway, apologies for the quick write up, life is a *touch* busy at the moment. Any more questions, feel free to hit me up in the comments.

More adventures later.
Alex