Something medium to large corporate organizations struggle with in regards to executive portraits is inconsistency. If you try to exactly match certain background with different photographers in different locations over different time periods, even if the photographers do a good job there’s going to be variation in that media collection that will be obvious to everyone. One of the things I like to do is give each person a variety of settings to shoot in so that we’re baking variety into the photographic cake, and those subtle variations in lighting, etc will be much less of a factor. This shoot had 5 or 6 spots I’d picked out for each person with wildly different lighting requirements – ranging from 1/125 to 1/2000 shutter speed to keep a consistent 1.8 to 2.2 aperture setting for a shallow depth-of-field look for all the waist-up shots. All these were shot on a Nikon Z7 with the native 85mm 1.8 S lens with one Profoto B1 flash off-camera shooting through a 30” Profoto Octa. I love keeping my lighting setup simple and mobile, which cuts down on how much time I need with each executive while also delivering a diverse library of images for each person to choose from.
