An event shoot and a reprise of ‘the mattress’ headshot
It was over a year ago that I designed and photographed a headshot series at Tempur Sealy’s London HQ. Originally intended to unify the online profiles of a number of their executive leadership team, a collective bout of Covid and other illnesses meant that it was only the EVP of the International side of the business who was photographed.
Sticking to my belief that the background of a headshot should reflect the business or character of the sitter, his portrait was shot against an uplit mattress cover stretched across my backdrop frame to insert a distinct trademarked motif right into the image. You can read about it in an earlier blog post.
Last month, as Tempur Sealy gathered their international leaders together for a networking and training event in London, I was invited to reprise the portrait design, extend the headshot concept to a broader, more international team, and carry out some event photography too.
Much like trade shows and annual Sale's kickoff’s, Executive Team events are a great opportunity to unify the look and feel of a leadership team’s online profiles. They are rare moments when key people from around the world come together in one place and are immersed in their corporate world.
For this Tempur event I set up a small studio in one of the hotel’s conference rooms. Having saved notes and sketches from the previous shoot, replicating the set-up did not take long at all…
..although I am yet to develop the optimal method for supporting the strip light that I use to create the high contrast shadows that exagerate the texture of the backdrop.
This method isn’t as precarious as it may look, and allows for decent airflow around the flash. It does, however, mean that the wash of light starts higher up the backdrop than I’d like. This can be an issue when photographing shorter people as the light strikes the backdrop a little hot at that lower position, so it requires a little work in Photoshop to even out the look across each sitter.
The result though, was a consistent set of headshots serious enough for business but with a subtle addition of the company’s product playfully introduced across the whole image.
The training event was held in one large room, so I used mid and long-range lenses to document it. On all event commissions, I typically use two cameras to allow for equipment to fail and for me to still be able to finish the job. In this instance, as one spent most of the time in the ‘studio’ set-up, I switched between lenses for each series of images and shot with just one camera body in the event space. Capturing the welcome and badge collection, the opening speeches, workshops and the ever-popular coffee breaks.
I particularly enjoyed watching the quick-fire rock-paper-scissors ice-breaker, which was far less tedious than many ice-breakers I’d previously been involved in at corporate events. I also liked the use of a Polaroid camera to take everyone’s photo, which they then affixed to their profiles in the coffee break suite. This was a brilliantly analogue way of allowing people to get to know one another and avoid the inevitable embarrassment of forgetting the name of the person you had spoken to earlier in the day.
At all events I always have at least one ear on what’s being said, they are such a great way to learn about subjects I might otherwise not come across. At this event I was interested in the use of Liz Wiseman’s ‘Multipliers’ book to lead discussions and workshops on leadership theory. In the training that I have designed and delivered, I quite often turn to the likes of Sinek and Cialdini as key sources, so it was interesting to be introduced to a new leadership theorist who I can now get my teeth into.