Part 1: A Day With Gallo Center for the Arts

I recently had the chance to work with the team over at Gallo Center for the Arts, which was such an exciting opportunity for me. In collaborating with Doug, who is their Director of Marketing & Public Relations, we came up with the idea to capture some environmental shots of the team as well as the standard headshots. With everything planned, the next step was for me to figure out how to best capture everyone in the Mary Stuart Rogers theater space. I typically work from my studio, where I’ve got things fairly dialed in for my style of shooting, so going on location presents a new set of challenges, though nothing I couldn’t meet head on.

In working to capture an environmental shot that helped to highlight the person and the theater space, the main challenge was, how to light the environment? I wanted to keep the space low lit, to give the feeling like whoever I was photographing was the star of the stage. So the first thing I did was work find a good base layer to serve as my plate shot. You can see in the following images, as I bring in lights to illuminate the subjects and then add additional lights to illuminate the lower section of the seating and finally the plate shot.

With everything dialed in, it was go time! You can see the final results below.

I just love how the environmental shots came out with the interplay of the theater, the canvas to break up the scene a little bit and the subject. What challenges have you faced while out on location? How did you work to get the shot while working in those spaces? Check back in for the second half where we go over the more formal headshots.