In January, I posted quite a few entries here about my shoot at Macworld 2007. At the time, however, I didn’t go into specifics about who the client was or what the project was all about. Well, I can now take the wraps off the project. The client was Apple, Inc. and the project was to team up with my friend and podcaster Daniel Steinberg to execute a set of developer profiles for the Apple Developer Connection. Specifically, we created nine profiles of developers who were exhibiting in the ADC Developer Pavilion.
The black and white photographs above appear on the landing page for the project. The black and white conversions were done using Aperture’s Monochrome Mixer tool. Each photograph in the cheeseboard is linked to an individual profile page which contains a portrait and an audio interview. Each of the profile pages looks like this:
To create these pages, I took the images as processed in Aperture and exported them out to TIFF. I then pulled them into Photoshop where I did all of the compositing work to lay on text and gradients. Here’s another example:
I’m really proud of this work and I’m really happy that I can now show you the final result of the shoot that I blogged about here. Most of all, I’m happy that we were able to get some interesting profiles of nine developers for the Mac platform.
Looking good!
Ian: It's interesting to me that you like the candids more. It's great feedback actually.
As far as lighting, the candid shots were a mix of lighting. Some of them were available light coming off the nasty lights above the show floor. Some were with a single speedlight on a lightweight stand and either a PocketWizard or IR transmitter. I'm pretty sure the candids of Chris, Lorenzo, Eddy, and Dr. George were available light and the rest were with the off-camera flash. And, of course, all of the posed shots were with the speedlight on remote stand.
The most challenging part of the assignement was managing the lighting--especially when on the show floor with lots of people. I learned a lot in a short amount of time there.
Having been at the show and knowing how crazy some spots are on the floor I am amazed you managed to shoot as long as you did! Great work!
I kinda like the candid B&W shots more than the posed ones, thats just me. What did you use to light these?
Great work; and you introduced me to the Monochrome Mixer. Didn't even know it was there! Haha, embarrassing. Glad I know have the blog in my RSS reader so I won't miss anymore great information.