A Group Photo in the Time of COVID.

For the past six years, I’ve proudly worked with the City of Little Rock, Arkansas by photographing an updated group shot of their City Directors after each election. The group photo is typically pretty straightforward. I usually photograph them before the start the public board meeting at City Hall.

When COVID hit, everything changed.

All of the meetings had been moved to a much larger space, ballroom at a popular venue located across from City Hall. Board members still held their meetings, but were spaced six or more feet apart. Some Board members opted to participate virtually and all those present wore masks.

After the November election, I was contacted by their Director of Communications for ways and ideas to photograph the Directors, but doing so safely since COVID was still widespread in central Arkansas and basically everywhere.

I threw out a couple of ideas, one of which I had shot for a different client a few months earlier: Let’s shoot everyone on white seamless paper and we can create the group photo virtually. With the other Clients permission, I emailed the finished photo as a sample. The Client loved it. After agreeing on budget, a date was set.

The photo shoot was to take place the day of a board meeting to make it convenient for everyone. I set up for photos in the large hallway, just outside of the ballroom.

On one end of the hallway was my seamless background and behind me and down the hall were large windows that faced west. I knew the light spilling into my space would affect my white balance so I set up large blackout drapes to block as much daylight as I could.

I wanted the photo to look as realistic as possible. After discussion with the Client, I planned to photography each person in full length and cut each person out. Since I had planned from the start to cut each person out and dropping them onto a white background, keeping wrinkles and creases off of my backdrop wasn’t too important. In addition to full length, I photographed everyone’s updated head shot from waist up so the city of Little Rock could have some variety with design needs in the future.

To design the main photo, I started with Little Rock Mayor, Frank Scott. He is the center of the photo. I referenced my photo from the most recent shoot back in 2019, to gauge everyone’s height in relation to the Mayor and each other. Once we got the height proportions correct, we then worked on who was standing where and whose shoulders were in front, in back and so forth. I sent my Client several mock-ups before they selected the final version. One of the Directors was not able to attend the photo shoot so I took their photo from the most recent photo shoot (2019) and digitally added them into the lineup. All that was left was adding subtle shadows under the feet and adding in lapel pins. A few Directors were not wearing theirs. Retouching was kept simple and natural.

Each director arrived and were photographed in 15 minute increments. I proofed all photos in real time using my CamRanger connected to my iPad so each Director could make adjustments to stance and smile. For my key light at camera right, I used a Profoto B10 in a 53” deep white umbrella with diffusion. I wanted to keep the light simple, clean and uniform to each person. At camera left and just out of frame was a V-Flat set to. On the background was Profoto B2s and umbrellas with a soft white interior and a black backing to avoid light spill.

Below is a quick video to show the layering process.

Spotted in the Wild!

The additional head shots I took were used by the Clinton National Airport (owned by the City of Little Rock) to update a digital sign that greets passengers as they fly in to and out of Little Rock.