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Jim Grant, the publisher of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, is one of Wall Streets greatest critics, and Adrian Delucca had me head downtown to shoot him for a recent Barron’s feature. Jim’s office was pretty small, but an institutional yellow wall behind a doorway…
…and his wall of books…
…gave me what I needed for a couple of nice portraits…
Damn Ugly Photography 
would be fun to hear your lighting techniques for the images…
Well…since you asked…
The shot on the yellow wall is pretty straightforward…a 20″ Profoto Beauty dish with a grid is camera left, up kinda high and skimming past him, and there is a gobo making that shadow on the left side of the frame. The only other light is a ringlight about a stop and a half under for fill. The portrait against the books is another story. At camera left is a 6′ Elinchrom Octalite with the upper half open (diffuser taken off) for an overall directional ambient light. In front of that is a 28″ Mola Setti with a grid that acts as my main light for Jim. The two shafts of light on the far left are from a couple of 10˚-gridded Elinchrom 500w/s monolites. The final light is again a ringlight. BT
Did you use a Fresnel spot with barndoors ? Or is it just a honey grid ? Great Lighting and colors.
The lighting setup was very similar to THIS…using the MOLA Setti dish with a 20˚ grid in front of the Octalite…BT
One of my favorite (Terry Lundgren)… The beautydish seems to be nearly IN the octa, crazy setup !
I used this set up for a cover I just did and it’s a beautiful light,….hard yet soft. Sweeeet.
I’m returning to this post again. You say ‘straightforward’, but I’m just terribly impressed and intrigued by what you achieve with those lights. I was just wondering, how much and what kind of photoshop is required to achieve the bookcase-portrait look?