Tiny Room Portraits Of Mohamed El-Erian For InvestmentNews

So I got an email from Scott Valenzano, the Art Director at InvestmentNews…

“Don’t care if you are booked, can you shoot this cover for me…..”

The gig was Mohamed El-Erian…rabid New York Jets fan and the BIG brain behind PIMCO…the global investment management firm with about $2 Trillion bucks sewn up in the mattress. As is the case with most billionaires, we weren’t gonna have a lot of time…and we had to shoot him in the InvestmentNews offices, so no big open spaces, no high ceilings, no groovy locations. And Scott wanted a couple of setups…but we’ve done this lotsa times. Let’s roll…

Scott ushered us into a conference room…it was maybe 12′ x 15′ with a lovely 8′ ceiling and a huge table in the middle. It would be perfect…insert sarcasm…more than enough for a couple of setups! Scott mentioned that he wanted a really bright look for one of the shots and mentioned how he liked the orange drops I used in my portraits of Bill O’Reilly and Ricky Gervais…

Here’s how we squeezed ourselves into the room…

Normally I would use a 3′ Octa for a main light, but in that room we were seriously limited with what we could do. We managed to have just enough ceiling height to fly a 20″ Profoto Beauty Dish for a main light, filled with a Profoto Ringlight…

After some color and contrast adjustments, here is the how the final lighting looked…

Onto the second setup. We turned 45 degrees to the left and used a simliar lighting as the first, but since Mohamed would be sitting I had enough space for a 3′ Profoto RFI main light. In place of the ringlight, we used a 6′ Chimera bank placed directly behind me and the camera for fill. We dropped a half roll of Thunder Grey seamless behind him and covered the table with another piece and here’s how Kaz looked…

Partly because of the limited space, but mostly cuz I liked the wide angle perspective, we used a 50mm lens on the Hasselblad for both setups…

Here’s how everything turned out in the magazine…

You can read what Mohamed thinks about whether or not a recession is coming HERE

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Joe Duran In A Walnut-Paneled Room For InvestmentNews

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Joe Duran is the CEO of United Capital and we met up with him in a sumptuous, expensive looking, walnut-paneled room at the University Club in Midtown Manhattan for a cover shoot for InvestmentNews.

Here we go…..

Lotsa wood paneled walls…

But we had a specific look in mind, and that meant we were gonna drop some seamless…here’s Matt, looking pensive…

Lighting was pretty simple…a gridded 3′ Profoto RFI main light filled with a soft ring light.

When Joe arrived, he tried his best to emulate Matt’s serious look…

…but there was something about his smile that worked better…

On the opposite side of the room, we had dropped a grey seamless…

Obviously, I white-balanced my setup in Capture One rather cool…around 4350 Kelvin…to shift the grey tones from neutral to blue. I did that to better match Joe’s blue suit. The whole thing was lit by a single 47″ Rime Lite Grand Box with only a 7′ pop-up reflector on the right side for fill and I shot everything using a 50mm on the Hasselblad for a bit of wide angle distortion…

Here’s how it looks in this week’s InvestmentNews…