A few years ago, I re-vamped the portraits for the entire staff of McGill University’s MacDonald campus, and I’ve since gotten occasional requests from smaller departments to do the same. Last fall, I met up with various profs and staff members from McGill’s School of Environment to renew their headshots.
Each prof was scheduled at a specific time and they met me at pre-scouted locations on campus. We had picked a bunch of greenish locations, since this is for the School of Environment after all, but the tricky thing is to find a location that not only is green, but also has good lighting (at the time of day you’ll be meeting at), and is relatively private so that the subjects photographed aren’t too self-conscious or distracted with the crowds of students walking by.
At my studio, we'd have enough time to warm up and get comfortable But for these quick portraits, I need to create a relaxed and natural-looking portrait in about 5 minutes, and with someone who has never met me before. And who was perhaps forced to do this. So it's these aren't typically the easiest gigs, but this one in the end was really fun. Especially since a few of them were previous profs of mine back when I was studying biology at McGill.
It’s great to hear your former prof tell you “THAT’S A DAMN GOOD PHOTO OF ME.”
Thanks for reading!