I’ve had a couple of people ask me about this business portrait so I thought I’d answer your questions here on the Gazette’s photo blog.  Business portraits can, frankly speaking, often be a bit dry. So, a solution is to punch them up a bit with added light and maybe a camera trick or two. I’ll admit this one borders on “gimmicky” but I can live with that. Since this is a “posed” portrait I think it’s OK to go beyond photographing a scene exactly as it appears. This company’s network data room was full of computer equipment and I found one console that had some gaps between the shelves. I decided to photograph board chairman Wayne Adams through that gap and use the equipment shelves to frame him. To give the photo some pop I used two “off-camera” flashes. One flash was hidden pointing at his face from behind the console and a second flash with a blue plastic gel over it lit the back of his head. To help isolate him I also hung a black backdrop on the wall behind him. There were florescent lights overhead that couldn’t be turned off so I also suspended a cloth over Wayne’s head to block those lights (so the only light on him would be my flashes). The room’s ambient lights were lighting the front of the panel but required a slow one-fourth second exposure. When time came to take the photo I still wasn’t thrilled with the way it looked. Since I was using a slow shutter speed I decided to spin the camera slowly during the exposure to add the spinning blur to the photo. There are two reasons Wayne’s face is sharp and not blurred. The first is that the only lights hitting him are my strobes, which only fire for a 1/1000th of a second during the exposure. The second is that his face is in the center of the frame of the spinning camera where there’s much less movement. This all may sound like a lot of work but, hey, Wayne was willing to kneel in a cramped space for the good of the portrait so I had to do my part. Mark Reis