Portraits Of Future Leaders
Client: RMIT Universtity
Date: March 2022
Location: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Project Goal: To create portraiture for a select group of talented graduates
Vision: A set of portraits for each person that show their uniqeness
Talent: 8 graduating seniors
Equipment: Sony A7RIII, Profoto lighting & accessories
Shooting Time: 1 day
Image Usage: Marketing & Social Media
After dinner one evening last month, I answered a post online looking for a photographer to do some portraits in the near future. The post was a bit vague, and I initially didn’t put a lot of hope into what it might be, but based on the examples given, I knew it was something I could confidently take on, so I sent a message and in short order received the brief. To my surprise, the client was RMIT, a very prestigious Australian university in Saigon, which also happens to be just down the street from my office. After a few days preparing a quotation and then some back and forth with the teams there, lucky me, I won the job! With the shoot just about 10 days out, and still a number of questions to be answered, we shared numerous texts and calls and meetings aiming to get everything in place by the date we had to shoot. It was a bit stressful, but of course we pulled it off!
The project was to create editorial portraits of 7 extraordinary students who were graduating in this term. Each student was chosen for their own unique accomplishments, and as such, we wanted each portrait to be a bit different. I still like the analogy that the creative director gave me; think of it as an music album, all the songs on it are different, but you can tell that they’re all on the same album. Now, how to create portraits that are meaningful and unique to each student’s personality? I knew that with just about 45 minutes to photograph each one, just sitting down cold in front of my camera likely would not produce great results. So a few days before the shoot, I took time to have a video call with each one, to ask them a number of questions, so that I could get a feel for who they are and how best to capture them in the short time we had.
In short, the day ran as smoothly as possible, and we were able to try a number of different looks and lighting set ups for each person, with of course some working better than others. In the end, the client was happy with what we produced, and I was as well! These are a few of what we shot in a day, some of the client’s final choices, and some that I liked that didn’t make the final cut.