Harvard Alum

Last month we photographed an alumni of Harvard's School of Government for an article in their alumni magazine. I was excited to be shooting for such a respected client and was really looking forward to the shoot. Unexpectedly it turned out to be a rather challenging shoot.

Our subject, Melanie Roe, is the Director of Hall Management for the upcoming Democratic National Convention. Our assignment was to photographer her with the "bowl" of the Pepsi Center behind her. We were also planning on getting a shot outside with the Pepsi Center and the Denver skyline behind her.

Well the difficulty began with the inside of the Pepsi Center. I had photographed in their a few times before for Kroenke Sports and for Xcel Energy, so I thought it would be a breeze. Unfortunately they only had about 30% of the lights on. This created issues because we couldn't get a properly exposed background and a good shot of Melanie without blurring her. I found that in these situations about 1/15th of a second is the farthest I can push it before I start getting motion blur in my subject. To try an make it easier to combine the final two photos, I even pushed my exposure to 1/6th of a second.

My only option was to take an exposure for the background and an exposure for Melanie. This biggest pain about doing it this way is it really limits your flow while you are shooting. I have to make sure that I take an exposure for the background for each position I put the camera in. This really breaks up my ability to move around and work with the subject because I am tied to the tripod. Obviously this also adds to our amount of post-production work too.

After shooting inside, we went out for the skyline shot. This also proved to be a challenge due to a cloudless sky and the wind. Ryan set up a scrim for me to block the sunlight, but the wind wouldn't stop blowing. It threatened to constantly blow over our scrim (we had 4 25lb sand bags on the stand) and unfortunately the only direction we could face to get the Pepsi Center and skyline in the shot was blowing her hair back into Melanie's face.

We had to just give up on that one and pray that the inside shot was good enough for the client. It was! They loved the photo and were happy with the flexibility of having Melanie in a separate exposure allowed them in their layout.

Here is the exposure of Melanie with the dark background. You can see she stands out a little too much.

This is the correct exposure for the "bowl" of the Pepsi Center.


These are a couple of the proofs (we showed about 12 total) that we provided to Harvard with Melanie dropped in roughly to show what it would look like. We don't drop her in perfectly at this point so we don't spend a bunch of time working on photos that will never be used. We still want to give the client a good idea of how the final will look though. I would normally provide more like 40-50 if the large amount of post wasn't involved.


Here is the final photo we provided with Melanie dropped in exactly where they wanted her.