This past month my good friend Aaron Matthew and I have started working on updating his portfolio. For this session I was going for a classy suit look, but with a bit of an edge. We went with a single outfit and changed it up with a variety of lighting techniques.

The initial concept was to shoot inside an elevator, so we took a trip to downtown Phoenix. After finding our elevator, we quickly learned it wanted to have nothing to do with us propping it open. Instead we timed this whole setup in the amount of time it would stay open from pressing the button. This was the only setup that used additional lighting. I attached a bare speedlight to the staircase behind the camera with a justin clamp to bring some hard light into this shaded area.

For the rest of our setups I worked with natural light, ranging from setups in the shade, sun flares and shadows cast by nearby objects. My new EF 50mm f/1.4 I purchased has been working amazing for shooting into the sun to get flares. It’ll allow me to virtually shoot straight into the sun.

After what was to be our last setup, we busted out a few crazier concepts on the way back to the car. The shoot is never over until the memory card gets plugged into my MacBook.