How do you photograph seven people in a studio wide enough for two?
Connect, a UK charity that helps people with aphasia, needed a strong theme for their new impact report. Connect supports people with aphasia to help others with aphasia. We thought the perfect way to illustrate this would be to get some of Connect’s clients to work together to spell out A–P–H–A–S–I–A on placards.
A studio shoot would have been out of the question, being too intimidating for many of the people we wanted to photograph. So we organised a location shoot at the client’s London headquarters. We shot all seven subjects in the somewhat challenging surroundings of the client’s boardroom. However, thanks to the hard work of our wonderful photographer, Gary Ombler and some hefty post-shoot retouching by Remedy, the image works seamlessly.
Using a portable back-drop and lighting rig, we spent an afternoon shooting variations of pairs of subjects holding blank blue placards. After a trawl through hundreds of shots back at the agency, we chose the seven best poses and isolated the subjects and their shadows from the background. Then with a lot of TLC, we stitched the final composite image together. The next stage was to colour correct the different layers and enhance the shadows to create the illusion that it was all shot together as one. Finally, we superimposed the letters onto the placards, and Bob was indeed our uncle!
Although challenging, the shoot and final re-touched image worked a treat. What’s more, the models were chuffed to help their charity and the client was absolutely thrilled with the end result.
Read more about our work for Connect