McCay Duff LLP

Many of my regular clients are businesses that require corporate portraits and custom stock imagery for their website and collateral materials. One of these businesses is McCay Duff LLP, who describe themselves as chartered professional accountants providing accounting, tax, and business consulting services to small to mid-sized businesses, not-for-profit organizations, charities, and individuals.

I was originally commissioned to photograph portraits of 20 of their staff members as well as various custom stock, portraying things like boardroom meetings and details in the office, all for their relaunched website and branding materials. 

Over the past few years I have been back a number of times to photograph new staff members. It's always a fun challenge finding a slightly different but cohesive looking setup for each person. It was important from the beginning that there would be visual variety in the portraits, but still be similar enough that they all work together from a branding perspective. 

Scroll below to see a sample of this work. At the end you can find behind-the-scenes images from a recent shoot and information about the equipment and techniques used. 

TECHNICAL INFORMATION:

In order to have all the work I shoot for this client look cohesive, I choose to light and compose the images in a similar manner each time. 

I usually use a single light source as the key light, a reflector, and let the ambient light illuminate the background. 

For the below setup, I used a Profoto B1X with a Profoto Deep White XL Umbrella with diffusion for the key. I've learned that this office has very warm fluorescent lights, basically tungsten in colour temperature, so I often gel my light with CTO and change my white balance accordingly to neutralize the entire scene. I used a white reflector to bounce a little bit of fill back on to the subject as well. The strobe(s) are triggered and controlled by Profoto Air Remote and Air USB. 

I shoot on a Nikon D850 (previously D800) with either a Sigma Art 35mm or 50mm 1.4 lens, always at a very shallow depth of field. I shoot tethered via TetherTools to my MacBook Pro running Capture One Pro.

Check out the gallery on my website to see more from this body of work. 

BTS photos by Marwa Madasse and Nicolai Gregory.