Last summer I got a call from Lawdragon to shoot portraits of two lawyers here in Alabama for their journal. Lawdragon is a national portal listing of lawyers, evaluations and lawyer profiles and for this assignment they wanted to spotlight lawyers outside of their offices and not in suits. The direction was to place them in environments that matched up with something regarding their own hobbies or interests outside of the office. Jere Beasley and Ralph Cook were my two assignments. I have been wanting to release these for months but as it usually turns out the time between the shoot and when pictures are published sometimes stretches out further than one may expect.
Mr. Beasley lives in Montgomery and was Lt Governor during one of George Wallace’s terms as governor. In fact, Jere was acting governor for 30 days after George Wallace was shot. Mr. Beasley’s office was a short walk from the Montgomery Biscuits’ ball park. At this point I forgot the exact involvement Mr. Beasley has with the park itself and the land on which it sits now but I do remember that he loves to watch them play! That’s where we decided to go for our portraits.
Jere Beasley
Mr. Cook lives in Birmingham and is a lawyer with a firm downtown. I found out that he was the former Supreme Court Chief Justice of Alabama which is a big deal for such a humble and personable man. I called him to discuss the shoot and discover his hobbies and fishing came to the top. He gladly volunteered to bring his hat, vest, waders and fly rod to our shoot. We chose the lake at Oak Mountain to shoot and I waded (minus waders) into the water with him and my assistant positioned my strobe toward Mr. Cook (i.e. held the strobe to keep it from falling into the water).
Ralph Cook
Mary Jo McCabe - Psychic (http://www.maryjomccabe.com/)
Bhrett McCabe (Psychologist)
When I got a call to shoot corporate shots for the McCabe’s I had no idea it a psychic was involved. We’ve all seen psychics on the internet or on TV and have our own predisposed opinions of them of course but the McCabe’s didn’t fit those stereotypes from my meeting with them yesterday. MaryJo doesn’t name-drop but her client list includes Fortune 500 CEO’s and some Hollywood actors/actresses. I can say she has heard every stupid psychic joke – so much for originality.
They both needed new photos for their websites and also for press packs to be sent out soon. We made an afternoon and evening of the shoot and (sorry MaryJo!) kept them from their Outback dinner….Bhrett wanted to portray his sports psychology as well as have new images for the radio show (http://www.thepsychicandthedoc.com).
Bhrett brought his daughters along for the shoot and with Grandma in tow we all had a great time. I even got some fun shots of the girls and some with grandma also.
I felt the results were great and the customer was happy which is what matters.
(Some lighting notes: Inside I did use my 300W strobe with softbox but I pointed it at the ceiling to have a softer look while I dragged the shutter to let more ambient lighting from the background stream in. I wanted to show context of sitting in the living room and not over power them with light making the background dark. I also shot mostly at 2.0 to really blur the background. In some shots behind MaryJo the lamps just have a nice golden glow which looks really nice)
