It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve finished the Crunch portraits!
The prints were made and mounted on 12mm MDF by the awesome Spectrum Photographic in Hove and after a couple of nights of drilling they’re hanging in Crunch’s offices! They look great!
Here’s a little background to each piece…
The boss, Darren Fell. Darren’s a successful entrepreneur and Crunch is his baby. He’ll talk about it at most opportunities. With this in mind, I decided that I’d like to show him silenced, but at the same time looking boss-like. Out came some Crunch stickers to seal his mouth and bingo, the shot was born. I was surprised that he was up for this, but it paid off.
There’s a single key-light (a gridded snoot), camera right with the background blown out by two other lights.
The account managers. These are the front line of Crunch’s customer service. If a customer has an issue or a question, they come to this crew first. Tireless and strong-willed, they frequently face adversity but always show a strong face. The original idea only had four of them, but by the time I came round to shooting this, the team had doubled in size! I had envisioned a Kraftwerk album cover, Man Machine, almost with a Soviet look. Additionally, I wanted to show them looking strong, hence the gaze upwards. There needed to be some consistency, so I had each team member wear their headset.
Simple lighting for this one; shoot-through brolly – which is where the subjects are looking. Lights on the background to blow it out.
The accountants. Coming up with an idea for the accountants took a little longer. I discounted having them use calculators, or chew pens, or paw through ledgers – they all seemed too cliched. The accountants at Crunch are all young and very clever chaps, so I thought I’d parody those public impressions and have them reading a Dummies Guide to Bookkeeping. A little tongue-in-cheek, I know, and in retrospect a tad obvious, but they were up for it. The shirts and ties were purely for the camera; Crunch is not your normal accountancy practice and no one is forced to wear the normal business attire.
There’s a largeish softbox acting as the keylight, camera left, behind my shoulder. Then another light camera right to make sure their dark trousers retain some detail, and the ubiquitous lights blowing out the background.
The advisors. I really enjoyed shooting this one. A little background for you: the horn used to be honked each time one of these advisors made a sale. So I wanted to elevate its status to a thing that is to be coveted, worshipped even. The original version of this was ruined by my inability to iron a white cotton sheet (too many creases). So I returned a couple of weeks later armed with a nice red crushed velvet sheet.
There are three lights here. A flash directly over the horn; and one either side of the camera to illuminate the subjects.
Ops. This is the operations team of Crunch. They’re responsible for keeping the business running on a day-by-day basis. I struggled for a while to conceptualise their picture. Initially I was going to have them buried neck deep in paper shreddings, but this would’ve required saving up weeks’ worth of shreds. Then I hit upon the idea of them being surrounded by paperwork. Lots of paperwork. I set about making dummy versions of invoice, demands, tax letters etc and had them fan out from the team members. Conversely I wanted to have them posed in a resigned or even fed-up manner (at number88 we’re not big fans of happy, smiling people!)
There’s a large softbox camera left, behind the camera and two flashes behind the team members to light up the wall a little. I would’ve preferred to have shot this against an infinity wall, but as I was shooting all of these portraits at Crunch’s HQ, that wasn’t an option.
The four marketeers. The marketing and all-things-online team of Crunch. Clearly quite creative individuals and I pondered long and hard over this. Right up until the night before I shot this, I was going to have them sat on beanbags, surrounded by cups of coffee and all using flashy Apple kit. But during a dinner with my wife Lauren, she suggested that that idea was a tad too busy. “Keep it simple”. So I retained the beanbags and had them all do various forms of pondering over devices I felt were indicative of marketeers.
The keylight is a softbox almost directly behind camera, plus a couple of flashes blowing out the backgound.
The techies. This was fun. It was the first team picture I took (Darren’s was the first shot, but was a solo jobby). This is almost exactly as I had sketched it, many weeks before (I always sketch out my ideas). The leader, Nick, was supposed to staring into a monitor with a look of either massive confusion or just plain impatience. And he did it! I wanted the team members all aghast at what he was looking at. And they did it too! The outtakes from this are pretty damn funny! This was a bugger to edit in post, however. The black backdrop I used was nowhere near as wide as I anticipated so I had to cut out a lot of the unhidden background (windows, radiators, desks) using Photoshop – this is not my forte!
Dead simple lighting for this one. The monitor illumination is a flash pointing at the monitor and bouncing off a piece of white paper stuck to the monitor’s glass. This is in fact more of a keylight, but the fall-off meant that the team members at the back of the picture were dimly lit. So, I threw in a couple of other flashes on low power to add some fill. Bingo.