XDL is one of the coolest clients I've had the pleasure to work with. The XDL firm is comprised of attorneys with various specialties in my favorite area of law: intellectual property ;-).When they first called me for a shoot, we focused on full length high-key portraits of each attorney, for the "who we are" page on their website. That was a lot of fun, and I got to know each of the attorneys personally during those sessions.
But the images I like the most are the black and white environmental, available light images you see here.
The attorneys live all over the US, from Seattle to Minneapolis to Richmond, which doesn't poses any apparent obstacles to the ability to litigate effectively on behalf of their clients. When they do get together in one room, it's amazing.
All that brainpower in one location...all focused on protecting intellectual property rights...it's enough to make any creator swoon. Talk of copyright protection, patent and trademark litigation...ooooh, ahhh.
So my client, Amy Smith Pike, Marketing Director for the XDL group, says, "lets get some action shots of these guys all together hashing things out". So I got my trusty monopod, locked in the long lens, and stabilized the camera for some high ISO/low light/no flash/low shutter speed images of the group in one of their bull sessions.
Normally, when I'm asked to shoot meetings, I like to place off-camera strobes in the room to bring up the light level. This enables us to get low ISO, and thus low noise color images.
But something about this meeting was different...perhaps it was the intimacy of the room and the time pressure these folks were under to keep the agenda rolling (half of them had to catch flights home in the afternoon.) I felt it would be too much of a distraction to have strobes popping, plus, the room had so much stuff in it (flip charts, coffee pots, laptops, luggage sodas and snacks) I don't know where I would have found the room for light stands.
When converted to gray-scale, the low light/high noise images looked like good old fashioned grainy T-Max film. Didn't hurt that my client, Amy, used to work in media herself...she's an old news-hound and "gets it" on the photo-journalistic concept for her firm.
In the end, I was surprised at how much I liked the images, and I love how the design firm, Prototype Advertising, used them on the XDL website. Nice to know I have clients in high places, should I ever need to go to court to defend a copyright infringement.
All images Copyright 2007, Elaine Odell, Church Hill Photography, LLC.
