See how the woman at this conference room table is looking toward the camera, but not directly at it? This is one of my favorite views to capture with "real people". This is from our shoot at the engineering firm, Greeley & Hansen.There are lots of reasons why this approach: slightly looking off camera is so compelling. First, you give the subject another person with whom to interact. This usually results in more natural, realistic expressions Why? Because it's simply more comfortable for the subjects. Looking down the barrel of a 200mm long lens is kinda intimidating. Its much easier to look at a person and simply talk.
Another benefit is that the viewer is reminded that this is a group meeting and the woman's gaze reinforces the sense of discussion with participants. It's like you just walked by the room, and glanced through the open door.
We frame shots like this with stuff in the foreground, and let that go out of focus or "soft". This helps give depth to the image. It also reinforces the "work is going on here" theme by leaving the papers, pens and hard hat on the table. Hassan and Winifred (assistant and stylist) often push things in and out of the frame and go on search missions within the locations to find what we need to place around the edges of the image.
This style of shooting does take practice. Especially if you let the subject actually talk. Expect to shoot a lot of frames. Often, I ask the subject to deliberately slow down the pace of their discussion, and add pauses, holding their gaze with the other folks in the room. Sometimes I give them a word to say, like "seven" or "five", to get their mouth in an attractive position. I can't take any credit for that "single word" technique. I totally stole that from another photographer, Mark Mitchell. I assisted him for a few years...and well, tricks like that are too good to leave behind.