Photographing the President of the Philippines
When I’m not shooting destination weddings, I do a fair bit of editorial and corporate photography. I don’t post a lot of that on this blog, but just wanted to share a quick post about photographing the President of the Philippines this week.
Heads of State are busy people. They don’t give you much time for posed photographs. The image below is a select from a hyper-quick portrait session after I photographed the President during a TV and Print interview. And by hyper-quick I mean 20 seconds.
I was a staff photographer for a big news agency for seven years, and was able to shoot a lot of Presidents, Prime Ministers, Assistant Undersecretaries of Transport and other luminaries, but it never gets old. Its a rush to be able to make a solid image in very challenging circumstances, under the watchful eyes of security personnel, in dark rooms with terrible lighting, with subjects who have a million more important things to do than sit still for a photographer. So they give you a few seconds. There’s no time to adjust settings, no time to chimp – you better be ready with your setup and get it perfect in the first shot, because that may be the only frame you make. The image below is frame #2 from four that I was able to make before Aquino was whisked away to tasks of national importance.
Gear note: I recently picked up a Lastolite Joe McNally 24″ White Ezybox Hotshow Softbox. It’s pretty great. You can build it in about two minutes, it slips snuggly over my Canon flash, and I can carry it anywhere without any hassles. So now I’ve got nice portable portrait light wherever I go. It was essential for a gig like this.
Image credit: Julian Abram Wainwright/Bloomberg