Executive Portraits for Ahmed Mazhari
When Microsoft Asia’s PR agency, Edelman, rang me up and asked if I would be keen on photographing the then-incoming President of Microsoft Asia, Ahmed Mazhari, I jumped at the opportunity. It’s not everyday you get to photograph a chief of a major conglomerate.
There was only one catch: I had to complete the shoot within an hour. And to make things more challenging, Ahmed was going to enter this photoshoot after a day’s long video shoot. That’s not ideal but it’s still an opportunity that is hard to pass up on.
And so I immediately got to work. An hour’s long portrait session would be pretty awkward if we had nothing to connect about. So I dug through the Internet and found a few tidbits about Ahmed.
Firstly, Ahmed is an avid chef and his favourite dish was the Agio E Olio. Secondly, Ahmed loves Cricket. Armed with these two talking points, I knew I was ready to go. After all, through these topics, more topics will come up along the way.
The next thing to settle would be the scenes, composition and lighting. Time is usually a scarce resource when it comes to Executive portraits. I respect the time given to us and I want to make the most out of it.
My assistant and I turned up about 1 hour before the shoot to scout and set up on the location. While Yann, my assistant, prepares the backdrop and lighting for the white backdrop portraits, I scour our location for possible shooting spots. Usually clients would expect around 4-6 different scenes/variations in an hour and so that’s what I did.
After finding these spots, I tested the lighting out with my assistant and marked down the exact camera and lighting settings to achieve those looks. This is to ensure that we don’t waste time fumbling with settings when Ahmed is in front of us – with just some simple finetuning, we’re good to go each time Ahmed steps into the scene.
An hour flew by easily as we were engrossed in setting up for the shoot. As promised, Ahmed steps in exactly on the dot and we proceed to do some headshots in front of the white backdrop we brought in first. Keeping the background/composition simple allows me to focus on establishing a rapport with Ahmed.
We chatted about his favourite dish and how he keeps fit through sports. Once the rapport was established, everything else flowed like hot butter on a pan. As we moved scene to scene, I occasionally showed Ahmed the photos on my laptop screen to give him an idea what I was going for. He liked the images, and we proceeded.
With about 10 mins per scene, we wrapped off an hour’s shoot with 6 unique photos of Ahmed. Care was taken to ensure there’s a wide enough variation in terms of body positioning, expressions, compositions and backgrounds to maximise the range of usage.
At the end of an hour, Ahmed thanked us and the PR agency for the hard work and we likewise thanked him for bringing the right energy onto set, despite having just done a full day of video shoots.
One thing great about photographing Executives is that they’re task-focused and motivated, and they would do whatever it takes to achieve a good result at the end of the day. It takes two hands to clap, so we were immensely thankful to Ahmed for his professionalism.
If you’re looking to create a PR kit for your Executive’s Linkedin profile, speaker bio, internal comms memo, etc, contact us and we’ll chat! At In Conversations, we aim to create a fast yet smooth portrait making process for your time-pressed Executives.
