Puja Aggarwal wanted to really kick start her Online Remote Tutoring services with a new website and needed some portrait photography of the work she was doing to show it all off. Her students were based all over the world and she wanted to include a good collection of them in the photographs via their remote video feed on her laptop. She had already hired a photographer to do this same job but he hadn’t managed to complete the job to Puja’s liking so she asked me to take on the project in order to correct the mistakes made. This is a good reason to make sure you hire the right person the first time so you’re not having to pay twice for the same project.
The difficulty with the project was that each of her students had different quality cameras and different surroundings, I was able to control the light for my subject, Puja, but if you bounce a flash into a scene to light a person and they’re next to a computer screen then you don’t always see what is on the screen. A circular polariser is a good tool to help with minimising reflections but for this project I had to take a few screen-grabs while Puja was going through her mockup English lessons so I could superimpose any screens that were lost.
I initially used Puja’s wall as a backdrop for the formal portrait shots, lighting her with a softbox and reflector panel and then dressed her apartment to get a scene that was as clutter free as possible. When we spoke to her students I directed them into the best space in the room they were in, making sure their room was as minimal as possible, trying to make them the main subject of the frame and finally making sure they were lit, with any additional lights in the room (putting them in front of a window, turning on all lights in front of them and taking care not to get too much light behind them as their face features will then be lost in a shadow).
Finally I finished the session with just a few posed shots of her working to give the project a little more variety than just shooting what was happening on a computer screen. Take a look at her new website with some of my photography on there, I wish her all the very best in the new venture and really hope it’s a big success;- https://englishremotelearning.com/
Portrait Photographs
