Featured Shoot
This client has cardiac imaging facilities in hospitals around the country. They needed marketing photos of their four Colorado facilities and they wanted to make very large prints, some of them six feet wide, for their corporate office.
The real challenge of these shoots wasn’t lighting or lens choice, but the environment where we were shooting. I photographed patient recovery areas, waiting, rooms and procedure rooms with the heart imaging equipment. The former held the same challenges as usual, but the procedure rooms contained very sensitive and expensive equipment that brought each room’s value to an average of $1,500,000. As a general rule cables aren’t very attractive in photographs and we soon learned that that heart imaging equipment has a mile of cables running to and from it. Even more challenging was the myriad of wheeled equipment that surrounded it that trailed their own web work of cables.
I sent the executive who hired me some initial samples with the cables arranged as neatly as possible. He agreed that even neatly coiled the cables were distracting. He also wanted the background carts and cables to be minimized.
We had to rely on the clinic staff to make most of the modifications for us! This was a little touchy. Even though corporate had requested the modifications, final approval for each clinic was still governed by the head physician of that clinic.
Two of the four clinics were extremely accommodating, and all cables were removed, one of the clinics assigned an after- hours staff member that wasn’t qualified to make all of the changes and one physician let me travel six hours to his location only to refuse to remove any cables at all. In fact I was worried at one point whether he was going to let me get close enough to the equipment to take photos at all.
There was a lot of natural light in these rooms so the challenge wasn’t in getting enough light but rather how to accent and add warmth to a normally bright and sterile environment. I used a minimum amount of soft light sources (usually umbrellas) and went with more directional lighting tools to add very subtle highlights. Finally I used Tungsten spots to add some warm light here and there. It was all very subtle as the client wanted to see these rooms close to the way they really look.
Minus all the cords that is!
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