Portrait Photography – Ian Ritchie

Last week I was commissioned to photograph portraits of Ian Ritchie – former CEO of the RFU, All England Lawn Tennis Club and Chairman of Premiership Rugby to launch the new rugby format “World 12s”.

Ian was a lovely bloke and very easy to work with but as you can imagine from his CV, his time’s in high demand and therefore I was given fifteen minutes of his time between meetings.

The launch of “World 12s” was hot off the press and the whole point of me being there was to create a suite of imagery that could be wired out to national press, online and print as well as be utilised on their new website. As a photographer the main thing to consider in this instance is how the pictures will be used, press and graphic designers of the website will want space to crop in to make them work to their formats so having him left/right of frame as well as a variety of environments to suit their taste. They will want options and lots of them.

I arrived with plenty of time to spare – as is the key with all shoots, arrive early, don’t be rushed – sipping a cup of tea and taking my time I decided on four set ups, this was potentially a bit of a push for a fifteen minute slot but the weather was good and lighting would be straight forward so I took the risk.

As mentioned the weather was good that day, even so I opted for a two light set up. Working with the natural light I put a large soft box fill to the right of Ian’s face on all frames and used an open head back right to extenuate the nice sunlight we had. For this I use Elinchrom 500ELB heads, super easy to move around, lots of power in them and the refresh rate of the flash cells is nice and quick.