The Onshore Pictorial

I was at the memorial shrine along Wacker drive one Friday morning. I had my tripod with me and my 2 cameras – one with the wide angle and the other with the zoom lens. I wasn’t sure I’d even touch the zoom lens since it wasn’t the right one for this photo shoot but I brought it along just ib case.

A few days ago, John, the Chicago site lead contacted me and asked me to hold a photo shoot for all onshore people. Since the picture will be used in a postcard memo which will be sent to all Manila personnel, he wanted this to look good and so he contacted me. With that I think he meant he wanted this to look good but they probably can’t afford a professional photographer and so they used the cheapest alternative. :P

I was at the location early to scope and frame the place. John arrived and we discussed the shots they needed and what I had in mind while waiting for our “models” to arrive. The weather was great in terms of lighting as it was a bright and sunny day (Thanks to my honey who prayed for a beautiful day :D). In terms of temperature, well, it was freezing and so everyone was bundled up and given that the location was directly beside the Chicago River, the winds didn’t help at all. No wonder out of the 150+ people invited, only 15 showed up (mainly because they lived nearby and they didn’t have much work to do).

Like what I do with studio shoots, I took some pretty basic classroom type photos first just to warm everyone up. After the first two poses, my hand was starting to freeze since I couldn’t operate the camera with my thick gloves on. We took the usual classroom shot, a happy shot, a serious shot, a jumping shot and a wacky shot while moving the group here and there to get different angles and different backgrounds.

This one’s my favorite:

I love holding pictorials like these. Hey, they get their pictures, I gain experience and believe me, I learn a lot more through hour long shoots like these than by reading books all day.