A recent client wanted some corporate portraits of their founder and CEO in their offices at The Rocks. They also wanted to subtly blend an iconic background to show the portrait was taken in Sydney. I can fully understand this otherwise if the portrait was just taken in the boardroom, it could have been taken anywhere in the world. In this particular case it was important because the business, a cloud based platform company for hotels, was founded in Sydney and now has offices around the world.
The nearest location to the headquarters was Circular Quay. In order to make this portrait work the iconic background which happened to the the Opera House, would simply have to not appear too obvious as it would distract from the portrait. My solution was to use a Canon 70-200 f 2.8 telephoto lens with a larger aperture to make the background totally out of focus and to appear more abstract. The telephoto lens also helps provide a shallow depth of filed and isolates the subject more from the background.
A considerable amount of post production was also involved especially because the subject had to be photographed in a shaded area as the highlights were too strong on the skin tones directly under the sky, and then with the bright Opera House in the background.
