On the job: West chester university portraits

one of this fall’s projects gave me the chance to work with West Chester University Foundation on a set of portraits for their 2021-22 Annual Impact Report. These types of reports are fairly common but offer a great opportunity for colleges and universities to present a fresh look to prospective students and alumni. For the report, they wanted strong, lifestyle portraits to spotlight a few of their donors who were doing tremendous things at or through the university.

Portraits are always a welcomed challenge because, unlike events, I get to direct what’s happening in front of my camera. At events I am reacting to what is going on around me, while with portraits, I’m guiding the action, the location, the lighting, and more. In discussing the scope of the project with West Chester’s creative team, we settled on five subjects. Articles were crafted about each of the donors and their impact and the plan was for me to capture them individually around campus in a more relaxed, informal style to both show off the campus and spotlight the subject.

Four of the five donors were able to meet up on campus easily. We were able to work around the busy fall semester on campus and the finicky weather to get a nice collection of portraits of each subject so the creative team could pick and choose which images worked best in the layouts when they got to the design stage.

The fifth subject, however, ended up being a bit far from campus and we decided it was best to take the photoshoot to him instead. It wasn’t a huge issue but changing venues can sometimes present a challenge when trying to create a set of images that work together as a set. Despite the venue change, we were able to keep the feel of the fifth portrait similar to the others.

Thanks to the team at West Chester University, and the open lines of communication from start to finish, we were able to make this report look great even with all the moving parts. 

Peep these great layouts below: