Location Portrait for Hazelview Investments

A lot of our corporate photography takes place on-location in downtown Toronto office towers. When the pandemic hit, all such shoots were cancelled immediately. Everyone thought things would be back to normal in a month or two, when companies would be bringing employees back into offices. In fact it’s been a step by step process for us. Here we are - it’s January - and the common wisdom now is that it might be sometime in the Fall, once a critical mass of people are vaccinated.

When Toronto went into “Stage Two” of reopening on June 24, we re-organized our studio to comply with strict Covid protocols making it possible to invite people into our studio to be photographed, We’ve had sessions for several financial services companies and law firms as well as a wonderful shoot capturing students for the re-branding of Rotman Commerce at the University of Toronto. Our Friday Photos days have also been well attended since we were able to restart them on July 3.

Location Portrait of Hazelview founder and CEO, Ugo Bizzarri

Location shoots involving people were a different story. We were not receiving any requests as, we expect, companies didn’t know it was possible to have us come in to photograph their people. Then in mid August, I was contacted by the marketing manager of Timbercreek Communities, the property management arm of Timbercreek Equities. They were building a new website as part of a massive re-branding as Hazelview Investments and Hazelview Properties. The firm leading the re-brand, Flywheel Strategic, recommended they contact Plexman for new portraits of the executive team, to be shot on location at their beautiful low rise office on Yonge Street.

Flywheel Strategic provided reference images for the proposed look and feel - they wanted a colour treatment, interesting points of view, shallow depth of field, and no eyes to camera. I got excited and set about creating a “style” in our capture program to give us the desired colour palette. When I met the client in mid September for a location scout, I was pleased to hear that this colour style had been approved.

HOW WE MANAGED DISTANCING: As only 25% of Timbercreeks staff was being rotated into their office every week, the safety aspect of an indoors location shoot was feasible as long as we were all fastidious with our PPE. We asked each subject to stay masked during our setup and testing for each portrait, then remove the mask for the final images. Things got interesting for the few “interactive” meeting shots on the list. We had to find an angle that made it look like people were closer together than they really were. One of my long lenses helped to create the illusion of a tighter space between people. Once again, we did all testing with masks on and then asked people to take their masks off while we quickly took shots. It was a challenge but it worked!

Studio Interactive Portrait dropped onto location background

Three people couldn’t make the sessions on location, so we arranged to photograph them in the studio on a white background, setting up chairs and tables so that we could properly pose to convincingly drop them into location photos captured as in-situ backgrounds. The series was so successful that Hazelview asked us to photograph their entire staff of 50 over a couple of days in a large boardroom, to be colour treated, close cropped and dropped onto additional in-situ backgrounds, retaining the look and feel of the original series.

Hazelview is very happy with how good their executive team looks on their new website - and the look and feel aligns beautifully with their new identity. They look like a cohesive company that has a very clear vision of its future path.

Shot in boardroom on white background