I enjoy the challenge of shooting portraits of young medical researchers that need to serve a dual purpose. When Howard Hughes Medical Institute announces their new Gilliam Fellowship recipients they only run one very small headshot version on their website. But they often have other uses when they can run a full photo that includes more environment.

Angelica Riestra, HHMI Gilliam Fellow at UCLA

Here are two recent examples of this year’s recipients that were shot at UCLA. The portrait of Angelica Riestra shows how the same photo with a clean background can work successfully for a small headshot and yet has enough interesting information to be used in a larger feature format like the example of Ryan Dosumu-Johnson below.

Ryan Dosumu-Johnson, HHMI Gilliam Fellow at UCLA

I’ve since applied the style to corporate and academic leaders as well. I prefer the result better than the standard portrait in front of a studio background. What do you think – is it a smarter approach?

Mark Harmel
harmelphoto.com

The first comes from Planet 5D a wonderful blog site that is a great place to track the development of shooting video with the Canon 5D MKII. There is a quick run down of how I volunteered to help Erik Proulx and his Please Feed the Animals team work on the “Lenonade” film and ended up contributing video instead of stills to the production.

David Cohen lost his job and changed his identity (still from 5D MKII video)

I’ll add more details about the project and how my new Twitter habit led me to the production.

The second Twitter connection led to a mentions in edwardboche’sposterous blog. Edward is the chief creative officer and chief social media officer at Mullen and a Twitter connection. We traded some posts in advance of his recent Crowdsourcing program for the Ad Club in Boston, and he was kind enough to express the refreshing feeling that was created by my bathtub photo from a recent Flat Creak Ranch series. (I was the poster boy photographer in Jeff Howe’s original Wire Magazine Crowdsourcing feature.)

Edward also writes about his connection to the “Lenonade” movie.

Mark Harmel

harmelphoto.com