How I shot it: ZAAZ London colleague, Duminda

Duminda probably wouldn't say this about himself, but I think he's mysterious. He's totally brilliant, and pretty quiet at first...but is also really friendly, interested in all kinds of stuff, and has such a big, easy smile that he'd be impossible not to like. We went through a few ideas of how to shoot him, but finally decided on a high-stakes croupier. I ordered props - visor, chips, cards - and got soooo excited about this one.

Location

Like a lot of other shots in this series, this was done in a conference room!

Lighting

This was fun. I made a snoot for my Speedlite with a big piece of paper and then just futzed with the length and taper of the snoot until I came up with something that looked right.Too big...Too small...Then I jacked up the ISO and shutter speed to drown out all of the ambient light, then played with the aperture to just reveal what the flash hit.

Lens

This was shot with the 24-70 at 70mm.

Directing

This was fun too, because I gave Duminda a couple of photos in advance to show him what to wear, and he was all set to recreate those poses.But then, we came up with the idea to have him flip the cards in the air. This is where the flash really kicks ass, because we could freeze the cards in midair. It was so much fun!I think we did 3 or 4 series of card-flipping shots. My pick for Duminda was the very last shot of the session - just looked at the camera and said "Well, it's not gonna get any better than THAT!" The cards framed his face, his smiled looked like a Cheshire cat - everything came together!

Post-processing

The only thing I did in post for this was darken the edges of the table and the metal thing on the wall a bit, and deepen the black at the edges. Everything else was completely perfect! And finally, the caption seemed awesome because it brought together the poker theme with Duminda's PhD in some sort of ridiculous number-related field. As I said, he's brilliant.