I was recently contacted by Melbourne based construction company Ducon who were in the process of updating their website, and as such were looking to capture some images of their staff in action.

Employing over 70 staff, this highly regarded company offers three distinct service areas; Construction, Maintenance and Bespoke for complex and unique projects. My brief was to capture the staff at work with minimal disruption in order to showcase the human face of the organisation. This made good sense since ultimately people ‘buy’ people when selecting a company to work with, assuming that the company provides the relevant services that are being sought, and to the standard required.

I began by shooting the staff in the office on the first day, both as formal and ‘at work’ style portraits; I then ventured out onto various sites around Melbourne to capture the crew in action. I did use a variety of flash set-ups in capturing these images, generally setting up and working around the schedule of the staff which is why I did not use my Elinchrom Ranger Quadra’s in the field but stuck with Canon Speedlites. The Quadra’s are very portable and designed with use in the field in mind, however in this case I did not need the extra light output, but instead needed a self contained flash that I could easily climb onto the roof with…

Most of the staff that I photographed have been with Ducon for quite a number of years, due in my opinion in no small way to the Managing Director, Peter Mason.

Peter is obviously highly regarded by his staff, and upon meeting and working with him it is easy to see why. I found him to be one of those people that you immediately click with, having a good sense of humour and fairly obviously a very clever business brain. I genuinely enjoy meeting new people, which naturally is very important in my chosen field, but it is always such a pleasure to be able to strike an instant rapport with your subject.

I captured several different scenarios with Peter throughout the morning, yet found that the image I ended up personally preferring is the final casual shot taken using available light only as below.

Sometimes I will set up a group or series of portraits, and sometimes it is simply more beneficial to work at distance while using a longer lens such as the excellent 70-200mm f2.8 L. Again, I really appreciate the value of the small Canon Speedlites  for this type of work. The image directly below is lit with flash, which I was able to conceal around the office and then simply stand back and pick my subjects as they went about their day.

The following images are from the second day of photography at sites throughout the Melbourne metro area; again as I hope will be apparent this was a lot of fun to do!

A number of the images captured during this shoot are now visible on the new Ducon website which can be found here: http://www.ducon.com.au

As usual, I really enjoyed this shoot and am certainly delighted to have had the opportunity to work with Peter and his talented crew – thank you to all involved, particularly Jacqui for arranging everyone and posing for me over many shots!