Rolling into the July 4th weekend I dropped by the newsstand yesterday afternoon and found a new feature I shot for Fast Company appearing in their July/August issue on the Olive Garden franchise owned by Darden Foods. What could be more American than unlimited breadsticks and salad?!
The shoot took place near Darden HQ in Orlando, FL over a single very sweaty and full day with three Olive Garden heavyweights who were all fun to work with if also really busy, so time was the name of the game. Assistant extraordinaire Scott Cook gave me a hand on the shoot which had us sprinting from location to location to do 3+ lit setups with each honcho in 60-90 minutes plus a headshot on black as well (one of which, of Darden CEO Clarence Otis, became the ToC cover). A strange highlight of the shoot was blowing one of my Hensel Porty heads during the first set-up (took 4+ full years of shooting to have to replace the 1st bulb!), which was loud but I always have spares so it only slowed us down for about 20 seconds.
Business gigs that are packed this tight don’t have much room for creativity or error, and really you just struggle to add in any little bit of quirk or context that you can. Photo editor Jessica Adler and I had a few really fun concept ideas for the package, but there was just no time to pull them off in each sitting, because unless all 3 portraits were connected nothing would come together and that’s game over. Ultimately without a lot of pre-planning with corporate PR/HQ you nearly always are looking at the CEO show, but we tried hard to try to raise it above the corporate titan Glamour Shot low-angle power imagery of the 80’s and 90’s. Below is a favorite outtake that gets into the humorous concept we didn’t have time to fully pull off. At least Olive Garden president David “Dave” Pickens (below, having a sweet little breadstick picnic) won’t soon forget our shoot… he spent most of it in total disbelief, but was a good sport.
