Client: Birmingham Ultimate Fitness
Photographer: Marek Dziekonski
Assistant: Shane Tincu
Brief: To create and execute a concept for high end, unique personal trainer headshots, conveying the impact of exercise in daily life.

Dustin Wenzel, a personal trainer and owner of Birmingham Ultimate Fitness, reached out to us looking for unique headshot photography for his business. After meeting and chatting with him to better understand his goals, we came up with a creative concept that focused on juxtaposing fitness with regular outfits. The idea was to photograph two headshots of each trainer: one in workout clothes and one in work attires, and to then blend them together for a single headshot image.

The biggest challenge of this photoshoot was technical – for images to blend well together we needed to make sure that we kept a tight leash on the lighting set up as well as subject’s distance to the camera.

To light the scene we used a 4 light setup: 2 Profoto D2 1000s in Profoto’s 1x6in stripboxes, and 2 Paul C Buff Einsteins: one in a PCB Beauty Dish above the subject and one background. For background we used the Westcott Wrinkle Resistant backdrop. We tethered our Nikon D810 with TetherTools’ tether cable to a Dell XPS laptop for previews on a larger screen. Tethering to a bigger screen allowed us to catch any potential post production issues and ensured that client was happy with the images we were getting in the process.