New portraits! Cloe Shasha, Director of Speaker Development at TED, photographed at TED’s headquarters in New York City for Middlebury Magazine.
Here’s the story as it ran:
Third photo used in the table of contents:
Outtake:
Cloe’s role at TED is to find good speakers, pitch them within TED, and to coach them one-on-one as they prepare their talks. She has helped produce talks with speakers as diverse as World Bank president Jim Young Kim, author Roxanne Gay, the ACLU’s Anthony Romero, sex therapist Esther Perel, Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia, and Monica Lewinsky.
At the TED headquarters there is daily running count of the number of TED videos viewed projected onto a glass wall. At 8am the number was already well into the millions. Cloe told me that there is never not someone viewing a TED talk video.
Lighting wise I kept things simple to facilitate changing locations. Three Profoto AcuteB 600r battery-powered packs. The key light for the desk area shot above and the opening shot was a Profoto Medium-Deep White Umbrella with a diffuser. The stage area setup was keyed with a Chimera Small Softbox with a fabric grid to control the light’s spill.
The opening image was shot in a small raised conference area. I liked the wallpaper and the Irving Penn corner wedge vibe. We removed the conference table and had just enough space to make the image work. My key light took inspiration from the window light but we did draw the window shades to have full control over the light. It also kept Cloe’s shadow on camera left from going overly blue.
I used my Canon 5DSR for the interior setup shots. 50MP gives the client a lot of room to crop or reformat in post. Outside shots were done on 1DX Mark II to take advantage of that camera’s speed and buffer as Cloe walked through the streets of Tribeca.
