Veronica Roth is the 25 year old author of the Divergent trilogy of books, the film of the first of which is about to be released in the UK staring Kate Winslet. Late last year, she was in London to promote the film, and I had 10 minutes to photograph her between interview sessions at the Soho Hotel in London. These kind of situations are pretty high pressure – she will have spent all day in a hotel suite giving similar interviews to a dozen or so journalists as well as being filmed and photographed.
So while Lucy Holden was interviewing her for The Times article, I set up a couple of lights in another part of the suite and got ready to make the most of my short amount of time with her.
I decided to use one of the striking red walls as my main background, lighting it with a low powered speedlite. The main lighting was a soft box and hair light high up to the left of the frame. Once set up, I could try various poses and crops within the camera, knowing if the session was cut short I would have enough images to give to the page designers. Luckily though, by the time I’d finished here, we still had a couple of minutes before she was to be whisked away. So I sat her in one of the chairs in the entrance hall of the suite, to give me a separate background and composition.
You can see a few more portraits from the session below. And here’s the article in The Times.
Here’s some more of my portraits for The Times.