Houston-based photographer Thomas Shea had an assignment to photograph Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, for the Houston Chronicle.

I was recently assigned to photograph Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, by the Houston Chronicle. I was excited and nervous at the same time, even though I only had 10 minutes to shoot, I was happy with the results. After introducing myself, I stated to Matt, “I am probably the only photographer without a blog.” He laughed and we continued on with the shoot. I asked him if he preferred to be shot anywhere in the house and he decided he preferred the room we were in. Looking around I remarked that the room had beautiful light, and he commented that it was the reason he chose this apartment in the apartment building. The first thing I do when I shoot portraits is take a photograph of the ambient light, that way I can see what the light will look like in the camera LCD monitor,and then from there, I build my scene adding light. I had a feeling this was going to be a quick shoot so instead of carrying in all my heavy white lighting kit, I just carried in two Canon 580 EX II flashes, two light stands, two shoot-through white umbrellas and a couple PocketWizard Plus II . After looking at my camera LCD from shooting the ambient light, I realized that I was going to have to use some additional light. The trick was to add just a wink of light to make Matt pop. I decided to use one flash, set the the flash to manual at 1/32 of a power and shoot though a white umbrella, this way the light would scatter and light the whole scene evenly.

Continue reading on Thomas’s blog.