Shot caller – The story behind our People to Watch portraits

When coming up with ideas for this year’s People to Watch cover story, it was important to our editorial team that we take a new direction from last year. Using gorgeous wide shots, staff photographer Collin Richie’s portraits from 2013 had revealed our subjects as creatures of their environments, like charismatic stars in a dramatic diorama.

This year we chose to zoom in for an intense personality study, letting everything fall away—the props, the tools of the trade, the comfort zones—in favor of one thing: the face.

Richie used a ring flash and an extremely shallow depth of field focused only on the eyes to find the souls of these Baton Rougeans, one striking image at a time.

Naturally, our staff played around with the concept, too, but we completely goofed off while doing so, as you can see at right. View more of Richie’s work at collinrichiephoto.com.