Landing a photograph of the head of a company can be a tricky business. Given the nature of their jobs, these titans of the corporate world aren't comfortable relinquishing control: Plopping them in front of a lens that captures their every tic and grimace--and offering them no say in which photo we choose--makes them uneasy. This was especially true for this month's cover subject, Michael Sabia. As Sinclair Stewart writes in "That was intense" (page 54), the outgoing CEO of BCE is the quintessence of control freak, a quality that was in full evidence during the shoot: After every few frames, he would wander over to see the results, weighing in on what he liked or disliked. Even with Sabia peering over his shoulder, photographer Sylvain Dumas still managed to capture a revealing portrait of the man at the centre of the biggest deal in Canadian corporate history.
The shoot we assigned to Nick Westover for "A pretty penny" (page 70) was even more difficult and, as it turned out, downright dangerous. The brief: Get us a photograph-- any photograph--of John Lepinski. For years, Lepinski has been pushing his Coquitlam, B.C., company's copper prospects based on questionable assay results. Obviously, the head of Getty Copper wasn't going to consent to a photo. A stealth shot was the only option.
Over the next several days, Nick engaged in a game of cat and mouse. He checked out Lepinski's home and found out what car he drives. He did manage to take a picture of someone he thought was Lepinski, but who turned out to be an employee at the bar Lepinski owns (Nick was using a 10-year-old photo as reference).
Lepinski, tipped off that something was up, became even more circumspect. He would circle the parking lot outside the bar to see whether anyone was lurking in a car. So Nick rented a van with tinted windows and sat waiting for his subject. On the tenth day--after wasting a morning hiding in the bushes by the sixth hole where Lepinski was supposed to play a round of golf--he finally tracked down his man back at the bar. Nick snapped off three quick shots before Nick and his assistant, Thomas Buchan, hightailed it. Here's Nick's version of what happened next: "Thomas and I split up as Lepinski went inside to get reinforcements, which I wasn't expecting. I took off, but the barkeep grabbed me while Lepinski came racing over in his car. As we wrestled for the camera, he broke the flash off. Thomas made it back over and grabbed the camera and took off again."
By this point, figuring the pair of photographers were thieves, a couple of nearby shop staff cornered Thomas while Lepinski reclaimed the camera. He removed the flash card and handed back the camera, which would suggest that we didn't get the shot. But in the melee, Nick had replaced the camera's flash card with a dummy one. We had our photo. "It ain't art," he wrote when he e-mailed the shots. "But this is your man."