The Los Angeles Times hired me to make a portrait of Amit Jain, the CEO and co-founder of Luma AI, for a story about how AI is reshaping Hollywood. Luma builds generative AI video tools. Their platform Dream Machine debuted in 2024, and their newest tool, Modify Video, launched in June 2025. Jain’s pitch is “iPhone to cinema,” the idea that anyone with a phone can make something that looks like a movie. He used to be an engineer on Apple’s Vision Pro, so the man knows his way around a hard technical problem. My job was to put a face on all of it.
The all-white office problem
I showed up at Luma’s office in Palo Alto and it was gorgeous. Clean, modern, almost entirely white. Great place to work. Terrible place to make a moody portrait of a guy whose whole company runs on code and light. White walls bounce everything everywhere. There is nowhere for a shadow to live.
Plan A: a projector in my hand
I had brought a small battery-powered projector, the kind you can hold in one hand. The plan was to project the technology onto him so it became part of his face. I pulled out my phone, opened ChatGPT, and generated a wall of flowing ones and zeros, the old visual shorthand for code. Then I aimed the projector at Amit and let the numbers run across his skin.
It was a nice idea. The room had other plans. Those bright office lights washed the projection right out. You could barely see the code on his face. Beautiful office, zero contrast.
Plan B: a dark bathroom and a blue gel
So I asked the CEO of an AI company to follow me into the bathroom. It was the one room in the building I could make pitch black. Close the door, kill the lights, and finally I had a place for shadows to live.
I set a single light with a blue gel on the toilet lid and bounced it off the ceiling for a soft wash of color. Then I kept the projector running with the ones and zeros. I shot one-handed with my Nikon Z9 while holding and aiming the projector with the other hand. Blue on blue. His face built out of light and code.
Why it worked
The Los Angeles Times loved it and ran it big as the lead image of the story, in print and online. They described the look in their own words as a man standing under blue light with numbers projected on his face like “The Matrix.” I will take that comparison every day of the week.
The real lesson is simple. A bad room is not the end of a shoot. I walked into a clean white box with no contrast and walked out with a portrait that ran big as the lead image, because the answer was the bathroom down the hall. You bring a small projector, a gel, and a willingness to look a little ridiculous in a bathroom, and you fix the room you actually got handed.
One more thing. While I had Amit there, I lit a separate portrait in another room just for a little variety.
I am a Bay Area and San Francisco editorial portrait photographer who makes this kind of AI company CEO portrait for magazines, newspapers, and companies that want something with a point of view. If you need headshots and portraits that do not look like everyone else’s, get in touch.