Project: Have I seen this face?

I work at a university (it won't be tough to figure out which). Here's the drill: You get an email about a speaker with a long speech title, and some art, which just isn't as high-rez as you'd like. You set aside an hour and work something up.

So imagine my surprise when this lands in my inbox. The title has just six words. The speaker is fairly well known. And his photograph is good. He looks, in fact, a bit like Jean Reno, which is only so bad.
So, I make the photo very large. Boost the blues a little. Cut the type into the picture and the picture into the type. The client wants a little more verbiage than I'd prefer, but nothing too outrageous.
Overall, satisfying.

Some technical details:
1) What background color to use? I chose a pale blue to match the eyes. Another logical choice could have been a sandy tan ... playing up the blue/orange complement pair and perhaps suggesting the Middle East. But I stuck with the blue background, which I think has the effect of magnifying the warmth of the skin tone.
2) How to get the photo inserted into the text. In InDesign, select the text block, create outsides. Then (re)import the photo into the text block and size and position it to match. InDesign wouldn't let me do more than one line at a time, so I had to import the photo a couple of times.