Environmental Portraits in Baltimore

Despite the name, Charm City Headshots is more than just a headshot studio. Sometimes I leave the studio and venture out into the real work to make environmental portraits. Earlier in my career I was a busy newspaper freelancer, for whom environmental portraiture is a big part of the job. Now I do the same type of work for corporate, individual and institutional clients. The nice thing about this work, compared to newspaper assignments, is that I have a lot more time to prepare for the job and find the ideal time and location for the shoot.

In the portrait above, for example, I was assigned to photograph a student environmental activist for Tufts University. She was lobbying for environmental causes in DC, so I wanted to show the natural environment while also placing her in the capitol. After a bit of research on Google maps, I found a location on Theodore Roosevelt Island where I could still see some of the monuments in the background.

In the second photo, I was hired to do a series of portraits by a conductor and professor at the Peabody School of Music. We photographed in and around an old sailcloth factory near my house in Baltimore.

The third photo is of a space scientist at Brown University, photographed for the Carlton College alumni magazine. He had a lab in Providence lab full of globes and photographs of the lunar surface. The space was a bit dull, so I added a bit of red 'spaceship lighting' in the background to jazz things up. The forth photo was for the Tufts Fletcher School of Government, for whom I photographed their (very intimidating) outgoing president.

The Northeastern Law School in Boston, who asked me to photograph one of their alumni who had recently been appointed as a judge. A little scouting around DC led me to the DC Court of Appeals building, which is very 'legal looking', and where no one comes to shoo away pesky photographers. She was flexible on time, so we used beautiful end of the day light as the only illumination.