I have been working on a personal photographic project with my girlfriend Shauna. We are creating a series of portraits featuring the many amazing people that live in our community. Last week we photographed Pat Willits.

Pat is the Ridgway Town Mayor. He is also an environmentalist running his own non-profit orginization, The Trust For Land Restoration, an avid river runner. Our goal is to show Pat’s many facets in a single still photograph.

We chose to photograph Pat looking quite mayoral in a suit and tie, yet standing in the Uncompahgre river, not only a prominent feature in the town of Ridgway, but an element to illustrate his avid interest in river running. We chose the low angle to add to the feeling of his prominent position as mayor. Getting this angle of course required us to be in the water.

Below is a short, raw, behind the scenes video of what was involved in the making of this portrait.

Thanks go to Jack Moseley for assisting with the shoot and shooting the video.

Tech stuff about how the photo was made 

In the video you may have noticed that I was wearing a dry suit. Yes, the water was cold,and having a dry suit enabled me to be comfortably up to my chest in the frigid water. Shauna was wearing a sweet pair of Patagonia fishing waders I had left over from a product shoot I did for them a few years back.

I had my camera on a tripod in the river with me as insurance against dropping it in the water. Yes, I was nervous about that. For the same reason I had the strobes on stands held in place by Shauna. The current, as you can see, is rather swift and the light stands would have been swept away if she had not been there holding them. I triggered the lights remotely with pocket wizards.

There are two light sources in this image. The first is the sun providing the ambient light. It was a very overcast day leaving us with a very soft diffused ambient. We had actually hoped for a fantastically clear blue sky day like we had the day before when Shauna and I scouted the location. We were on location in the early morning and hoped to take advantage of the great alpinglow on the peaks in the background. Didn’t happen, but I think it worked out fine.

The second light source is the strobes held by Shauna. I underexposed the ambient just a little and set the strobes on full power to overpower the ambient. I exposed them properly as the key lights. You may notice in the video I am using two strobes side by side. Two strobes at full power? Yup, I needed as much power or light as possible so that I could keep the ambient down, over power the sun, and have a slow shutter speed.

I wanted the slowest shutter speed I could get in order to have a little bit of blur in the moving water. For a 60th of a second shutter speed I was at something like f11 which meant very little light from the flash was going to get in. Two strobes in the same location gave it to me. We had talked about using an umbrella or some sort of light modifier ont he strobe, but I didn’t feel I could afford the loss of light one would cause. In the end we also decided we liked the harder shadow the bare strobes gave us.