Location portrait somewhere in the mountains in the midwest. Could it have been Virginia? Does it matter?

man waiting patiently to get back into his warm winter coat.

 I'd been on the road for weeks. I was working on a project for an enormous infrastructure company. They build things like lakes, damns and long distance electrical delivery systems. They were finishing up a series of high voltage lines across some rural areas and they wanted portraits of the key people on the ground for one of the projects to use in an annual report and in subsequent marketing. It was the third week of November 2018. A Monday. Probably the 20th. 

I'd been covering the wildfires out near Sacramento the day before. I got a note that we were on for the photo shoot in the mountains of Virginia, far from any major airport. The in-house travel people at the client side arranged for a redeye flight back across the country to Charlotte, NC, booked a hotel for what turned out to be a four hour rest stop, and booked a rental car for me as well. The next morning, armed with a GPS pin on my phone and a target time to meet a bevy of workers in pick-up trucks at a lone truck stop hundreds of miles away, I tossed my two cases of gear into a black Toyota Camry and headed north. By this point in the project I'd been in and out of a dozen rental cars. The one from the day before, out in Sacramento, was a Chevrolet Impala. It was not my favorite. The Toyota was a decade ahead in terms of user satisfaction. 

Halfway there I cruised through a McDonalds, used their mostly clean restroom and also got an Egg McMuffin and a large coffee to consume while driving ever north. (Just checked. The destination was Bastian Virginia). Say what you will about McDonalds but if you are traveling rural and you are on a tight schedule finding one of Ronald McDonald's golden arches can be key to survival. 

There's not much to Bastian but there was a BP gas station and that was our meeting spot. I needed to be there by 12:30 pm and I made it by the skin of my teeth. But the journey wasn't over yet. I met about twelve people there. They were spread out into four or five pick-up trucks and I was to follow them up into the mountains where, a short while later, we left paved roads and followed a crumbling, one lane dirt road up the side of a very tricky mountain. A vehicle with four wheel drive would definitely have been much more appropriate. 

We reached an overview that we all liked and I re-read my instructions from the marketing department in the comfort of my car with the heater turned up. At six or seven thousand feet in late November it was downright cold. I got out of the car and assembled a couple of electronic flashes on small, light stands. The company people took turns holding the stands steady in an increasing wind as I photographed their co-workers, one by one. 

Before we'd fired the first frame a light sleet started to fall. It got progressively worse. I covered the flashes with Ziplock bags to protect them from the moisture. We kept shooting because no one wanted to come back later and try again. We were two thirds of the way through the cattle call of portraits when the person who was managing this part of the project on the ground told me we should hurry it up because "weather was moving in." And he strongly suggested that before weather got there in force I should get my low slung, consumer rental car off the top of the mountain and onto some paved highway. We redoubled our efforts.  We wrapped a little before three in the afternoon.

The sleet got worse and the temperatures continued to drop. By the time I'd tossed all the gear in the car I could barely feel my hands/fingers on the steering wheel. I waved farewell to the convoy that followed me down the mountain and headed back South. I needed to get to Raleigh and be ready for another shoot the next morning at 9 a.m. somewhere just South of Raleigh. And my hotel was four or five hours away. 

It's fun to shoot environmental portraits. More fun if you don't have to drive for hours in either direction and stand around in a sleet storm to do them. But that's fun and challenge of commercial work.

It's so much easier when it's all just for fun. You can look at the weather report and decide to stay inside, sip hot coffee and read a good book instead... and later you can write and tell me, definitively, how I should have handled the job...

Yep. Same Godox AD200 flashes I'm still using five years later. Good investment for lighting combined with lots of travel. Might have to buy one more. Nostalgia purchase.