Industrial Commercial Portraits

This past week I had a travel assignment to produce images of heavy industrial machinery in Kentucky.  Our location was the factory where ultra heavy duty industrial shredders are made.  It was gritty, dirty, and awesome!  Although the images of the machine (the size of a dump truck) came out incredibly heroic this post is not about those photographs.  While breaking for lunch I noticed one of the workers was doing some welding… I had my assistant follow me over with a single strobe outfitted with a small Chimera soft box and we snapped a few candids while he had his welding mask down with the walk around camera for the day (5d mark II with 50mm Zeiss f/2).  Of course he noticed the flashing all around him and stopped what he was doing.  His name was Frank and he turned out to be a pretty nice guy.  After some small talk about the Steelers I asked if I could make a portrait of him.  With some reluctance which quickly faded he agreed.

Below are a few of these images.  While on assignment I’m always on the lookout for extraneous shots for my portfolio.  While product shots of heavy machinery aren’t something I would usually show on my site or portfolio it was nice to come away from this assignment with a few new portfolio portraits.  I hope to produce more environment industrial portraits soon as I love meeting the people and incorporating the surroundings.