Agonizing and Joyful // Tallahassee Magazine

Agonizing and Joyful // Tallahassee Magazine

Tallahassee Magazine asked us to photograph Jay Revell for a feature in their May/June 2021 issue tied to his book, The Nine Virtues of Golf. The story, written by Steve Bornhoft, explores Revell's lifelong relationship with the game, and the assignment took us to Capital City Country Club in Tallahassee to capture portraits of Jay in the environment where so much of that relationship plays out.

Capital City Country Club is one of those locations that looks effortless in photographs but requires some thought to photograph well. The course is lined with Spanish oaks and full of rolling terrain, which gives you beautiful depth and framing options. But a golf course is also wide open, and depending on the time of day, you're managing strong directional light with very little shade to work with. As Tallahassee photographers, we've been on this course before for other assignments, so we had a sense of which spots would give us the best combination of background interest and workable light.

For an environmental portrait like this, the goal is to put the subject in a setting that tells part of their story without needing a caption. Revell on the course, with his clubs, surrounded by the landscape he writes about with so much affection; that's the photograph doing narrative work alongside the article. We brought our Canon mirrorless system and worked with a range of focal lengths to balance Revell against the scale of the course. Some frames pulled in tight on him, while others let the fairways and oaks fill the background to give the spread some variety for the magazine's layout.

What makes editorial photography like this rewarding is that the subject brings something to the table before you ever press the shutter. Revell has a connection to the game that comes through in how he carries himself on the course. Our job was to find the frames where that connection reads naturally, without overexposing or forcing a moment that wasn't there. The best environmental portraits happen when the subject feels at home, and Revell was about as at home as you can get.

This feature was photographed by The Workmans for Tallahassee Magazine and appeared in the May/June 2021 issue and was written by Steve Bornhoft. The Workmans are a husband-and-wife photography team based in Tallahassee, Florida, and we work with publications across the state of Florida, in Washington D.C. and around the United States. You can explore more of our editorial photography in the archive, see more of our work across our website and connect with us on how we can best serve you!