Jimmy Patronis' past is informing his future // INFLUENCE Magazine

Jimmy Patronis' past is informing his future // INFLUENCE Magazine

INFLUENCE Magazine assigned us to photograph U.S. Rep. Jimmy Patronis for a feature in their Fall 2025 issue. The story, written by Jacob Ogles, profiled the Florida congressman, and our assignment took us to the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. for a congressional portrait session.

This was one of several congressional portrait sessions we photographed in Washington for the same issue of INFLUENCE Magazine, and one of the things that keeps that kind of work interesting is that no two sessions at the Capitol are the same. Even though you're in the same building, each member's schedule, office layout, and available time window create a different set of conditions. The craft is in adapting your approach to those variables while maintaining a consistent level of quality across the full set of portraits the magazine needs for the issue.

Photographing at the U.S. Capitol requires coordination with congressional staff well before session day. Access, timing, and location within the building are all discussed and penciled in in advance, but changes can happen at any point, even after you arrive. As a congressional portrait photographer, you learn to build flexibility into your plan so that if a location shifts or a schedule compresses, you still deliver strong images. We worked with our Canon mirrorless system and Canon lenses that gave us the range to work in different areas of the Capitol without needing to swap too much gear between setups.

What makes congressional portrait photography at the Capitol different from our political portrait work at the Florida Capitol in Tallahassee is scale. The building is larger, the security protocols are more involved, and the pace of a member's day in Washington leaves even less margin for the session than a typical Tallahassee assignment. But the fundamentals are the same: come prepared, respect the subject's time, find the frames that serve the story, and get out of the way.

As a Washington D.C. photographer serving Florida-based publications, we've built a workflow for Capitol sessions that lets us move efficiently between multiple assignments in the same trip. That efficiency matters for both the publication and for us. D.C. editorial photography is a growing part of our work, and being able to deliver multiple congressional portrait sessions in a single visit is how we serve publications like INFLUENCE Magazine at the level they expect. We bring the same approach to every session regardless of which Capitol we're working in.

This feature was photographed by The Workmans for INFLUENCE Magazine and appeared in the Fall 2025 issue and was written by Jacob Ogles. 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!