Time Travels // Tallahassee Magazine

Time Travels // Tallahassee Magazine

Tallahassee Magazine assigned us to photograph Ann Camp for a feature in their September/October 2022 "Senior Living" section. The story, written by Emma Witmer, profiled the 92-year-old memoirist and her writing process, and our assignment took us to Camp's historic home in Tallahassee for an environmental portrait session.

Photographing someone in their nineties in their own home requires a particular kind of care. You're working with a subject who may move more slowly, who may be more sensitive to bright lighting, and whose comfort in the space matters more than any creative concept you brought with you. The session needs to work around the subject, not the other way around. As Tallahassee photographers, we've photographed people across a wide range of ages for editorial assignments, and sessions with older subjects are some of the most rewarding because the images tend to carry a weight and a presence that younger subjects don't always bring to the frame.

Camp's home is a historic property in Tallahassee, and the article describes a warm living room where the interview took place. Historic homes give you rich visual material to work with: architectural details, natural light filtered through older windows, and interiors that have been shaped by decades of living. The challenge is being respectful of a space that's clearly been curated over a lifetime while still finding the compositions that work for a magazine layout. We worked with our Canon mirrorless system and chose lenses that let us frame Camp within her home environment without needing to rearrange or disrupt the space.

For the portrait work, we kept the setup minimal. Not every session benefits from bringing in a full lighting setup, and a home environment with an older subject is one of those cases where working with the available light and supplementing gently, if at all, often produces the most natural and comfortable results. The goal was images that felt like you were sitting in the room with Camp, not images that looked like a magazine crew had taken over her living room.

Environmental portrait photography like this is about patience and presence. You spend time with the subject, you let them settle into the session, and you wait for the moments where their personality comes through naturally. That's when the best frames happen. Features like this one for Tallahassee Magazine remind us that some of the most compelling photography in Tallahassee comes from simply sitting with someone and letting their story show up in the photographs.

This feature was photographed by The Workmans for Tallahassee Magazine and appeared in the September/October 2022 issue and was written by Emma Witmer. 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!