Jesse, the talented owner of J Allen Smith Design/Build, a design & home remodeling company in Ijamsville, MD, and I first met in a business class this year. A few months into the class, he asked me to call him to chat about environmental business portraits for him and some of his employees. We looked at the 5-yr old existing business portrait of himself that was on his website, and he explained what he liked and didn’t like about it, and that he wanted to replace it with something both updated and more professional-looking. He also wanted to add headshots of his employees to the website to better demonstrate the size of his company to viewers, and to give people an idea of who would be working in their home. "My people are good guys," he said, "and I want their headshots to portray that."

And so we agreed on a two-part environmental business portrait project, first photographing four of his employees at a worksite in Washington DC – one of his client’s homes where they were working on a kitchen remodel and building an enclosed patio / sunroom – and then a few days later photographing Jesse and one of his office staff at their Ijamsville office.

Jesse has a great office for this type of environmental business portraits, with interesting design elements and decor that I could creatively incorporate into their headshots. Of all the business portraits, my favorite is this first one on the left, simply because I feel that the composition and design of the environmental portrait helps to portray the design aspect of Jesse’s business.

Many thanks to Jesse for this online review on Yahoo of our business portraits!

“Working with Irene was great! I needed pics of my employees for our website and she made everyone feel comfortable and look natural. The compositions were great too, I’m very happy with the results.”