At the time of writing this the world, is suffering from the COVID-19 (Corona Virus) Pandemic. I live in Suffolk County NY and right now we have 33,773 cases and had 1,102 deaths and these numbers are still rising.

I have been trying for the past few weeks to do some charity portraits of the healthcare providers in my community on Long Island.  Logistics have been a bit of a pain trying to get in or near a hospital as you can imagine. So I decided to go a different route with it.  I wanted to focus on the workforce. I'm very active with The Greater Patchogue Chamber of Commerce and  I approached them about a photo essay called Project Face Mask.  I was looking to photograph business owners in their place of business but they have to be wearing a face mask. I'd say about 90% of the businesses in town are shut down. I sent an email out to all of their members.   I really wanted to capture the emotion that we are all feeling right now as small business owners. I didn’t want these images to look perfect. I was going for a darker moodier tone. One thing I'm doing that is taking me some time to adjust to is photographing portraits with a 14mm lens. For those of you that are not photographers that may mean nothing. A 14mm is a wide-angle lens and portraits are generally shop with 50mm or longer but that will depend on the photographer's style.  The 14mm focal length gives a bit of a distorted point of view. Living through this pandemic is definitely giving us all a distorted point of you and our day-to-day activities. So I felt this was the perfect fit. I did try one with a 70mm-200mm this lens is considered the ideal portrait lens for most photographers but it wasn’t giving me the tone I had envisioned. It just looked too good.

Now for all of my photo geeks, My camera was the Nikon Z6 the 14mm was the Sigma Art lens, I wanted to use one light for these and not overcomplicate it and to be in and out in 10-15 min. I used the Westcott  FJ400.  It’s a 400ws AC/DC mono-light.  I paired it with the Westcott Beauty Dish SwitchIt was lightweight and easy to travel with. Between shots, I could just put it in the back of my Jeep Renegade with the light stand leaving it set up.