I call this portrait "Jonathan, Glass Artist"

This is an environmental portrait of Jonathan Davis, a North Carolina-based artist who creates new and exciting glassblowing, shaping, and coloring techniques.

It was made in his glass studio after I had heard of his work through a common friend.

I wanted to capture the intensity of his work by conveying the heat in his studio and his work with melted glass. This required careful lighting, from a strobe and ambient light level matching, and adding rim lighting to help contrast and shape him against the background.

The rim light from behind him, camera right, was gelled with a warm orange to help ensure that the rim light color matched the rest of the scene.

I used two Profoto strobes and a Nikon D800 with a 24-70/2.8 lens, at ISO 64 with the camera on a tripod, as the shutter speed was a slow 1/15th of a second.