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Los Angeles-based photographer Justin L. Stewart recently completed three editorial assignments for California Freemason Magazine, which covers news, stories, and insights about Freemasonry in California. The client needed portraits and social documentary-style stills of members of the Prince Hall Grand Lodge at several locations in Santa Ana, including the Orange County Black History Parade. The photos from the three assignments were featured in the magazine’s Summer 2024 issue.
These were three different shoots for the summer edition of the California Freemason magazine. My editor, Pete Ivey, had reached out to me a few years prior for another assignment after being referred to me by another photographer, but that shoot unfortunately fell through. This year, Pete had an assignment for me that rolled into another assignment, and then another last-minute assignment.
The editor preferred a photojournalistic style image with little to no artificial lighting for the magazine.
The vast majority of my career has been centered around photojournalism. While I do a lot of portraiture with supplemental lighting, I have experience making do with whatever available natural light there is.
Justin appreciated being given plenty of room to explore and capture the best photographs he could, adapting to each situation as needed.
Pete gave me the assignment and a general overarching idea. We had phone calls, and he sent me examples of other images they’d had made but let me loose at the end of the day to get what I could from each situation.
The client is a magazine that covers the Freemason societies in California, run by the Grand Lodge of California. They tell stories about their membership and their storied history. These three assignments were about the Prince Hall lodge, with its storied history tracing back to the time of the American Revolutionary War. While much of the summer edition of the magazine covered Prince Hall’s history, my assignments revolved around its current members and happenings.
The shoot took place at several locations in Orange County, around the Prince Hall Grand Lodge in Santa Ana.
One portrait was made in a cigar lounge. It was a tight space with a lot of moving parts and some hard orange light, which made it a little difficult to work in, but the employees were kind enough to let me do the shoot there and the patrons didn’t mind either, which was kind of them. I added a little gelled supplemental lighting to that scene, but tried to keep the ambiance of the available lighting.
The other portrait was a last second shoot in a hotel lobby during a conference. It was a nice lobby, and I was concerned someone might stop me during the assignment, as some buildings are protective of their lobbies and don’t like photography to happen in them. Thankfully that wasn’t the case here.
Every photographer brings their own energy to a shoot and, of course, connects differently with the people they’re photographing. Justin revealed how he usually approaches this,
I always try to come in with a calm and kind demeanor and connect with people as much as I can, while also being a bit of a wallflower to not take away from the moments I’m trying to document. You’re not always going to have an incredible rapport with people, but if you can build a decent one during a short amount of time, it makes the work much easier and you get better photographs of people being themselves instead of someone stuck in front of a camera.
Justin aims to always accurately reflect the person in their portraits so he tries to direct as little as possible to still get great results.
When you’re making portraits, there’s a lot of directing that can be done, but it’s easiest when the person has a natural comfort in front of the camera and brings some of their own ideas to play with. Both the people I photographed were great, but I wasn’t able to get as much variety out of them as I would have liked. Being in a confined space for the one portrait shoot limited me all the more, as when you have those struggles, you can usually use your environment to add more variety. I still could have done more on that shoot and wish I had, but the tight and busy space — it had room for just one person to walk up and down the area — had me hustling to complete the assignment without wearing out my welcome.
There’s almost always some sort of way you can play and stretch your creative boundaries, even if only for a couple shots. And mistakes happen and give you that chance to learn and improve from them on your next opportunity. I could have held on a little longer during the tight space portrait shoot and made one or two more varied frames. I don’t know that they would have been any better, but there wouldn’t be any lingering questions in my head about how I could have done better. Photography is a very competitive space and you always want to turn in your best work to earn that next opportunity.
Looking back on this project, Justin said the following,
I was really lucky to work with Pete Ivey at California Freemason Magazine. He puts a lot of work into that magazine on so many levels and creates a wonderful magazine. There are a lot of talented photographers that have shot for the magazine and I feel really lucky to have had the opportunity to produce some work for them.
See more of Justin’s work on his website.
Credits
Editor: Pete Ivey
Further Reading
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