I’m happy to share some environmental portraits I created recently of new InterMed CEO Roger Poitras, along with his executive team. InterMed is one of Maine’s largest doctor practices and operates primary care facilities in South Portland, Yarmouth and Portland. The assignment was to capture environmental portraits of Poitras that incorporated aspects of InterMed’s landmark Marginal Way building.
Sometimes, the best way to get a storytelling image is to get up high. I’ve worked with South Portland-based construction company H.B. Fleming for a few years, documenting some of their impressive projects throughout Maine and New Hampshire. The scope and scale of much of the work they do—building massive retaining walls and cofferdams, for example—are most apparent when viewed from above. In 2020 Fitzgerald Photo became a FAA-certified commercial drone operator. We’ve since been using drones for photography and video production for clients throughout New England. I’m happy to share some images from recent H.B. Fleming projects.
Dove Tail Bats by Fitzgerald Photo
During the past two months I’ve been busy with ongoing projects, especially with video production of work I started before the stay-at-home orders shut things down.
I love the impact of the still image and it’s my primary way of telling stories visually. Often, a crafted campaign built on remarkable still imagery is the most effective and impactful way to tell a story. Other times, a single still image alone isn’t sufficient and that’s when I turn, increasingly, to video storytelling.
I’m excited to release a new video showing Dove Tail Bats founder Paul Lancisi in his manufacturing facility in Shirley Mills, ME. This was part of a photo assignment for Down East Magazine. While I love the portraits I produced for the magazine, I decided to incorporate video as well because it better conveyed the processes that make Dove Tail Bats so special.
I love how Lancisi pivoted from a woodworking business to one that embraces his lifelong passion for baseball. What he and his wife Theresa have created is amazing: a Maine company that crafts beautiful, one-of-a-kind baseball bats sought after by major league hitters and top college athletes. The bats might look great hung on a wall above the fireplace, but—just like Dove Tail Bats—are destined for greater things.
It’s inspiring to be able to show Maine companies doing such remarkable work and and achieving great success far outside of our state.
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Ready to level up your storytelling content with photography, videography and multimedia? Contact Fitzgerald Photo to see if we’re a good fit for your brand or project.
I love working with innovative Maine companies that are doing interesting, important work. This week, Agri Cycle launched their re-branded website with some of the work I’ve done for them this year.
Agri Cycle recycles organic waste and turns it into renewable energy using an anaerobic digester facility in Exeter, Maine. They do great business working with other marquee companies from Waterville to Boston, including Whole Foods, Colby College, Hannaford Bros. supermarkets, and others. They also arguably do important business—not just producing energy from matter that normally would be discarded, but by reducing the amount of organic matter in landfills (meaning: less greenhouse gas emissions).
They are so busy, in fact, that one of the biggest challenges to photographing their team and equipment was simpy to pin them down (from their perspective, admittedly, a good problem to have). Another challenge was to create visuals that spoke to the relationships and the needs of Agri Cycle’s clients rather than focusing on the waste itself—which, let’s face it—wouldn’t win any beauty contests. By focusing on their clients, and on Agri Cycle’s processes, we were able to show their reach and their impact without just showing a bunch of bins of discarded vegetables. Because ultimately, it’s not about what they do, but why.
I’ve worked with the fine folks at BNN, a full-service accounting firm based in Portland, ME, for a few years now. In honor of their 20th anniversary, they just relaunched their refreshed website look this week with a new logo and a few of the environmental portraits we’ve done featuring their principals within their beautiful downtown Portland office space. They wanted to emphasize the personal, human component of their services, and I think the new web design and images work well to do that.
A lot of what I do these days is destined for web-only use. It seems as though print use is getting less and less, but I like to think of it another way…that print is used when it really matters, and thus the quality of what’s printed—and the images needed for those pieces—is comensurately better. Less, but more.
I like to get involved in these projects early on, or as early as possible. It can be challenging to come in as a photographer once the design has been set by a web team, and then to have to create images that will safely fit into an ultra-cool horizontal web page slider that is 900 pixels wide and (it seems) 2 pixels deep. Of course, that’s when you find out the client wants to shoot full-body portraits, too.
That said, I firmly believe my job as a photographer is to provide solutions—practical, useful and hopefully creatively fulfilling—no matter what stage of the process I’m called in on. It’s never too late to bring some value to my clients even if the train has not only left the station, but is set to arrive in five minutes.
So when local law firm Perkins Thompson wanted to create a variety of team photos for their already-templated site, it was necessary not only to work with their chosen design (fortunately, not 2 pixels tall), but to understand what uses they might have beyond the site. That’s why photographers should and do ask clients a lot of questions about potential future uses of images. I found that they wanted the images for a variety of print ads and other collateral, even though the initial use was for a (very) horizontal web page display. So, the images needed to be flexible enough, in terms of composition, to work for both.
Add to the mix that they have far-flung attorneys who had to be merged into photos together, and it became a logistic challenge.
Here are a few screenshots from their new site–I’m happy with the interaction and group photos we got. All were shoot loose enough to work in print pieces and ads, but with heads and head sizes in a relative horizontal line so they could be used for web ads. Doing so cut down on the chance that my client will have to call me in a year asking for a Photoshop miracle, like turning a head-and-shoulders image into a full-body portrait.
To their credit, Perkins T were great to work with and very patient (candidly, I also love that they were founded by a guy named Widgery “Whisker Bill” Thomas). I’m happy with the results, which feature their teams in a dynamic way that works for them.
When a company decides to embark upon a rebranding initiative they often hire an agency, a designer or a photographer to help them. There are a lot of ‘triggers’ for when a company decides to do take this critical step forward. It often happens when the company is in transition, whether physical or something more existential—a move to a new location, a major renovation, a period of great growth.
Spinnaker Trust is a Portland-based company providing wealth and finance management services. Recently they grew with the merger with another firm, and moved into a really knock-out new space downtown. To showcase their dynamic new space and their growth, they needed environmental portraits of their team members within their amazing offices—lots of frosted glass, hardwood flooring and deep blue walls.
I spoke with the team about their needs, and decided to go with a more dramatic approach to lighting. With lighting you can go one of two ways. Light ‘big’, and just create a wall of light so that everything’s bright, well-lit and very commercial-looking (see any national-level advertisement) or light ‘small’, or selectively, throwing light just where you need it to create dimensionality, mood, and highlight aspects of the environment. Spinnaker was perfect for the latter.
I used three to four lights for most of the portraits—with all of the glass around, the lighting was tightly controlled to avoid reflections. We did multiple scenarios with each person in a relatively limited period of time—in my shoots, I tend to move fast: 15 minutes being a long time to spend on any one portrait.
I was happy with the results: professional but dramatic, with the environment a key feature of each image. A big shout-out to the team at iBec Creative, who designed this clean and beautiful website.
This past week marked the launch of one of the coolest sites I’ve seen in a long time. The new InterMed website also happens to be locally designed, by Kemp Goldberg Partners, with original photography taken over the course of the past six months or so. Beginning back in the fall of 2011, I was fortunate to work with KG’s talented crew to make it all happen.
The approach the KG team took was to photograph the doctors and other medical staff in a very casual, environmental style that both made them feel comfortable and allowed for personalities to come through. These portraits are accompanied by a bio written by each person. The result is warm, personal and compelling. It was great working with each of these people, who had to endure my pleas for ‘just one more shot.’ The visual centerpiece of the site are the images of doctors and staff interacting with each other and with patients, along with views highlighting the beautiful Marginal Way InterMed building. The first thing a visitor to the site sees are documentary shots of patients and their families whose lives have been impacted in positive ways by their InterMed doctors. Shot in the moment, these vignettes illustrate well the InterMed creed, “Care without compromise”.
I love this….one of my clients is making it big. Biba, a health “smart drink” startup based in Boston, is now in full production after a couple years of very hard work. I just noticed them in the local grocery store, too. Biba is hands-down the best energy-type drink I’ve ever had—light, full of vitamins rather than sugar, and darned tasty. Go Biba!
I met the folks at Portland-based law firm Verrill Dana last year. The firm was in the middle of a complete web redesign of their site, and needed photos—lots of them. Verrill Dana is one of the largest law firms in northern New England, with offices in Maine, Boston, Connecticut and Washington, DC.
The firm already had professional headshots of most of the their 100+ attorneys, but needed updated versions. In addition, they wanted to showcase more of each attorney’s personality: on each bio page they would run three black-and-white candid photographs of each person in their work environment, engaged in normal interaction.
We met and came up with a plan to tackle the job. The formal portraits would be taken over the course of weeks and would be shot in Portland, Boston and in our studio—but they had to look consistent, as if they were taken all at the same time. The candids needed to be purposful but natural, orchestrated but spontaneous-looking.
I started by photographing some test “attorneys” in a variety of ways to provide some different looks. Once the artistic vision was decided on, we arranged shoot dates and makeup days, then got to work. The shooting days went very smoothly, primarily because the marketing team at Verrill Dana is so well-organized. Although small issues always come up in the course of shooting, a bit of flexibility and a solid team can easily overcome them. My years as a photojournalist helped me move quickly and roll with the punches, too.
We love Verrill Dana’s new site, launched earlier this month. It’s inviting, clean and filled with nice touches, like being able to view an image of each attorney just by mousing over their name. Congratulations, Verrill Dana!