I’ve had the pleasure of working with the team of folks at The Boulos Company this past year on an ad campaign showcasing the partnership between their brokers and commercial clients. The creative called for environmental portraits that showed off the commercial spaces, which are located throughout Southern Maine. The ads ran in MaineBiz. The entire process was fun…and I think the ads look great.
This Friday I’d like to share just a few outtake images from recent projects that were conceptual in nature. I’ve always enjoyed doing this kind of concept work—it’s extremely creative and if successful, gives the viewer something extra that causes them to linger a bit. What you end up with is more created than found. Here are a couple of images that I really liked but that ended up as outtakes. Enjoy….and happy Friday!
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I’m very excited to finally be able to share one of the coolest projects I am grateful to have worked on this year. It’s a project that combined both my interests and my skills and best of all….it benefits a great and worthy cause.
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As an editorial and commercial photographer, you just never know when an amazing assignment will come your way. It’s a good habit to train yourself to look for opportunities for project work that will stretch you creatively.
2013 has been a great one for interesting visual projects. I was fortunate enough to be involved with the Southern Maine Agency on Aging for a project early in the year, and as a result of that ended up meeting and photographing several senior athletes.
Now, when I think ‘senior athletes’ I usually imagine high school kids runnning around a track–the kind of assignment I routinely had as a newspaper staffer. These seniors are over the age of 50, and are extremely talented athletes. I ended up doing a series of portraits of these Maine athletes who compete at a national level at the National Senior Games in their respective sports.
Maine famously has a population with the highest median age in the entire country. My concept was to photograph senior athletes in the environment they train in, showing their connection to Maine. I ended up photographing each on white seamless as a way of separating them from that environment, illustrating that they are serious, talented athletes independent of their Maine address. I call the project “the Oldest State”, and hope that it shows what’s possible no matter your age.
Thanks to the SMAA and to all of the athletes. I hope I never again have to set up white seamless outside on the Maine coast…but meeting these folks was an amazing experience.
–30–
I’ve been busy lately, working on a somewhat hush-hush project in the Lewiston-Auburn area. Last night as we finished the 12th and final shoot, the Lewiston Sun-Journal showed up and so the cat’s partially out of the bag. Here’s Charlie and me at work in Daryn Slover’s photo from today’s Sun-Journal, ….followed by an outtake from that same shoot, just to show what it looks like in-camera with all of the smoke and lights. Once the everything is complete, I’ll post more images and explain how I approached this complicated (and extremely fun) project.:
You’ve seen them, plying the narrow streets of the Old Port like some four-wheeled herd, or perhaps spied in a vacant lot or square. Almost non-existent just one year ago, these vans of plenty are gathering fans and making tastebuds happy all over Portland. One more missing piece has been added to Portland’s puzzle. I love the display Down East Magazine gave to this article, published this month.
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.
You’ve heard of the acronym, ‘KISS’, right? It stands for ‘Keep it Simple, Stupid.’ It’s mantra that software engineers, among others, use to keep them on track during development to guard against product bloat. I keep a similar line in my head when I’m approaching an assignment: It’s the Story, Stupid.
Now, maybe you’re one of those rare photographers who can always stay focused and zeroed in on your work, but me—I get distracted. I’ve been known to set up a bunch of lights in a daisy-chain, lighting up God Knows What just because I could. This is a photographer version of tunnel vision, and it makes you a slave to a concept rather than what you should be: flexible, in the driver’s seat, and asking yourself the kinds of questions that lead to images that truly tell the story you’re trying to show.
On an assignment, lots of things are going on: you’re interacting with clients or subjects, fiddling with your gear (why won’t that PocketWizard remote fire??), keeping an eye on the clock and the shot list, managing your assistant or team. It doesn’t matter. You always have to be aware of why you’re there and what story you’re there to tell.
It’s that awareness that leads you from the image you (by necessity) planned for to the one that Serendipity bestowed upon you that works much better.
Recently I photographed Jim Twombly, a retired Portland police officer, at his home for a story featuring patients of a large medical practice group. Jim was diagnosed a couple of years ago with diabetes and was facing a slew of health issues. He worked with his doctor to completely change his lifestyle. As a result of eating healthy and exercising regularly, Jim dropped more than 50 pounds and is stronger and healthier than he’s been in years. I was there to photograph Jim as he did his morning routine—exercise followed by an oatmeal breakfast. During my earlier scouting visit, we had decided to move his starionary bike to the more visual solarium he had built onto his home. Early in the morning, as the sun was coming up, it would make a great visual.
And it was. The only problem is that, devoid of the usual clutter, it made the solarium look a little bit sterile. After photographing Jim in his home, I asked to go photograph him in the workshop above his barn. Once we stepped into the sawdust-infused atmosphere, stacked with woodworking tools, Jim seemed to relax. This was his element, clearly. I set up a couple of lights but wanted to keep the portrait low-key, focused on Jim in his world. We chatted a little, Jim settled into a comfortable position, and the image at the top of this post was made. Once I took it, I knew it was my favorite image because it told more of a story about who Jim really is–a hard-working guy, a Mainer, a craftsman. A guy who is tough enough to stick to a complete revamp of his lifelong eating habits because it just needed to be done.
Good on you, Jim. For more about Jim’s story, check out his feature on InterMed’s website.
It’s always cool to get my work published in a new place (new for me, that is). Traders Magazine just went to press with a feature about Rob Felvinci, a NYC financial trader who decided to trade the big-city lifestyle for the slower (and more family-friendly) pace of Maine. We ideally would have been somewhere out on the docks with him and his kids, fishing, but due to time constraints had to stay in and around his Congress Street offices. I liked the setting of this portrait…empty office, waiting to be filled, with Congress Street pictured through the windows.
