2 More Environmental Portraits for Advertising Client

Here are the latest images from my advertising portrait series for the State of Maryland... Tracy Tyler and Patrick Gallagher.  Tracy Tyler's company, Cambridge International, manufactures metal belts.  They have recently discovered another application for their products.  They are using them as architectural elements which help shade large windows while still allowing people to see out, and letting light in.  Patrick Gallagher is the Director of NIST which is an insane collection of laboratories in Gaithersburg, MD.  They are doing amazing research with million dollar machines.

Tracy Tyler, President and CEO of Cambridge International

Dr. Patrick Gallagher, Director of the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

Editorial Style Portrait of Paul Reed Smith for Advertising with the State of Maryland

I just finished another environmental portrait for the state of Maryland.  This one is of Mr. Paul Reed Smith.  It was shot in one of the production rooms of his guitar factory in Stevensville Md.

Interested to know what it looked like before post processing?  Here it is:

Not quite as exciting is it?

Magazine Cover Portrait of Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy

The other job I shot in Atlanta in January was a portrait of Chick-fil-A president and COO Dan Cathy (son of founder Truett Cathy) and Mark Miller, CfA's VP for Training and Development. I originally wanted to do something involving cow costumes, but the magazine shot that down. I then came up with the idea of photoshopping them into a photo of a giant chicken. There's one of those right around the corner from me. That one got shot down as well. They ended up using a shot of the men inside one of their mock restaurants that they use for training. So here is the idea that I liked, and will use in my portfolio, and the image that the magazine used on their cover...

Advertising Portrait for Baltimore Symphony Orchestra

I recently wrapped up a portrait I did of Marin Alsop, the conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. The client called me saying she wanted to make a portrait of Marin for a circus themed program they were doing. We had originally talked about shooting in a prop warehouse with a bunch of circus props around her. After calling around to a few places, we found it would cost a minimum of $3000 to rent the props and space for shooting for the day. I proposed having me fabricate a backdrop for the portrait in photoshop. Of course I would have to charge the client for the extra computer time I was going to put in, but it still represented a huge savings to the client. I made a few quick sketches, got a little direction and approval from the client, and away we went. I hope you like the results...

Environmental Portraits for the State of Maryland part 2

Here are the last two environmental portraits I shot for the State of Maryland - Bryan Voltaggio & Claire Fraser-Liggett. Many of you may recognize Chef Bryan Voltaggio from his runner-up performance on Bravo's "Top Chef." He is currently Chef/Owner of Volt restaurant in Frederick MD. Claire is the head of the Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS) at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore MD.

Environmental Portraits for the State of Maryland

I've recently been hired to make several environmental portraits of different people throughout the State of Maryland for ads for the MD Dept. of Business and Economic Development. It's a great opportunity to meet some interesting and prominent people in the state. The 1st 2 completed are Mario Armstrong and Mei Xu. Mario hosts and syndicates his own technology talk shows on XM/Sirius radio, USTalkNetwork.com, WYPR & WEAA. On TV, his segments air weekly on NBC WBAL-TV, and Small Business Television.com. He has appeared on CNBC, TV-One, PBS, C-Span and CNN. Mei is the owner and creator of Chesapeake Bay Candle and Blissliving Home.

Portrait of Matt Gilman

I recently had the opportunity to photograph Matt Gilman for my editorial portfolio. He's an incredible person and I was extremely excited to get to meet and shoot him. For those of you that don't know about Matt already and are wondering what's so amazing about him: Well, he's a fairly accomplished Bike Trials rider who regularly gives demos on the sport, and is getting better every time he rides. "Yeah, so what?"... So, he also just happens to be legally blind! Next time you're on your bike, try jumping off a few rocks with your eyes closed. Here's what he has to say about himself from his website...

I became blind due to diabetes at the age of 24. I have been riding bikes for most of my life and when I had lost my vision I thought that I would never be able to ride again. I couldn’t ride for 2 years between 2004 to 2006.

One day I decided to grab my trials bike and go out to the curb to just hop around and do the most basic moves. I quickly realized that I couldn’t even trackstand. I put my bike away in disappointment. A few days later I decided to learn how to trackstand again without vision. After a long uphill battle I have gotten back to, or near, the level of riding that I used to be at.

Now I ride almost everything that I could have ridden with sight but, I just had to figure out how to do it in my own way. There was no one to tell me how to go about it; I needed to figure it out on my own.

I'm happy to help Matt by providing him with some quality images for his website and other promotional efforts. If you find his story to be as inspirational as I do and would like him to speak to your group, I'm sure he would be happy to hear from you.

Here are some shots I took of Matt riding:

Shooting at the Pentagon - for an editorial assignment

I got a call from a magazine photo editor requesting I shoot a person who works at the Pentagon in Washington DC for a magazine article about the future of I.T. I came up with, among a few others, the idea of using doors as a metaphor. Unfortunately, the Pentagon is a very busy place with a lot of rules and regulations regarding when and where I could set up lights. Heck, it took me nearly 30 minutes to find my approved parking space, and another 30 minutes waiting at the gate for my escort! So, I was only able to set up in a small alcove by some doors that could not be opened. I did that shot, but also asked if I could shoot the subject with some glass doors in the middle of a hallway, as long as I didn't set up lights or disrupt the normal flow of traffic. I had to use a small hot-shoe flash, which I color balanced for the fluorescent lights in the hallway, and bounced off the wall to my right. The resulting image was OK, but not up to my standards:



So, I got on the computer and spent a few minutes tweaking it. I changed around some of the colors, darkened some areas, and removed the ugly signs. It went from a boring image that any competent photographer could make, to something I could be proud to say is mine. Here is the final image:



Another shot I did for the same article is below. This one is the original door idea i had. This shot is more interesting than the Pentagon shot, but the story behind it isn't...

Best of my 2008 (and earlier) Corporate & Editorial photos - continued

OK, this image was shot for Boating Magazine for a story on dirty jobs in the boating industry. This man does the "gut-runs" at the big fishing tournaments in Ocean City MD. In otherwords, he takes a barge full of fish pieces from the piers to a place it can be dumped. The tournaments happen in August, the magazine was scheduled to run in June, and I was hired in Feb. As you can imagine, there were no guts to be had, in fact the gut barge was dry-docked for repairs at a garage just off the parking lot. Fortunately I was able to get low enough that you couldn't tell we were not on the water. All that was needed was a little retouching to remove some fence and part of a pickup truck. The boats you see in the background are actually dry-docked boats in the parking lot!



This one was done for a Halloween photo exhibit for the local chapter of ASMP. The theme was "trick or treat". I had seen the house around my neighborhood, and always wanted to shoot it. The owners have so much stuff all over the place it's insane. My picture doesn't do it justice. But it reminded me of the gingerbread house from "Hansel & Gretel", and this was the perfect opportunity. So I went out and bought a sweat suit and an old-lady wig, and recruited my Mother-in-law as a model. She refuses to look at this picture by the way. I shot her in the studio on a blue-screen, shot the apple seperately, and combined all 5 images together in photoshop to create the final image. It was recieved so well, it was used as the only image for the invitations and web promotions.



No real interesting story here, I just like the image a lot. It was shot for WatchTime Magazine. It is Robert Parker, the US's leading wine critic. My task was to create an interesting portrait at Mr. Parker's home that incorporated wine and watches. I saw the map of France and knew I wanted to incorporate that into the background, but the test images of my assistant were just too plain. Then I found some wine bottles, set them up on his kitchen counter, placed a light behind them, and shot through them to Mr. Parker. The resulting image of Mr. Parker is in the shape of a wine glass with the negative space of the bottles. Serendipity baby, serendipity!

Best of my 2008 (and earlier) Corporate & Editorial photos

Hey There,
Welcome to my blog. It's January, so I thought I should start out by showing you highlights from past jobs. Enjoy...




This 1st image was shot for M.I.T. for an article in their alumni magazine, to illustrate an article about the subject's donation to the school's new sci-fi library. I have been doing photo-composites a lot, but this was the first time I had created an entire fictional world. The biggest challenge was to make the subject come off in a flattering way, and minimize any characteristics that would indicate she was not a professional model...




This next image was shot for Brandweek Magazine of Geico's Ted Ward. It was for an article on the Marketers of the Year. Brandweek chose not to run this one, but ran a more conservative option (seen here) I did of Ward holding a photo-composited Gekko in his hand. I like this one better. It plays off the idea that Ward is an idea man, and he came up with a huge idea... Through the use of a fish-eye lens I made the tiny bulb he was holding into a huge "idea" above his head, and to make the idea even bigger, the bulb is being lit by the sun in the sky. Oh, and he's standing on a road as a symbol of auto insurance... I thought it was brilliant.



This Image was shot for the University of Buffalo's alumni magazine. This man works at the Smithsonian in Washington DC, so I was hoping to get him inside a diorama of cavemen or something similar, as if he had become a permanent fixture there, but the folks at the Smithsonian shot me down. He was also in the middle of doing a lot of travel and had a very limited timeframe available for me. So, since there was no budget for a scout day, and there would be no access to any exhibit areas, I asked my contact to think of interesting locations where I would be allowed to shoot. When I arrived on location, they had picked out one location, on a roof with the Capitol building in the background. From the Smithsonian, the Capitol was barely visible through the haze, and the sky was white. I was able to persuade them that we should shoot the front of the building even though "it's been done hundreds of times already". I pulled out my battery operated lights and started setting up just as the clouds began to break. I shot him exactly where I wanted, and in 15 minutes he was free to go. I then made a few exposures for the sky and the building. Back at my studio, I carefully blended all the different images together to make what you see here. Hopefully they've not seen something like this done hundreds of times!

Phew, I didn't think this would take so long. More later...

Thanks for looking!