Trans-Canadian Cargo

I love trains. If you’re a train lover, the Trans-Canadian Highway all throughout BC is an epic place to spot them.

Miller Lite Rolling Stone ad

Late last year, I shot a fun lil project with DDB for Miller Lite that ran full-page in the November issue of Rolling Stone. I’ve never been one to scrawl my own poems or drunken rants onto the walls of the many bars I’ve visited in my years, so it was fun when the agency decided they liked my handwriting the best and I also got to play the role of drunken art director, in addition to (sober) photographer.

We shot this on a weeknight in one of my favorite Chicago neighborhood spots, The Charleston.

To get technical for a moment, the big challenge on this one was keeping the foreground wall element reserved for copy in focus while also not letting the background Miller Lite neon become too soft so that it wouldn’t be legible. Of course we could’ve just shot plates of both sides of the frame in sharp focus, but I strive to keep things authentic whenever possible and didn’t want to create two different focal planes in the one shot. We ended up shooting at f18, iso2000, at varied shutter speeds and using a couple strobes at high power to light the interior of the dark bar and foreground false wall. It wasn’t the easiest approach but I think helps better sell the realism in what is otherwise a rather manufactured image.

Huge thanks to everyone at Miller & DDB along with my small crew Brad, Josh, Dave and Cooper.

Cheers!

Shedd Aquarium Animal Meals for Chicago Magazine

As far as assignments go, it’s hard to beat this one! We got an exciting behind-the-scenes look at the Shedd Aquarium while photographing seven (the tortoise didn’t make it to print) of their cutest animals. I could go on and on about how much fun it was to get to briefly hang with these critters, but I’ll spare you.

As you can see, the fun twist to this assignment was to show each animal while eating (the cute sea otters look surprisingly terrifying while downing their lunch while the friendly belugas somehow manage to look even more friendly). Each animal image was paired with a stylized overhead shot of their meal as if served in a fancy restaurant. It’s not even much of a stretch—the Shedd representative told us most of the animals’ food is sourced from places that might even be of higher quality than the food served to humans.

You can catch this spread in all its full-page glory in the November 2019 issue of Chicago Magazine.

Huge thanks to everyone at the magazine: Martha, Michael, Katherine, Tal. Special thanks to Johnny and the rest of the team at Shedd for the repeated visits. Food styling by Gabriel Miles Freeman. Prop styling and assisting by Allison Ziemba.

Rahm Emanuel for Chicago Magazine

I had the opportunity to photograph Chicago’s outgoing mayor, Rahm Emanuel, for a Chicago Magazine exit interview covering his time in office. While I won’t get into the politics here, it was an honor to get the sitting mayor of my hometown in front of my lens.

The mayor’s office provided the location, a newly constructed school, which thankfully contained one angle offering a nice view of nearby downtown. To maximize our short amount of time allotted to us, we had two different looks ready to go adjacent to each other.

I really wanted one option to have a super shallow DOF but was nervous shooting at f1.2 would be risky as I’d probably only get a dozen frames but decided to go for it anyway. I also used a continuous light which isn’t something I’d normally do but figured I could shoot much quicker and get more takes if I wasn’t strobbing the mayor to death while shooting in Al Servo mode at f1.2. Overall, while not perfect, I was happy with the results and knew we had our “main” setup which was a bit more of a safe shot to fall back on.

For that, I used two strobes with large softboxes and a white bounce and a third strobe near the lens for fill. Plates were shot a bit closed down on exposure to darken the exterior and add some contrast to the room and the two frames were composited together. I don’t normally like relying on merging multiple frames to make a photo this way but figured it was the best approach since we’d need to match the bright daylight from outside.

Overall I was happy with the results and our ten minutes with the mayor was over before we knew it.

The gymnasium was off limits to shoot in as it was being surfaced, however, the mayor wanted to check it out so we followed him downstairs and I snapped a few more photos along the way. Then we spent the next hour loading up more or less every piece of photo equipment I own back into my Ford Focus hatchback and off we went.

Huge thanks to Emily Johnson and Martha Williams at Chicago Magazine, Alisa Radoi on grooming, and Brad Danner for assisting and shooting the behind the scenes images.

Cody Hudson for Sonos

Cody Hudson had me over to his studio late last year to document a project he did for Sonos. Always love a good Cody hang, especially when I get to shoot him doing his art. It was also rad to shoot for a company whose products I love and use as much as my Sonos speakers.

I’m off to Miami this afternoon for a production and I’ll be honest, as much of a pro-winter person I claim to be, a few days in 80-degree sunny weather will be much welcomed.

Haven’t forgotten I still want to get a UAE trip report up with more images (hopefully Sri Lanka as well, though I didn’t take my SLR out once while there, regrettably now but purposefully at the time).

The more serious post I did over the weekend was a brutal reminder that putting honest thoughts online is a bit torturous to me. After posting I had a wave of dread wash over me that I was coming off as a smug or jaded professional who thinks getting back to his roots is somehow special. That’s fair if that’s how someone takes it, however, I was reminded by my lovely girlfriend Allison that doing this blog should be more of a personal reward and I shouldn’t feel an urge to please any potential readers, as few of them as there will realistically be in this dusty corner of the internet.

So that’s the plan moving forward. This is my space. I get to post whatever I want. I hope you like hearing about simulation computer games, my basement tiki bar dreams and the future of bitcoin. Just kidding, kind of…

ABS: Always Be Shooting

I started this blog over the holidays, when I didn’t have any jobs going on, as a way to keep myself motivated to create and share when I wasn’t being paid to do so — to keep the gears moving and muscles from forgetting. Downtime, while being scary in the feast-or-famine world of commercial photography, shouldn’t automatically be interpreted as a negative. Giving your brain some time off to consider other things and relax & recharge is a positive. Even more so, however, is freeing yourself from the business-as-usual mindset. As a photographer of modest success over the last few years, I’ve been conscious of the urge to stay within my lane and not break things (jobs are happening so let’s give the people what they want and not experiment with new approaches). While I’ve always been a bit all over the place in regards to what subjects I like to shoot, I’ve also been afraid of falling into habits (good or bad ones) and not being able to change them a few years down the road.

This is an industry that loves to follow trends. It’s incredibly hard to forge a new path and convince the world they should like what you’re doing, so the more common approach is to emulate what already is working. That’s fine until you find that the trends have changed and you no longer know how to adjust or even recognize the need to change what you’re doing.

But that’s all big picture stuff and gets exhausting to consider.

Let’s focus on something smaller, something that I’ve tried to do regularly in my career and consider to be extremely helpful in my role as a commercial photographer. It’s simple: I continue to challenge myself. Big jobs with proper rates are great but you need a large crew to make it possible to capture the maximum amount of content in a day to justify your clients’ budgets. Decisions are outsourced (with your direction) to your teams of producers, stylists, lighting assistants, etc, etc, etc, as it’s simply not possible to do everything yourself in such a short amount of time. This is fine but can also be a recipe for stagnation in the longer term. My personal favorite way to keep myself balanced, grounded, and thinking fresh is to go out and shoot all by myself.

No assistants to help so I need to keep the gear load down or risk angering my aging body; no fancy lighting package so I need to think on the fly and combat often-terrible light conditions with limited tools (and learn which natural light conditions work best); no crew to help style so I need to consider available things I can use to help round out a shot; no producer to yell at me when we’re behind schedule so I need to keep moving fast in order to maximize content and not be shooting all day long; no benefit of owning a space so I need to shoot in “live” locations, be flexible and get creative or learn to be outgoing and incorporate people you aren’t paying to be there; no room full of agency and client opinions so I’m really only there to please myself and am therefore more able to experiment and take chances on things I’m not sure will work.

Finding commercial success is great but continuing to do the same things simply because people are giving you money to do them doesn’t lead to guaranteed happiness or evolution as an artist. That’s all stuff you need to actively work on no matter how successful you get.

So that’s what I do. I shoot for people I like but don’t necessarily have much or any money. I shoot for local bars & restaurants that have great style but not a huge budget. I shoot for myself while traveling and love looking at new locations from a photographer’s perspective. All of this work helps keep me on my toes and feel more comfortable when I’m on a big budget commercial set and everyone is looking at me for answers.

This doesn’t mean every time I go out and shoot some low budget photos I’ll end up with some great new portfolio work (although this is always the goal no matter what I’m shooting), but the act of doing it keeps the creative juices flowing and gives me new ideas and tricks to keep in the ole photographer tool belt, be it on the shooting or editing side of things.

Anyway, enough typin’, let’s get back to shootin’!

Above are some examples of recent one-man-band shoots I’ve done for some restaurant/bar friends Dorian’s, Good Measure, & Dante’s Tavern.

Dubai

This scene was surreal. I’ve been itching to visit Dubai for longer than I’ve been traveling on the regular as an adult with disposable income and, as I’ve been telling anyone who asks, the place exceeded my expectations of disbelief. There were numerous moments on our brief trip where I stood before reality and didn’t quite believe it. My most vivid memory being watching the light show projected onto this building, the world’s tallest, at night.

I’ll try to do a proper writeup on my trip to UAE (which was very rad) sometime this weekend, tho currently buried in job prepping. Back to reality in the new year…