My assistant Dan and I traveled to Ashland, OR to photograph this assignment for the July issue of Natural Health. The Boutenkos (or Raw Family as they are more commonly known) live a pure raw food diet and were super cool! They made us feel really welcome in their home and gave us some cool cookbooks and DVDs. We photographed them making a tasty raw pizza and a spinach smoothie, eating at their table, and hiking in a nearby park. The shots came out great.
At one critical point during the shoot, Dan was outside with a strobe shooting in to the kitchen for some back lighting. All of sudden, it started hailing really hard just I was taking the critical shot of the smoothie being poured into a glass. Dan had an umbrella outside because it looked a little stormy. His quick thinking saved the shot, himself, and the light all at once. Cheers to Dan!
I had a lot of fun shooting this one with Jen Davison and Rachel DeSchepper for Portland Spaces. The shot’s really about the product, but there’s so much life in Joanna’s face that it really makes it something special. I also love the bold color tones all complimenting each other. Fun stuff!
Recently, I photographed a remodeled home for my newest architectural client, Jessica Helgerson Interior Design. Jessica’s clean and modern design aesthetic was perfect for a young hip family relocating to Portland. From what she tells me, it was a pretty striking change between what the house was and what it is today. It was a real joy to photograph and we got some great shots.
An article about Jessica and the home was published today on Design*Sponge, a website dedicated to home and product design run by Brooklyn-based writer, Grace Bonney.
Here’s one of my favorites from the shoot.
UPDATE: Design*Sponge’s Grace Bonney spotlighted one of my photos of the EMP Museum at the end of last week. Thanks Grace!
These are always fun to do and it’s so nice to be a regular contributer to a magazine. I have now shot three of these product features for Portland Spaces in my studio with Jen Davison and Rachel DeSchepper.
This tearsheet is from the most recent issue where we focused on handmade objects by local Portland artisans. The challenge with the opening shot was getting it to look like a studio product shot, but a little bit more natural. We also had a tight layout, so the positioning of the branches and the bird feeder was super critical. I’m really happy how it came out.
April was a great month for me in Portland Monthly. I shot three full page spreads, two for the April issue and one for the Northwest Golf annual special edition that came with the issue. Here are the tearsheets.
Portland Monthly April 2008 | Cornershop: Noun | AD: Pete Ivey
Noun is a cute antique boutique store in the Belmont Neighborhood of Portland, OR. The owner, Stephanie Sheldon (pictured), was super nice and really fun to photograph. I onlysed two lights for this shot. One light in the main room bouncing off the ceiling to on camera right. Another light in the anteroom bounced off the ceiling area on camera left. Kind of a classic foreground/background cross lighting technique to build contrast, but softened because the light is indirect.
Portland Monthly April 2008 | Hitlist: Pistils | AD: Michael Novak
Like the Cornershop, Hitlist focuses on local business in Portland. To illustrate the unique garden stores you find around town, Mike and I shot Pistils on NE Mississippi. These busy shots can be a little daunting, but the trick is to find your angle then simplify the styling. You want it to look neat and organized, but not sterile. Plus adding a human element always helps make an interior come to life. I used two lights again, but this time all the lights were bounced off camera left. The store had no windows on that side, so I wanted to reduce the fall off from the daylight coming in from the right. I didn’t want it to look fake either, just a nice mix.
Northwest Golf 2008 | The Gear Guide | AD: Jason Blackheart
For this studio shot, I was given a challenge. Jason asked me to shoot these four golf clubs and make it look like a Jill Greenberg shot. Since Jill shoots mostly people and monkeys, I was really excited by the idea of replicated her lighting style with a shiny metal product. I was really happy with the results and so was the magazine. I’ll be posting a tutorial on how it did soon.
When I started this news blog, I didn’t have a clear idea of what it would do or what kind of feedback it would get. I wrote a bunch of articles on what I’ve been doing and also some technical and business articles. I’ve learned that people (and Google) really like my technical/business articles.
So, in order to focus this New blog, I’ve moved all my technical/business articles to a new blog:
Recently on my photoblog and a personal email sent to my friends, family, and colleagues, I asked that they nominate me to be given a scholarship from Chase Jarvis to fly to Chicago and attend the ASMP Strictly Business 2 Conference. The SB2 conference is something I wanted to attend to sharpen my business skills. I am basically self taught and just about everything that I know about business, I’ve learned from my father Jeff Barbour, Philip Beaurline, John Spiro, ASMP and EP. I’ve made many mistakes and learned a lot over the last six years, experiences that I pass on to my close-knit group of young photographers and self-employed entrepreneurs. By going to SB2, I knew I would learn more skills and share that knowledge in return.
I don’t mean to brag, but Oregon is probably the best place to do a location photo shoot. I would say even better than California, unless you’re shooting models in bikinis and board shorts (the beaches are a little chilly here). I originally moved here for personal reasons; mostly looking a change of pace from the East Coast. But after living here for a couple years, I realized how fortunate I was to find a photographer’s dreamland.
My stock agency, PhotoShelter, just came out with a new cool stock photo widget. It’s a rotating slideshow of all my images available for licensing. The cool thing about it, is you can embed it into your blog, social networking page, desktop, email, what have you.
