Award Winner

I produced this project last year and it won a Manny Award for Best Medical Device Campaign. The agency, Lehman Millet has been a long time client and the very talented people there have provided some of my more interesting assignments over the years. I'm pleased that work we've done together has brought them some recognition. 

One thing of note on this project. When the Creative Director approached me about this I was concerned about getting a hornets nest, because if / when this happened it would become my responsibility. So I did a quick ebay search and voila, there was this beautiful, iconographic hornets nest available. It was a bit pricey, apparently these are collectable. I just bought it even though this wasn't a for real project yet. It became a piece of sculpture in my studio and then a few months later the project happened. It's still here in it's sculptural form, really an amazing object...

And for shooting the hornets, get this: we found a guy who does insect taxidermy...

Digital quality of life

I've been busy with commissions the last few months, not so much on my own pictures though. Some of that work will eventually find it's way for public display. 

Through it all I've invested in some new technology and made techno lifestyle improvements. The first being upgrading to the new version of Photoshop CS6. I tried the Beta version and never went back. In my view it's a substantial upgrade, one feature alone is huge for me and worth whatever the cost is. Saving in the background, that screen shot above is a welcome sight for me.

I work on big files. Routinely have layered 16 bit files over 1GB, often close to or over 2 and they can take awhile to save. Extra large psb files can take like 10 minutes. Now I can keep working while Photoshop saves those files, in previous versions when Photoshop was saving a file - that's all it could do was save. The new dark interface is pretty sexy, I'm kind of an interface snob so that appeals to me, patch tool now works on a separate layer with content aware algorithms... There are other features too, but saving in the background is much appreciated by me.

Like I said I work on big files, so I've had a RAID 0 for scratch and data files for years. RAID 0 reads and writes you data across multiple drives simultaneously - I've got a 4 drive RAID so each drive gets one quarter of the data. It's a lot faster than a single drive. I got a tip from Rick at Mac Gurus to stripe my disks across different enclosures - I've got two 4 drive enclosures for 8 total drives - and he was right, I did indeed get a performance upgrade. See my screen shot above for read and write speeds, pretty cool, and another lifestyle upgrade. 

I've also digested a new Mac Pro tower in the past few months. 16GB RAM modules are now available for it so I put 3 of those in it, big lifestyle improvement. While I don't have any pictures I can share right now as new, I can tell you  a new Mac Pro tower with 48GB of RAM, that saves Photoshop files in the background, striped across 4 drives in 2 enclosures is new for me and I'm pretty excited about it. 

Public display of affection

My son and I went to the driving range now that spring is here, upon walking into the pro shop was greeted by one of the ads I shot with Arnold for Titleist last fall. It's always fun to run into my work in public, more so when there's someone along to share it with...

Archive

I just re-upped my subscription to Archive and there was tab for rankings, so I clicked on it and voila there I was...

The Replacements

There's a lab at Mass General Hospital that tests and studies joint replacement parts. They get them sent in from all over the world. Made a visit there for an editorial client. Here's what worn out hip replacement joints look like.... Ouch and kinda yuck, but also pretty interesting. 

Get a Grip

I shot these recently for Brunner, an ad agency in Atlanta. Wonderful people to work with. The photography was relatively straight forward for me, the challenge was getting the surfaces that resembled a  bench top of a golf club fitting environment. The wood surface above was a piece of new butcher block a few days prior to the shoot. Tip: use steel wool that has been steeped in vinegar as a base layer for distressing wood. You can also add some tea into the brew for more of reddish color.

The above piece is the real deal, it's a used grip repair station. Heavy duty piece of steel with attachments you can't see in the picture. I end up with the props after a lot of shoots, and it's not uncommon to have some indecision about what to do with the debris... I was finally a victim of market forces a few years ago and lost my huge studio with a great location. Still have a great Boston location, but not enough space to store weird things like this. Tossing the stuff seems like such a waste, selling it is time consuming and I don't have a place keep things just because I have them, it can be a problem... Not this time though, this found a home after we moved it around the studio for a few weeks...

Stuffed up

We found the above teddy bear while sourcing stuffed animals for the campaign below. We ended up commissioning all of the animals we photographed for the ads, but I thought this one was worthy of a photo op. It just looks so sad and the fur is so authentically aged, would have worked for our concept but would have been very difficult to modify for the necessary bloating. 

Actually one of the interesting things I learned when speaking to the artists who make real teddy bears is; the proportions we wanted, big body little head for our bear is counter to what is typically made for a kid's stuffed animal. They usually make them in the proportions of babies, whose heads are in larger proportions to their bodies than the rest of us. 

Which points at a challenge with these kinds of projects, when we commission artists or artisans for props for photography, they usually make what they make. What we need is a prop for photography, and there can be a difference. In the case of the bear in the ad below, the teddy bear artist provided us with mostly what we asked for, but we ended up removing his arms and head so they could be positioned separately on set, took some of the fur from his back side and added it in front so we was even more bloated. There was an apparatus behind him holding him together and pushing him out in places. Those kinds of things are difficult to get from someone who isn't used to taking direction on their creations, we don't need a stuffed animal in this case per say, we need a fat bear prop. I've worked with the same model maker now for probably close to 20 years, and whenever we have custom props like this, even if he doesn't make them, I still try to get him included as he understands we need a prop for photography.

Another challenge on this one, we produced the bear ad on the week between Christmas and New Years...