Best Gig EVER!!

Spent the last 6 days traveling through the great states of CO, WY, UT, ID with a group of British, Irish and Scottish travel agents. It was called a "FAM" which is short for a Familiarity tour where these agents(and photographer) get to travel around to tourist sites and get wined and dined by the tourism departments of each state. The hope is that the agents will steer their customers toward their destinations.


Never in my 20 years in business have I gotten paid to shoot funpix and get to stay in 5 star hotels, eat Steak Dinners, go on rafting trips, see each state's finest attractions and get to sit on a shuttle bus and not have to drive. It was pretty amazing. One of the best things about it was getting to hang out with the Brits. My oh my those folks know how to cut up and have a good time. We ended up closing down the bars in every town we visited. The humor and camaraderie were awesome.


It'll definitely be hard to get back to the daily grind.

Farm Worker Debacle

Went out and shot some Hispanic farmworkers harvesting Ranunculus flowers to help illustrate the ongoing immigration debate going on in the Senate. It's one of those issues that always pops-up around Spring. I've said this before and I'll say it again, we need to show some respect for these folks. This kind of work is backbreaking and hard and most Americans just won't do this. When the politicians started driving these immigrant laborers away in States like Alabama and Georgia, I had a strong feeling that within One planting cycle, they'd be begging them to come back. It happened and as a result, we saw the stories of American farmers who had to let their crops rot on the vine since their weren't enough immigrant farm workers to pick them.
I think we are lucky to have them and should let them stay and be productive members of our society. Legally that is.

Recent Images

Just a few selects from various assignments I've been working on lately. I suppose I should start calling them commissions since most of them are of a more corporate nature. I'm finding a lot of interest in photojournalism-style photography in the corporate world. Many, many companies and organizations need the well lit portraits we are all used to for their marketing materials, but they also have great demand for good documentarians to come in and capture dynamic images of what they do or produce. For me lately, it's been for hospitals, theme parks, Science labs, Sheriff's departments, and a nice variety of other places. I also think companies who hire photogs are becoming much more photo-saavy as the whole reality based media culture we live in has flourished. For instance, I had a marketing manager who hired me to come in and shoot "real" stills of their doctors seeing patients. The photos they were using were all stock stuff where the doctors all looked like George Clooney and the patients like Angelina Jolie. The guy just flat out told he didn't like that "stock image" look. I looked at him with a big smile and said "I couldn't agree more"

St Patties Day Chicago Style

Shot a conference in Chicago last week and was able to get away and shoot some of the St. Patrick's Day festivities around town. I must say it was rather exciting to see them turn the Chicago River Shamrock green. It was such a stark contrast from the dark, gloomy and gray atmosphere around Chicago. That in no way reflects the people who are unusually sunny for such a chilly place. As my cousin Meredith and I walked around town, it was fun to see all the crazy green outfits from beer hats to green tu tu's to painted beards and mustaches and all kinds of other crazy get-ups. It struck me that many of the revelers were very young and very inebriated.
The next day we went to a more localized parade in a suburbs near the O'Hare airport. This parade seemed to be more of a social, who ya know kind of parade. There were were local politicians, a cement company truck, a plumber who had a float with an Irishman sitting on a toilet, and the local Chicago Police Dept. bagpipe brigade. I was a bit more privy to this one because it felt more authentic and you really got a sense of the neighborhood.
Chicago is a great town with really warm, funny,sincere people.

New Line of Sequestration

Decided to spend a nice sunny Sunday in Tijuana to do a little sightseeing and take a few snaps along the way. Upon entering I was immediately was hit with a sight that brought this whole sequestration issue into reality. A line of people, at least a mile back , waiting to cross into the U.S. I can't say for sure if it was because of the Sequester cuts but in the 22 years I've been crossing over into TJ, I've never seen anything close to this many people waiting. The line went zigzagging through neighborhoods and along a network of streets that all lead to the border and went back as far as the eye could see. Now in those 22 years, I've endured many long, inconvenient lines that were brought on by the events of 9/11, holiday travel and just increased growth in the region. This was the most dramatic spike in border crosser wait time I've ever seen.
So I headed on into town to have my fun knowing full well I was in for a doozie of a wait but also hoping it was some sort of fluke and might miraculously whittle down after a few hours.
Well, I was wrong, it got worse. So I followed the line to the end, losing full site of the border as I wound back further and further from all the hub bub. Each minute walking back became a painful reminder that it would be an hour forward once in the line. So I get back to the end and my nightmare became a reality. Walk 3 steps, wait a few minutes, walk another 2 and wait a few more, 45 minutes, still no border in sight. The one saving grace was that there was plenty of good people watching, food vendors, a guy singing really bad Mexican Karaoke and vendors selling all kinds of crap from Porcelain Jesus statues to this huge Angry Bird Pinata. I figured what better way to spend that time than to document it.
3 hours later, I finally made to the Customs inspector when he asked me what I was doing in Mexico. I told him I was just here to wait in this lovely fucking line! Well, I was at least thinking that.