Late Bloomer Zach Ancell Discovers a New Track

When he was a child, Zach Ancell was no Ansel Adams. He wasn’t given a camera as a life-changing gift. No older relative inspired him to the visual arts. He didn’t know early on that photography was his gift or his professional destiny.

In fact, he was “halfway through” college, he says, before he recognized photography as something he loved and could excel at professionally. While attending the University of Oregon on a track scholarship, he picked up a camera and started shooting portraits of his teammates. Soon he was shooting athletes on other Ducks teams, and then things came into sharper focus.

“I realized it was something that I’d love to do with my life,” Zach says.

As his portraits made the rounds, Zach took on a project chronicling the 2010 NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships, which Oregon was hosting. After “some time, a few emails and some marketing on my end,” the university recognized his talent and hired him to shoot other Ducks teams and athletes for marketing materials and other purposes.

A few short years later, Zach is enjoying life as a commercial sports photographer. He’s completing work on several promotional images for the U of O’s 2012-2013 teams and already planning new campaigns for the 2013-2014 seasons.

And he serves as a strong reminder that you never know what life has in store – and that sometimes, the best artists aren’t born, but created.

“Growing up, I was the athlete, not the artist,” Zach says. “So it should come as no surprise that when I finally discovered my passion for photography, I naturally coupled it with my passion for athletics.”

Click here to see more of Zach’s sports-themed art.

Irene Pena Goes With the ‘Overflow’ in Costa Rica

You’d expect a fashion photographer like Irene Pena to be creative, and she is. What makes her unique, though, is her eye – and her ability to inject equal parts motion and emotion into her work.

Irene – who counts fashion and yoga photography among her top genres, right alongside lifestyle – put this skill to good use in a recent project combining fashion and fine art, titled “Desbordamiento” (The Spanish word for “overflowing”). Working in Costa Rica with a Holga camera, Irene teamed with local fashion designer Angela Hurtado Pimentel on a concept designed specifically to break fashion’s sometimes strict parameters.

“The concept behind the design of these dresses was the idea of ‘overflowing,’” notes Irene, who is herself a native of Costa Rica. “Fashion can become a rigid mold that sets boundaries for behavior, but people cannot be contained entirely in any of these molds. They simply spill out.”

While she often uses cutting-edge techniques and clever creativity to give her subjects a sense of motion, Irene found that Hurtado’s designs did that by themselves. “The restrictive silhouettes in these dresses are won over by this overflowing of textures and volume,” she says.

In a way, Irene adds, Hurtado’s dresses are “a representation of our inability to conform.”

“These dresses aim to discover that the fashion system can be subverted to create meaningful and carefully handcrafted pieces,” she says, “as unique as the people who may wear them.”

Click here to see more of Irene’s dynamic imagery.

William Geddes: Keeping it Real

William Geddes developed an interest in the visual arts at an early age when he discovered a talent and passion for both photography and lighting design for school productions. Though he’s spent years perfecting the science and technicalities that underlie his profession, he knows better than most that the best photography is not created by more technology and technique, but less.

That’s the theory behind “The Designers,” a series of lifestyle portraits that’s been William’s central preoccupation of late.

The award-winning lifestyle photographer—recent honors include the Canada’s Northern Lights Award for Excellence in Travel Journalism and Photography—has completed advertising/publishing assignments for A-list clients including JC Penney, Samsung and LG Electronics. It’s his pet “Designers” project, however, that showcases his favorite approach and greatest skill: “A natural ease,” William says, “and a sense that you can enter into the lives of the people in the images.”

The portraits are not candid shots; the subjects are most certainly posed but they’re posed in their own space, in their own clothes, in their own comfortable ways. It’s a reality, according to William, that you just can’t fake with props or clever lighting … and it’s paramount “for authenticity.”

“If the subjects are too conscious of my presence, and the camera’s presence, and the lighting, that creates a block,” he says. “I want all that technique to disappear.”

When it does—when it’s just William’s lens and a person in their comfort zone—that’s when “the subject shines,” the photographer adds.

Click here to see more of “The Designers”, and other examples of William’s less-is-more style.

Rafael Astorga Goes Hard in Brooklyn

Last fall, photographer Rafael Astorga spent more than a week inside a moving-van-turned-mobile-studio-turned-refrigerated-truck (long story) on the streets of Brooklyn, NY.  Armed with a skeleton crew, some studio gear, and a rack of Brooklyn Nets apparel, he photographed more than 200 Brooklynites who were happy to mug for the camera as they welcomed the basketball team to their new hometown.

Tapped for the project by Adidas Global Creative Director Eric Vellozzi, Rafael shot hipsters, wiseguys, journos, poets, cooks, co-eds, ballers, rappers, DJs, and grannies to create the ultimate snapshot of Brooklyn’s famous swagger. Casting took place in real time at some of the borough’s most iconic locations, including Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Bowery. 

Speed was the name of the game: the shoot flew from the get-go. Casting, photography, processing, and publishing all happened out of the truck, all on the same day. Adidas NBA Marketing Director Mitty Arnold was even on site to instantly approve images for the company’s official social media venues, while participants blasted their portraits all over social networking sites.

In the weeks that followed, portraits were displayed on JumboTrons in Times Square and both within and on the exterior of Barclays Center, the home of the Nets. Adidas also released select portraits in a series of regional print and digital advertisements as part of their “All In” campaign. 

Check out Rafael’s website and FoundFolios portfolio for additional images and more information on this awesome shoot.

Laughing With Bob Stevens

Nobody can accuse photographer Bob Stevens of lacking a sense of humor.

The Southern California photographer (and filmmaker, writer and painter) has catalogued plenty of “serious” work – his portraiture shines, his “Stories from the Streets of Los Angeles” portfolio captures the spirit and diversity of a great American city and his commercial work featuring boats and motor vehicles skillfully and professionally portrays the beauty and power of those machines.

But this is an artist who’s not afraid to smile. Bob’s a wonderful reminder that great art doesn’t have to be somber or even particularly meaningful – sometimes, great art can just be funny, especially when it’s created by an artist with a keen eye and whip-smart sense of the absurd.

Evidence of Bob’s funny bone fills his outrageous “LMAO” portfolio. And his seriously-hysterical approach is also on full display in his recent collection highlighting the strange life forms inhabiting the famous Venice Beach Boardwalk.

“I’ve long been fascinated by the Venice Boardwalk,” the photographer says. “So I set out on a sunny fall day to capture the unique personalities that roam this concrete strip along the sand.”

To manage some control of the wicked-bright and always-moving California sunlight, Bob created a “sort of mobile photo booth” – though this led to the mistaken assumption by many of the milling artisans, performers and pedestrians that Bob wanted to charge for the privilege of taking their portraits.

“They were pleasantly surprised when I informed them that I would print an image of their choice with my battery-powered printer immediately following the brief ‘session,’” he notes. “I like to say that you can’t make this stuff up … and this is definitely a one-of-a-kind place with one-of-a-kind people.”

Click here to check out more of Bob’s pleasantly surprising, one-of-a-kind work.

Overnight Sensation: Dan Wagner Can’t Sleep, Again

The night belongs to Dan Wagner.

His latest self-published photography book, Insomnia: The City That Never Sleeps (August 2012), is drawing significant attention (Joel Rose, author of The Blackest Bird and Kill Kill Faster Faster, calls Dan “as sure-handed and accomplished a storyteller under whose spell we…could ever hope to fall”). Insomnia takes an unblinking look at nocturnal New York, and now the Huntington, NY-based photographer is putting a night-in-the-city sequel to bed.

Dan is the creative force behind two previous photography books: Few Are Chosen: Photographs 2010-2012 (February 2012) and Never See Nothing: Photographs (May 2012). While his artistic skill is evident in all of his collections, there’s a clear edge to this native son’s love affair with his city. “Images illuminated by my 30-year-old Sylvania flashbulbs are emblazoned on my overstimulated brain,” he says in the Insomnia intro, which goes on to explain his fascination with nighttime in The Big Apple.

“I toss, turn and wonder what’s happening at Webster Hall in the East Village, if there’s a good crowd of club-hoppers at the West Side Meat Market, or how Steven, my favorite bouncer at The Fat Black Pussycat, is doing,” Dan writes.

That same passion will fill the next edition of his black-and-white Insomnia series, expected later this year. “Because city nightlife changes with the seasons, I’m already planning new night shots,” Dan says. “In fact, just thinking about the moments I’ll catch as snow falls on busy New Yorkers is already keeping me awake.”

Click here to see shots from the first Insomnia collection and other examples of Dan’s signature work.

Dark, Wet & Noisy with Eszter + David

San Francisco-based photography duo Eszter Marosszeky and David Matheson certainly have a knack for capturing unique, human poses. Their diverse portfolio depicts athletes twisted and contorted, tradespeople hard at work, families amid the majesty of nature, and even more examples of people being people, with all the beauty and complexity that entails.

A pair of recent ambitious photo projects falls into the first category: both shoots involved a sixteen-foot trampoline, and a whole lot of water.  First, the photo duo collaborated with Easton Lacrosse General Manager Doug Appleton to convince lacrosse star Mike Powell to show off his stuff.  The second shoot was done for cancer awareness non-profit Get In Front, and Eszter and David recruited a super talented slew of dancers from the San Francisco Ballet and Alonzo King Lines to pose for their cameras. 

The sessions were shot in their studios, some of them during an “Open Studio” event (where San Francisco artists open their studios to the general public to view their work, and in this case watch a photo shoot in progress).  Preplanning was key, as Eszter and David knew that dark, wet, and noisy can be less than ideal conditions for photography. As part of their preparation, the two rigged up some garden hoses and even more sprinklers to the studio ceiling. They played with different lighting to get the perfect feel, but after that there was still more work to be done: they needed to figure out how to safely contain the falling water so their landlord didn’t void their lease!

Once the shooting conditions were ideal (and risk-free), Eszter and David began to shoot their subjects twisting, turning, and posing in mid-air as water cascaded down around them from the ceiling.  During the shoot a live audience of onlookers watched as the photographers battled loud fans, exhausted dancers, and the difficulties inherent in being understood through fairly thick Aussie accents—and, of course, everything was wet.

Despite the chaotic nature of the shoot, there’s a singular peaceful beauty in the final photographs: something about the water droplets frozen in place around the front-lit dancers makes them the perfect crystalline complement to the chiseled perfection of their human forms. 

The photographers love the creative opportunities that using a trampoline for a shoot affords them, and they’ve used a similar concept for many other projects. “What I love about using the trampoline is that it affords a lot more freedom for the subject, and tons more latitude for the photographer,” explains David.  And creatives love it too: The duo’s raw talent and the fun and beauty of their shoots have clients jumping at the opportunity to work with them.

Click here to check out a behind-the-scenes video of the shoot and see more of Eszter and David’s work.

Jeff Berting: Man of Action

The art of the action shot often eludes even the most talented and resourceful photographers.

Capturing a blurred image of an athlete whirring by is no great shakes; managing to focus on bodies in motion is only slightly more impressive. But freeze-framing high-speed subjects mid-spin, -kick or -jump, at exactly the right moment, in exactly the right light … that ain’t easy.

By remembering two key pieces of advice – one from a high school art teacher, the other from his wife (a fellow photographer) – California photog Jeff Berting has become a master of dynamic photography. His “Surf/Sup/Body,” “Active Lifestyle” and “Craftsmen” portfolios are filled with unparalleled examples of humans doing their thing, captured at precise angles and in moments that add beauty and depth.

For a fantastic example of this you need look no further than the above image, part of a shoot Jeff was hired to do for Southern California skateboard manufacturer Maki Longboards. The image was selected as part of PDN’s recent “The Shot” Sports Photography competition, and it perfectly frames one of the moments Jeff knows so well, “when you wish your eyes had cameras in them.”

That always leads Jeff back to the good advice from his high school teacher (“take the ordinary and make it extraordinary”) and his wife (“don’t just use the camera to describe what you see, use it to interpret what you see”).

“By taking this advice to heart, I’m constantly challenging myself to keep looking for new perspectives,” Jeff says, “to go beyond the immediate and give the work my thumbprint.”

Click here to check out more of Jeff’s signature, action-packed work.

Flying High With Andrew Buchanan

Photographer Andrew Buchanan has always loved the feeling of being in the air—so much so, in fact, that he got his pilot’s license when he was only a teenager.   It seems natural, then, for a man who loves flying so much to make aerial photography such a big part of his career.

When he first moved to Seattle in 1998, Andrew fell in love with the city’s architecture.  Like most major cities, the unique designs of its buildings are a reflection of the character of the city itself.  Seattle residents like Andrew are a mirror image of their city: quirky, progressive, but solidly built upon a firm foundation. The photographer decided he wanted to capture these buildings as they’d rarely been seen, so he started booking architectural and land design firms as clients for his photography business and took to the skies to photograph what exactly he found so fascinating about the landscape and urban planning of his new hometown.

As word about his unique talent began to spread, Andrew’s business began to take off. Of course, there are challenges inherent in aerial photography that more traditional shooters don’t have to deal with: Andrew quickly found that at about $5 a minute, the cost to rent a helicopter for each individual job for which he was commissioned was prohibitive for his clients.

So to better serve them, and book more jobs, Andrew started combining projects from multiple clients into a single session in order to cut down on costs. His clients are happy to wait considering the quality of his work, and creatives are also happy he can charge lower prices by fulfilling multiple commissions in a single flight. 

Perhaps because of its uniqueness, the business model has managed to pay off. Andrew now averages between eight and ten aerial shoots a year for clients as varied as The University of Washington and global architecture firm NBBJ.  In fact, in 2012 he was commissioned for seventeen aerial jobs!

His work has deservedly garnered a lot of recognition, the most recent example being a featured spot on Photoshelter’s main buyer’s page—particularly impressive when you consider Andrew’s photo was chosen from a pool of 70,000 accounts.

Andrew looks forward every year to flying the friendly skies and doing these exciting shoots. “I think I enjoy it so much partlybecause of the way I look at the world and see photographs–it’s very graphic- and design-oriented. I love the challenge of compressing a three-dimensionalspace into a two-dimensional photograph.  That’s aerial photography in a nutshell. You don’t get much volume from 500 feet up!”

See more of Andrew’s impressive work here.

Inside The Mind of Michael Clinard

When Adweek Magazine contacted Michael Clinard about conceptual images for the mag’s year-end “Hot List” issue, the photographer knew he’d have to make a tight turnaround time, made tighter by the Thanksgiving holiday. But for an artist who thrives on pressure and never hesitates to push the creative envelope (or shred it), this was the good stuff.

On the day before Thanksgiving, Michael got his marching orders: create imagery representing Twitter for the magazine’s “Biggest Time Suck” list and the hit AMC program The Walking Dead (rated by Adweek as “Best Edge-of-Your-Seat TV Show”).

With an assist from a master prop builder, his friend John Lavin, the Seattle-based photographer concocted a brilliant design for the Twitter shot: a flock of blue Twitter-esque birds stealing the numbers off a simple clock. From his own gently bent mind he conceived an image of a zombie arm pointing a remote toward a television’s glow (beside an enormous bowl of cheese puffs, a Clinard staple).

This level of creativity—and impressively swift execution—is nothing new for Michael, whose work is always ingenious and just slightly off. Well, maybe that’s an unfair comparison to artists who actually are just slightly off: Michael is way off, a brilliant and imaginative conceptual artist who thinks so far out of the box his thoughts can’t even see the box from there. Whether he’s capturing images of a man swallowing a rainbow, hamsters guzzling Jack Daniels or a variety of oddly contorted models, Michael’s eye for angles and mind for messages never disappoint.

Both the Twitter-clock and zombie-arm shots scored with Adweek. The magazine’s creative director was especially pleased with the clock shot, which Michael notes started as a German cuckoo clock but evolved into the analog clock face and time-snatching bluebirds.

“I’m really thankful to have clients who trust my intuition and drive to deliver imagery that pushes both their expectations and those of their readership,” the artist says. “What a fun job!”

Click here to see more of Michael’s amazingly inventive work.

Martin Crook Is An Addict

Ontario-based illustrator Martin Crook freely admits to his dependency on caffeine. It would be hard to hide it, actually, as references to the stimulant are littered like so many used coffee filters throughout his colorful, imaginative work.

These java-fueled illustrations are “entirely autobiographical,” Martin notes—though he wonders if the proper reference might be “autopictorial”—and while he’s not ashamed of his penchant for percolators, he does consider his addiction “a double-edged sword”. While it consistently fuels his art, it occasionally over-stimulates it.

However, the illustrator acknowledges that no plan to stir up such drastic social change is perfect: His idea of Free Tea Clinics is less a view of some decaffeinated Utopia than “a nightmarish post-apocalyptic vision,” and therefore requires “staggering hordes of zombies sheltering from the nuclear winter.”

But that idea might change, he adds, after his morning cup of joe.

Grab your cream-and-two-sugars and click here to see what else Martin’s been brewing.

The Art of Marketing, According to Scott DuBar

Like many freelance artists, Scott DuBar often finds himself putting his own promotional efforts on the back burner to focus on a client’s immediate needs. However, a recent effort to catch the attention of a particular client unexpectedly led to one of the biggest marketing moves of his career.

When a “big potential client” requested a PDF portfolio, Scott went the whole nine yards. In addition to creating a top-shelf DVD of his sometimes surreal (but always insightful!) work, he created a special DVD case design…which wound up serving as Scott’s full-page advertisement for his first-ever appearance in the Directory of Illustration. (He’s Page 527, Scott notes proudly, of the January 2013 directory.)

Based on the design and content of his website, blog and other promotional materials, the DVD cover/full-page ad is actually a collage of nine different images, each intended to highlight one of Scott’s multiple styles and some of his offbeat humor.

While Scott’s yet to learn if he captured the heart and mind of that “big potential client,” he’s extremely proud of his Directory of Illustration ad – and he notes he’s “been getting work from other clients since I started using this promo piece.”

“This whole experience was a great reminder of the power of branding,” Scott says. “I’m super-excited about how everything came out!”

Click here to see more of Scott’s humorous and effective imagery.

Jim Cambon Goes Beneath the Surface

Photographer Jim Cambon has a love affair with shiny surfaces.

Over three decades of commercial photography shooting thousands of different products, he’s often found himself working with chrome, silver, gold and aluminum objects, not to mention glossy surfaces of all shapes and sizes—so when Waterpik needed an image to show how easily the reservoir of its Cordless Plus Waterflosser is filled, they knew just the artist who could make it happen.

“Most of the products I shoot feature one or more special surfaces,” says Jim, who notes all those shiny, reflective objects have their own special – often conflicting – lighting requirements, as do clear and colored plastics and stationary and running water.

All of these singular surfaces appear simultaneously in Jim’s Waterflosser shot, which was used on their website, print and packaging materials.

The son of an MIT engineer, Jim developed a fascination with machines early on (“before I started walking,” he claims). The photographer believes that enchantment with the inanimate has enhanced his ability to shoot challenging surfaces and angles. 

Other artists might balk at the challenge, but Jim’s portfolios are filled with shower heads, faucets, watches, bikes, automobiles and enough other polished products to reflect exactly how skilled he is.

A good example of his work with reflective surfaces is this classic Waterpik shot, which “presents one solution to the conflicting requirements of chrome and water, transparent and white plastic,” he says.

Click here to see more of Jim’s amazing photography of shiny products.

On The Move With Angela Coppola

Adding motion to their repertoires has become a familiar course for many still photographers, and Angela Coppola is among those branching out. The namesake of Coppola Studios in Boston has dabbled in video for over a year now, and admits it has “inspired me to see a project differently.”

“You think differently about every aspect: lighting, angles, how you want to say something,” Angela says. “Timing and production all change when you have moving parts.”

One of the photographer’s most ambitious motion projects to date is “Urbanites,” a self-assigned piece she’s using as a promo for new clients. With a crew including a set designer and logistical challenges like wardrobe changes, “Urbanites” involved considerably more preproduction than the motion work she’d done before. “My previous videos involved a piece of time,” she notes. “‘Urbanites’ is more a fashion piece with a story behind it.”

Angela has loads of experience working with kids, but took extra steps to make her young “Urbanites” models comfortable. The set consisted of backdrops and props the kids could easily move around – “The kids place each building or pigeon or sidewalk in a certain place,” Angela notes – and the artist also carefully selected music to play during the shoot. “The kids could use the beat to walk through the scenes,” she says. “That made it easier to edit the piece.”

According to the photographer, all that thoughtful preproduction work paid off. After sharing the piece with several potential clients, Angela received a call to estimate three new videos – hopefully, she says, the first of several potential clients who will be attracted by her video skills.

“I think of video as an extension of my photography,” Angela says. “It gives a client a more complete way to say something. My hope is that clients will use the still work for packaging and ads, and the videos would be added to their websites as sizzlers or informational videos.”

Click here to see more moving work from the kid-friendly photographer.

Cade Martin “Teas" It Up for Starbucks

Many artists make an effort to inject whimsy into their imagery, especially in work done for advertising clients. However, few are able to combine that free-spirited creativity with an unmistakable promotional message as well as Cade Martin can.

The Washington, D.C.-based photographer has shared this talent with a wide range of clients including dozens of companies, products and organizations you know like Cadillac, the National Geographic Society, Grey Goose, Merrill Lynch, Tommy Hilfiger and many others. Recently he brought his unique view to bear for Starbucks, helping the ubiquitous coffeemaker promote the opening of its first Tazo Tea store in Seattle.

“It was an amazing project and the Starbucks team was a dream to work with,” Cade says. “They contacted me last spring and I happened to be out in Seattle on another project at the time… They really seemed to like the body of my work and the magical, cinematic-narrative nature of my images.”

The first half of about a dozen “Alice in Wonderland”-esque images – each sprinkled with Martin magic, like a touch of cinnamon atop a pumpkin latte – has already been released through Starbucks, with more to come. The images, each depicting the tea as a sort of enchanted elixir, will be used for various promotional platforms, including wall-sized murals inside the new store, digital ads and Tazo Tea packaging.

Collaborating with the creative minds at Starbucks to “create a magical world was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had,” Cade notes.

“The client couldn’t have been more supportive of everything that I wanted to do,” he says. “We all got along great, worked hard and really had a good time.”

Click here to see more of Cade’s imaginative work.

Rob Prideaux Overperforms

San Francisco-based photographer Rob Prideaux spends quite some time in a different world; a landscape dotted with burning Christmas trees, electric bathtubs, and generally twisted imagery. Call it the land of the conceptual photographer.  Rather than shoot the surrounding reality, Rob captures concepts of his own design, what his site calls “witty anti-examples, cautionary tales, and glamorizing the grotesque as well as the beautiful.” 

Take the above fifteen-bladed razor for example.  “This image was born when I saw the five-bladed razor,” Rob explains of his strange—and perhaps a bit haphazardly built—device. “I’d sort of been aware of the evolution of razors – one, two, three (Did we skip four?).  That’s total overkill,” he thought, “They’re just #@%ing with us, now.”

In recent years there’s been an expectation from consumers that each successive iteration of a product should be faster, do more, be more powerful.  “It’s good in that it propels us forward, but it often devolves into a sort of performance for performance’s sake,” the artist ruminates. This thought gave rise to Rob’s concept of “overperforming.” In the series, Rob views the idea with a slightly ironic slant, creating a five-pack of engagement rings, or a watch wound by a special power tool. 

Conceptual photographers often take some extra steps before they jump into the fray and begin shooting.  Rather than simply photograph existing things, sometimes they must create their subjects from scratch. Armed with some glue, tools, and a vivid imagination, Rob constructed the imagery seen above. 

Luckily, the accompanying sets he had to build were fairly sparse. According to Rob, “many of my photographs are about an object, and usually about an object that existed only in imagination, so for me, a plain background often works – the object remains ungrounded, out-of-context, free of association, because the object is a key, a legend, that unlocks a slightly different, yet entire, world.”

Rob’s aim with his photos is to have the rest of the world see things a little differently.  Rather than accept what you’re seeing at face-value, he wants you to open your mind, expand your consciousness, and even have a little fun. Sometimes, though, Rob drifts back down to Earth with the rest of us. Maybe overperformance isn’t all bad, he acknowledges: “I decided to try the five-bladed razor for myself…and now I’m a believer.”

Click here to check out more of Rob Prideaux’s conceptual imagery and product shots.

Dan Root Gets Down and Dirty at Maggotfest

A long-standing adage in the photo industry holds that strong personal work is just as important as strong commercial work—and in some cases, it’s more essential.  Once trained as a photojournalist, Portland-based “sport and sport culture" photographer Dan Root has taken this concept to heart. 

As part of a recent rebranding push, Dan made it a point to get down and literally dirty by capturing what the artist calls “a different view of sport” with his camera. These efforts led him to the city of Missoula, Montana, where he shot a personal series at a local annual rugby event by the colorful name of Maggotfest. 

From the start, Dan knew he had to get the obligatory action shots: a scrum, a tackle, a rugby ball floating tantalizingly just out of the reach of a player’s fingertips.  As he spent time among the players, however, he worked to find the true story of the event—not just the game, but the team members and spectators themselves: the people. 

Yes, you need action shots to establish context, and they always serve to catch immediate interest, but some of the most fascinating stuff lives in the nuances of the interpersonal reactions before and after the actual event. Dan calls this the “white space” – “All the stuff that’s happening around the sport besides the sport.”

The players loved mugging for Dan’s camera and showing off both their passion for rugby and their camaraderie.  Although the participants gather for love of the game, the raucous atmosphere and strange costumes found off the pitch can make Maggotfest seem like a party—“Let’s Make a Deal meets Burning Man on a rugby pitch.”

Even so, for Dan Root (and the hordes of excited fans) the focus at Maggotfest is on the hard-hitting play and what he calls “the Band of Brothers mentality” shared by the motley teams of players. That’s where the truth of the event lies. The chaotic nature of the games may have allowed for plenty of organic and interesting action shots, but the photographer can always find quieter moments too, and he took advantage of those to capture plenty of well-composed and telling portraits. 

Four days and 150 GB of footage later, Dan had everything he needed to put together his personal series. It’s called “Scrummers”, and it can currently be viewed on his site. 

Click here to check out more of Dan’s work, where action and humor meet heart.

Greg Koch’s Dog Days

“Doggy Rescue Operation” began as an editorial idea.  Greg Koch has always loved shooting canids, having done a lot of work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Red Wolf Recovery Program (http://www.fws.gov/redwolf/).  With that in mind, he approached a family member who is involved in rehabilitating stray and cast-aside canines, then finding new homes for them.  What began for her as a simple love of dogs quickly became a burning passion.  Driving all over the state to pick up dogs, providing them with medication, fostering them temporarily, then delivering them to their happy new humans – it was a passion worth pursuing.

As a photographer, Greg likes to key into his subjects’ passions.  If the subject cares about something significantly, there’s a good chance the audience will care about it, too, and that can, in his words, “make for a rip-snorting photo essay.”

The first photo session began on an unusually hot morning.  “I knew I needed to get the key shots, the dramatically-lit images that would tell the viewer about the protagonist.  A photo essay, in that regard, is a bit like a movie.  Because of the heat, however, the doggy subjects were rather unwilling to cooperate.  They wanted to lie down in the shade, to flop into their drinking bowls.  Really, they wanted to do anything but look all posed and dramatic.”

So, he tried a different tack.  “One of the main ingredients of photography is plain old hard work.  When the subject isn’t giving you the important image, you try to stack the cards in such a way that you get what you need.  Sometimes, that means just taking lots of images.  Other times, it means shaking things up, trying new and different things.  And sometimes it’s just about being patient.”

While being patient, he went over everything again in his head.  “I knew I wanted a strong background that would tell the viewer a bit about the setting.  I needed the sun as a backlight in order to strobe the subjects from the “front-ish,” so I found a mid-morning setting that could give me the backdrop I envisioned.  I set up a 60” octa on a battery strobe and, when patience wore thin, fired away.”

After getting the key shot in the can, Greg packed away the strobes and focused on shooting the guts of the story, in this case a morning feeding: chicken feet, kibble, and dog biscuits.  “Canis ambrosia,” he says.

“These sequences of shots were memorable for their volume.  I couldn’t even hear the camera firing.  Surrounded by twenty-seven hungry dogs…well, there was more bark that morning than in many forests I’ve visited over the years.  (Sorry, that was pretty bad.)”

The goal with all of this was to tell a story about the subject.  “I think everyone has a story, but finding that proper angle that is visually interesting is not always easy.  Then again, that’s part of the fun, right?  Who doesn’t want to see a passel of puppies chasing an ATV up a hill?”

Greg finished off the series with just such a sequence, then one more dramatic sunset shot with the octa.  “The shoot was a blast, not just for the resulting images, but for the story that evolved while shooting it.”

Click here to check out the rest of this series and much more of Greg’s awesome imagery.

Jessica Boone’s Pasta-Perfect Effort

Recently there’s been a flood on the internet.  Thousands and thousands of well-meaning amateurs fill our news feeds with blurry, off-kilter images of their breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Professional photog Jessica Boone shares their love of snapping edibles, but takes a different approach – you see, she produces true art. The bevy of beverages and assemblage of eats in her imagery appear deceptively simple, but they’re winningly composed—the colors pop, the essence of the food is deliciously drawn out, and the scent seems to play at the edge of the viewer’s nose.

Never one to ignore a side dish, Jessica wanted to beef up her stock portfolio to supplement her editorial food shots, so she combined a half-pound of ingenuity with a dash of creativity and stirred to taste in devising this pasta-perfect picture.

Cooking up the image may have been easy—the ingredients were there and she certainly spent the time to let them simmer—but “plating” it was harder than it looks.

Shooting the dish from directly above required the use of a large and heavy ring flash: not by any means uncommon for this sort of close-up photography. Normally such a task is pretty simple, but Jessica’s tripod was missing in action and that presented an interesting logistical challenge for the talented photographer.

“Each time I bent over, I had to hold my breath so I could balance my equipment and keep all of my lines straight,” Jessica explains. Fortunately, there’s no evidence of these remarkable acrobatic feats in the final photo: she’s managed to serve up a lovely still shot of a particularly appetizing plate of pasta a la Boone.

"Needless to say, it was the first and last shoot I did shooting straight down with a ring flash and no tripod," the artist says. “No more yoga-photography for me!”

Despite the difficulty and tedium of the balancing act, though, Jessica believes it was ultimately worth it – particularly as a lesson in both advancing techniques and defining boundaries. Hey, sometimes an obstacle can make a pretty good garnish.

Click here to see more of Jessica’s appetizing food shots.

Kenneth Ruggiano’s Sense of Self

Kenneth Ruggiano HATES self-portraits. Just like that. All in caps.

Now, top-shelf professional portraiture? No problem there. You want in-depth studies of the Kelly Miller Circus during a rural Oklahoma tour? Ken’s got the greatest portfolio on earth. Heart-wrenching glimpses of the destruction left by the May 2011 tornado in Joplin, Missouri? He was there documenting the disaster.

But the combined challenge of "trying to minimize my dorky nature" while focusing the camera AND starring in the shot? Well, that can get to be just a bit too much for Ken, who basically steers clear of shooting himself.

Tapping into the renewal theme of the New Year, though, the photographer decided he “needed to get over it” and greet 2013 with a new Ken—so he made himself his last subject of 2012. To prove he was cured of chronic self-portrait avoidance the artist decided to create two, a headshot and an environmental portrait,  to use for promotional purposes.

He aimed for “funny and over the top” on the environmental portrait (Ken’s the one on the left) but he went about the headshot a little more seriously. Of course, that’s not particularly surprising for an artist whose portraiture tops his list of professional skills.

Ultimately, he adds, both portraits proved to be a “great opportunity to experiment.” Not only that, but they also stand as evidence that the only thing photographers have to fear—from either side of the lens—is fear itself.

Click here to see more of Kenneth’s creativity.