It is a brand new year, and I am slowly emerging from the fog of holiday craziness. December was busy with work, travel and family gatherings, all of which were fruitful. I am very fortunate.

Alas, this blog suffered from a month of non-posting. I promise to remedy that as 2013 gets started. I created some great new work for my Improvisors series in December, which I hope to start sharing in the next few weeks. Also, a new super secret personal project for 2013 is in the works, which will be shared in the coming months. And hopefully some regular features, to keep the blog fresh.

For the moment, I still find myself reflecting on a lot of what was nice about the holidays, especially time with family. With that in mind, I’ll share one of my favorite family portraits last year, photographed just before Christmas.

A woman requested a portrait of her husband and young son as a holiday gift for her. The whole family came by the studio, and the boys stayed for some father-son play time in front of the camera, while mom stepped out for a stroll.

Here are my favorite images from the portrait session:

Most of my time is spent making portraits of professionals for business purposes. However, at this time of year, things shift for a few weeks toward family portraiture. Lots of folks look at the holidays as an excuse to get an updated personal portrait. It’s so easy to print up custom greeting cards with online services. The addition of a really nice portrait on the front makes a special (and easy) gift. And of course a good old fashioned custom print (remember prints?) makes a very special gift indeed.

Along with the traditional nuclear family groups with one or two kids who always call during the holidays, this year I have received a lot of requests from young couples. I have found myself really enjoying working with this client base. They are almost always youthful, photogenic and very much in love, which makes for good photos.

This past weekend I photographed a couple who didn’t have a decent portrait of them together taken since their wedding 3+ years ago. Well, we fixed that.

We started in the studio, with a simple, elegant portrait:

After a couple of set-ups and wardrobe changes in the studio, we decided to step outside and shoot some more casual portraits. My studio is located in a somewhat industrial zone, but there are soft spots, if you know where to look. They strolled and chatted while I hung back and captured candid moments. Here is my favorite:

I enjoy the change of pace when photographing couples, families and kids during the holidays. I love the people I meet, and a well-made portrait really does make a unique and memorable gift. For all you holiday procrastinators out there, it’s not too late. Whoever you hire to do your photography, act fast to ensure that prints can be ready in time for gifting.

Happy Holidays!

My good friend Vanessa is the office manager at a medical practice in Berkeley. A while back, she and her colleagues were nice enough to host an exhibition of my portraits in their very nice office. Recently, she called me because the medical practice was updating its website, and they needed a good group portrait of the doctors and of the whole office staff. They wanted something natural, photographed outdoors.

After some discussion about the project, we put a date on the calendar. Then I took some time on a day off the week before the shoot to search the area around their office for a suitable environment. I found an ideal location with a long bench, located only a block away.

On the day of the photo shoot, everyone was on time and followed the wardrobe guidelines–cool blue and gray tones to contrast against the warm earth tones at the location. They also brought their smiles and camaraderie, which made my job easier.

My lighting for this shot was pretty simple. I planned for a time of day when the building we were using as our backdrop shaded my subjects from direct sun, but provided nice diffuse bounced light from a building across the street. I brought a battery-powered flash, and set it up on a stand with an umbrella at camera left. Power was set to equal the ambient light, so the flash gave just a hint of contrast, filled shadows, and gave nice shape to everyone’s faces.

Here were the results, aided by a subtle wind-machine effect created by the natural breeze:

If you are in the East Bay and are looking for a great naturopathic doctor, contact the ladies at Berkeley Naturopathic.

Last week I had the opportunity to meet and photograph the executive team at Ask.com in Oakland, California. The popular search site and parent company of Dictionary.com is in the process of updating its corporate information webpage and executive profiles, which currently don’t include portraits.

Back in early August, I was referred to a Senior Marketing Manager at Ask by a mutual acquaintance. She liked the work on my just-released new website, and my bid was submitted and accepted after an email exchange and phone conversation about the project. We scheduled a date for later in the month to do the photography.

Between when she booked me and the shoot date, the number of executive to photograph grew from 8 to 11. Also during that time, the date got pushed—since that many busy executives automatically equals scheduling problems!

Finally, though, the revised shoot date arrived and everything went smoothly. Everyone arrived on time for their appointment, followed the wardrobe guidelines, and gave me their full attention during our time together. (With busy executives, it can be difficult to go three-for-three in these categories!). As an added bonus, the corporate culture was very relaxed and unpretentious, which was reflected in the easy interactions I had and the candid images I was able to create.

A few weeks before the shoot, I had asked to speak with the web design firm that was doing the layouts. It was good that I did, because found out during our pre-production call that the design called for a slightly unconventional off-center horizontal composition, with room for text in the negative space. They also wanted negative space on both sides, so they had the choice of framing subject left or right of center in the frame.

This creative direction had a big impact on my approach to the shoot. Luckily, I was able to set up in the company’s large main conference room, leaving plenty of room for a wide composition with plenty of background.

Here are a few sample images from the shoot:

During the first portrait session of the day, we got some great candid shots where a laugh or break in eye contact produced a more editorial looking image. I pointed these images out to the Marketing Manager, and we agreed that if we tried to capture a few of these type of shots for each person, they might have a great alternative portrait series for other uses within the company.

This moment was an example of how it is not just important to nail down the specs for the shoot in advance. It is equally important to look for and recognize additional opportunities to capitalize on the limited time with the company’s busy executives. In this case, we doubled the output from the shoot—more useful images for the client and more business for me—by tweaking our game plan on the fly.

Here are just a couple of the candid alternate shots:

In the end, everyone loved the candid portraits. In fact, they liked the idea of “off-beat” portraits so much, that they called me after the shoot to request full-on blooper shots. Now that’s an executive team with a sense of humor!

This was a fun and very rewarding project that went well from start to finish. It exemplified what I like about doing this type of portrait work: I got to meet a group of interesting, educated, high-achieving individuals from diverse backgrounds. In my conversations with them, I learned about things like the physics of skydiving and what it’s like to be born in Italy then growing up in Alaska. And I got to know a bit of the inner workings of a locally-based global brand.

Much thanks to my Marketing Manager contact for her great facilitation (and executive-wrangling). The new site featuring these images is not live yet, but I will update this post with a link when it is released!

A good friend gave birth to her first child last Fall, and she brought him to my studio early this year for his first “official” portrait at around 8 months old. He was a joy, and the results were fantastic. Here is my favorite shot from the session:

I was excited to get another call from my friend a few weeks ago, asking me to do a follow-up portrait session with her baby boy, who is now a crawling, walking and climbing machine! He arrived at the studio and immediately flashed his same irresistible smile:

Being as mobile as he was, we didn’t stay inside the studio for long. The morning sun was shining, so we headed down the road to one of Berkeley’s beautiful parks. Upon arrival, our little star immediately climbed up a playground structure at the entrance of the park and began navigating its corridors with great curiosity and enthusiasm:

Then it was time to explore the rest of the park:

Finally, after an hour of running around and having his picture taken, it was time for our star to sit down and tell his best friend, “Puppy”, all about his adventures:

Some days it is a sheer pleasure to do what I do. I hope to have my little photo subject back in another six months to have some more fun and take some more pictures!

Some of my clients are awesome. Last week I got to add a new person to the awesome list. He is a psychotherapist who works with troubled teens. He’s saving the world one kid at a time, and talking with him during his portrait session was both educational and inspiring.

We did a traditional multi-purpose professional headshot that represented his balance of reserve and approachability:

After reviewing his headshots on the computer and selecting his favorite, he asked if I could do a more informal portrait that showed him in an environment and also demonstrated a bit more of his personality and the experience of talking with him one-on-one in a therapy setting. I quickly pulled apart my headshot lighting setup, dragged the couch from my client seating area across the room to the far wall, and concocted an environment for my subject to sit in. The jacket and tie came off, and we just started talking.

This was our winning portrait:

The image above looks casual and un-posed, but is still a descriptive headshot that shows his face clearly. He liked the image a lot, but as we were looking through the images from the couch session, he saw the image below and almost leaped out of his chair. He loved the spontaneous editorial quality of the image, and even though it doesn’t show is face quite as clearly, he requested the image.

I’m not sure I would have initially stopped to look at this image as a headshot. However, as I looked at the image more and more, I grew to share my client’s excitement about it. And it works as a supplement to the more formal eyes-to-camera images we had already selected.

It’s a keeper.

I recently had the pleasure of photographing a friend and fellow creative professional for the promotional materials for her upcoming one-woman show in San Francisco. Meghan is a classically trained opera singer and musical theater performer who teaches and performs in the Bay Area.

Whether it is a reserved corporate headshot or an unconventional artist portrait, I always try to capture the experience of meeting the person in their portrait. Meghan is energetic and full of laughter. We covered all of our bases in the first part of the photo shoot, getting reserved and sophisticated portraits against a black backdrop. At the end, though, I wanted to mix it up and try to capture some of that humor and energy.

The “put your hand on your face” direction usually results in a hack-y and contrived image (because people don’t do the Thinker pose in real life). But when I momentarily asked Meghan to put her hand to her face, and then promptly critiqued the folly of my direction, she burst into laughter. The result was our best shot, and the one that captured the experience of knowing Meghan.

Winning shots often come from unexpected moments.