LDS Philanthropies

There is a guy named Val Taylor that decided to go back to school in illustration. He has been working in the industry doing both illustration and graphic design for a number of years. Val is blessed with the gift of gab and as he come down to the print lab at BYU to work on his images we would end up talking quite often. Recently Val started working with LDS Philanthropies helping to create a number of brochures and to modify their brand. For those who don't know what LDS Philanthropies is or does, basically whenever someone donates money to the church or one of its other ventures the money goes through them. A lot of the money is used towards humanitarian aims such as building wells or libraries in third world countries. Anyways, Val needed a photographer and after talking to me a myriad of times and also seeing a number of my photographs decided to give me a shot. The shoot turned out to be quite enjoyable. Val gave me a lot of freedom in how I wanted to create the images. The focus was to be on hands and a mix of fruit and seeds. Diversity in age was also supposed to be prevalent, especially old and young. They let me photograph with my large format camera and Polaroid film so that I could create a very subtle, minimalistic image. I enjoyed having an art director that realizes that they hired me to create not simply transcribe photographically. If all commercial shoots worked out this way I probably wouldn't be so averse to doing commercial jobs. Anyways here are a few of my favorites.