Springville Museum of Art & Why I Disappeared

Thank you to everyone that was able to make it to the Perspectives: Utah Lake exhibit that was held at the Cover Center for the Arts in October. I would like to inform anyone that is interested that I will have two images in the Religious & Spiritual Art Exhibit at the Springville Museum of Art. This exhibit can be viewed through December 28th. If you can make it there is another exhibit that you should definitely see, it is a retrospective of the black & white photography of John Telford (My photography professor) I have always been a great fan of his photography.

Posting has been a little slow as of late, I apologize. I am in the finishing stages of making a commemorative book through Commemorative Publications of the Beijing Olympics for the United States Olympic Committee. My schedule has been hectic to say the least. I was initially given three weeks to complete it but the direction has changed so many times that it has taken longer than that. It will end up being about 376 pages, hardbound, and the bulk of the book will focus on the photographic memories of the games. (With a focus towards Team USA). I was hired as the creative director and photo editor. I hired three design students from BYU (Reeding Roberts, Natalie Davis, & Deven Stephens) who created the design for the book and helped me assemble it. They did a marvelous job. But I'll be honest, I will be very glad for this project to be over and done so I can get back to my own photography.

Here is a quick sneak preview so you will have a sense of how the book will look when it is finished.

Tiberius Arms

I have been doing some occasional commercial work for a high end paintball company called Tiberius Arms. (Yes, those are paintball guns that they are holding.) Most of the pictures end up being very boring product photography. (Sorry to all product photographers, but that is definitely not my personal photographic interest.) The advertising pictures I get to have a little more fun with. I did make the mistake early on doing a good job in the studio and now they have decided that the look has become kind of a trademark which makes it harder to try something different. Here are the two advertising images most recently finished.

LDS Philanthropies 2

Last year I was asked to do a photo shoot for LDS Philanthropies. (You can see the post from that shoot by clicking here) Apparently I did ok because they asked me back this year to do another large shoot. They did ask me to duplicate the look that I produced from the last shoot, this was the first problem since I had done everything with Polaroid type 55. Between then and now Polaroid decided to cower away from their roots and stopped making Polaroid film. I had to call all over the country trying to find enough of this film for the shoot. One problem solved. The job was scheduled for three days in three different locations. The first was at the This Is The Place Monument in Salt Lake City. It was a great location with lots of interesting props and characters to photograph. The film did run into a problem sitting in the sodium sulfite clearing bath and hot sun all day. Type 55 is a very fragile film that scratches easily. When I got home portions of the film looked like the emulsion and base were starting to separate. I panicked and hurriedly removed the film and hung it to dry. Since I didn't fully remove the sodium sulfite there was a powder that dried all over the film. After much experimentation and re-cleaning of the film not to mention many hours of scanning and Photoshop later I was able to rescue the shoot. The next two days were far less eventful which I am grateful for. So here is a selection from the three shoots.

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.