Community Action for Healthy Living

Billboards and a call to action video for CAHL.
https://vimeo.com/87089739 See what these people have to say about how alcohol has affected their lives.   

Boys & Girls Club

Recently, I had the opportunity to work with A2Z Design on the 2014 Report to the Community for the Boys & Girls Club of the Fox Valley.  This is a collection of photos of a group of kids that without coaching showed the most genuine display of love and happiness for each other that to me resonates that our future generations just might be on to something that will save this crazy world.

The Art of Bipolar Disorder

This is one of those times that my job becomes more than just snapping photos.  Who am I kidding, it's never been about just snapping photos.  It's about having the ability to open a visual doorway into who someone is and what makes them special.  A few months ago I spent the better part of the afternoon hanging out and photographing Braxton Verner for the Winter 2014 issue of @Affinity.  If you saw him on the street, you'd think he's a typical teenager.  If you saw him working on his art you might think "what a driven and creative young boy."  The focus that he generates when he is working on a drawing permeates the room.  "It truly is an amazing spectacle to watch him create a charcoal drawing."  Braxton, who is 14 years old, struggles with mental illness, but finds solace in creating art.  I urge you to read his story written by Alison Fiebig Mayer and find out what makes him the talented artist that he is turning out to be. 

 Braxton in his own words:

Best Winter Ever

For us here in Wisconsin, it has been the coldest winter in recorded history.  It also seems like the longest winter, for sure that I can remember.  However, if you are Castle Sales and  into snowmobiling it was quite possibly the best winter ever.    

The Dream Edit

     Three things can happen when it comes time to edit down your images after a shoot.  The first is that you come away with very little and in some respects the edit is easy.  Or painful,  The second, and is usually the norm, is that you wind up selecting about a quarter of the images in your first edit and narrow down the winners from there.  The third, and the reason I am writing this post is when all the planets align and you get a subject that just knocks it out the park and almost every frame is a winner.  It doesn't happen often, but when it does it is pure joy.  This was the case when I had the pleasure of photographing Kate Burgess and her team at Elevate97.  Not only is she a successful business leader, but damn, with her ability to light up a room and work the camera, she could be a model too.  Check out her story in the latest issue of Insight Magazine.

H.J. Martin and an Addy Award to boot

Most of you know I, along with Jeff Amstutz and Michael Miller at A2Z Design shoot cover stories for a regional business publication called Insight.  Recently, I had the pleasure of working with the great people of H.J. Martin photographing them at their headquarters in Green Bay, WI.
With any of these projects, my goal is to NOT do something expected (take that with a grain).  I often make a point to throw out the first few ideas I have just for this reason.  So, the question is, how do you incorporate something of what they do, but avoid creating some sales brochure for them?  Think, think, think.  Samples!  Any time you go to a place like H.J. Martin, you look at samples.  More and more samples.  So why not skip the obvious environmental showroom shot and use the individual samples as backgrounds for some fun portraits!

As an added bonus, the portraits won a gold Addy Award this past weekend.  Nice!

     Last month I attended the Paradigm Symposium in St. Paul, MN.  From scientists to archeologists to Egyptologists to geologists to paranormal researchers, there was no shortage of amazing speakers at this event. Not only did I learn things such as new ground-breaking evidence about when Ancient Egypt’s Sphinx was built, I also learned about the mysterious race of Nephilim written about in the Book of Enoch.  I even heard a jaw-dropping TOE (Theory of Everything) merging science, spirituality and the supernatural into one cohesive hypothesis.  Yes, these were all speakers at the top of their field. 

     In between these wonderful presentations, we would try to talk further with the speakers and get to know them on a more personal level.  Thankfully, the speakers were all very accessible to everyone at the Symposium.  Although I wasn’t there as a photographer, I was struck by not only the subject matter of what was being said by one particular speaker, but also the light that was hitting him.  This was Thomas Fusco.  After he finished talking to us about parts of his book, Behind The Cosmic Veil, I asked if I could grab a quick shot of him.  Thankfully, he allowed me to get up close and personal for the shot, and, after about three frames, this is what I got: 

Details: iPhone 5/Snapseed

Reboot and Refresh

It's time to freshen up my website.  These are some of my favorite images from the past few months.
Check out www.imagestudios.com to see everything.