Recently, I did a little bit of a different type of photo shoot for our longtime friends at M&M Pest Control, New York City's leading pest control firm. The photos were of some funny t-shirts proclaiming to the world it was safe to "Date Me… I'm Bed Bug Free!" I have no idea if they're moving many of the shirts, but they did their real job, which is to get lots of coverage in the local media. As a result, my work has recently appeared on Fashionista, Racked NY, Bikini Buys, The Lo-Down, and NearSay, and the shirts have also been mentioned in Coco Perez, the NY Times' T Magazine blog, amNew York, and New York Magazine's daily fashion update.

The funny thing is that at the time of the shoot, I was sporting quite a few bed bug bites, courtesy of a Lexington, Kentucky hotel that could have used M&M's services! But if, unlike me back in May, you are bed bug free, you can pickup your t-shirts at Funnybedbugtshirts.com.

Every once in awhile, I do a little work completely outside of weddings.  It keeps me fresh, and makes sure that I'm still expanding my skills.  Right before Christmas, I got a call while doing the usual drive from Long Island to Lexington, and it was the art department of a technology magazine based in New York, saying they needed someone to do some corporate portraiture for an article they were running in their February issue.  As you can imagine, they found the pickings pretty slim out in Morehead for photographers with magazine experience, but when they expanded their search to the nearest sizable city, Lexington, my name came up.  Since I was someone who had New York magazine experience, it was a great fit.

Due to logistics, we ended up getting this one done a few days into the new year.  I met with the PR department of the hospital I was shooting at (the subject was their chief information officer), and we did a walkthrough, looking for usable locations for a portrait.  In a lot of ways, it's not much different from looking for wedding portrait locations- you want an interesting background without a lot of distractions, and nice, soft light.  We found about 4 locations that were usable, it was time to start.

For the first time all day, I finally sat down with my subject.  Randy was pretty relaxed, having just gotten back two days before from a Disney vacation.  Since I had taken my little guys out there back in July, and they were about the same age as his grandkids, we started from a little common ground.  This is really important.  Most of your subjects, whether they're brides or executives or kids, they're not professional models.  They don't spend their lives in front of the camera, and they don't know whether that big 77 millimeter eye is going to hurt them or not.  You have to get them to see you as a friend, and you don't always have a lot of time to build the relationship.  I brought out photos from our trip that happened to be on my iPad, and that helped us transition into talking about technology, and what new toys like that mean to people in his line of work.  Eventually, it came out that I once, deep in my past, was a network technology recruiter for 6 years, so the article we were illustrating, about a shortage of tech workers in healthcare, was something I actually understood a little about.

By the time we escaped the office to get to our locations, we had a good rapport, he was able to stay confident looking, and he was up for whatever I asked him to try.  We went through our locations from the walk through and got about 15-30 frames at each spot, and I felt like we had most of it down.  There was still one shot I needed to do in front of a white background (so if the art department needs, they can clip out the subject & throw him in front of any background), but by and large, the photos we had were what a PR department considers nice, but didn't say they didn't say technology.  I mentioned to Randy that it was a shame the server room I'd seen was so cramped that it would be hard to shoot in, and he told me, "Did you know we have a new server building just outside of this one?"  Nope, no idea!  I just got here!

20 minutes later, I'm in a new, open, and clean server room.  We open up a rack to show all the flashing lights, I pull out a prop or two, and in 10 frames, we're done with the shot above.

The moral of the story? No matter who you're photographing, spending time getting to know them and getting to help them find their comfort zone is time well spent.

Sometimes, the job is simple. Just go out and make a picture. The key phrase there is "make a picture". Anyone can press a button and take a picture, but it's making a picture happen that makes this job worth getting up in the mornings for.

And believe me, I got up early for this one. For a wedding, I'm often showing up 11AM, 1PM, nice and easy. When you're meeting the techs who go out for one of Manhattan's leading pest control companies, you get there when they do: 7AM. In the pouring rain. One thing's for certain, we're not taking any outdoor photos today.

In this case, I'm taking staff photos for a relaunch of a corporate website, including new domain names and all. Now there's one thing M&M Environmental is known for, and it's eradicating bedbugs. (Don't worry, I promise no images of bugs on my blog. Honest.) And the star of M&M's team is Champ. Say hello to Champ...

Champ has no concept of personal space.

That might be because Champ is a year and a half old Beagle/Pointer mix, and he's got more certifications and degrees than you can shake a stick at, if that's your idea of a good time. Champ's idea of a good time is sniffing whatever he can, and when he smells bedbugs, up comes his right forepaw. I got to watch Champ training, and he is goooood at what he does. Champ's best buddy and partner is Danny, and that dog loves loves loves Danny.

One of the things I had to show was that M&M has complete testing as part of their service, but there wasn't a lot of equipment around that day towards that. They did have kind of telescope/magnifying glass thing around, but it wasn't the most impressive thing you've ever seen. We used just the top half, and implied the rest.

Finally, I had to get a portrait of Tim, the technical director for the firm. One thing about executives-- they don't generally give you much time. And I didn't ask much of Tim's time. I led him up to one the meeting spaces, set up one small soft box. Tim made it easy, he just exudes confidence and comfort with what he's all about, and it took literally 3 frames to get his portrait done. Two verticals which fit newsletters and blog postings well, and then this one, which is the type of thing you can use for a main shot for a feature article on a business profile.

I gave them tons of stock images they can use of their staff from techs to call center to their four footed superstar. They were thrilled, and Champ was too.

One of my recent gigs was covering the launch weekend of a new church in the Providence, Rhode Island area.

I had been contacted by Dan Clymer of Restoration House Ministries, a church planting organization that launches new churches throughout New England.  During my one year at Lincoln Christian College, Dan was one of my very best professors, and I've always held it as one of the great privileges in my life that I was able to listen to Dan explore the life of Christ for four hours a week every week for an entire semester.  When he asked me about covering the opening weekend, I was thrilled to be able to commit to it.

Northpointe Christian Church meets at Cinemaworld in Lincoln, Rhode Island.  Yeah, the church meets in a movie theater.  It takes a little getting used to, but the location is ideal-- you have a room with clear sightlines, an area for using as a stage in front, a second theater is used for one part of the kids programs, the kids' party room is used for one class space, and their offices in the mall, just outside the theater entrance, encompass the infant/toddler area.

I covered a launch party the night before the first service at the theater, as well as the first day's program.   I ended up delivering about twice the amount of images in the slideshow, with an eye towards showing them in action, while getting them group and family unit portraits that could be used for newsletters, fundraising brochures, etc.  I'm told that Restoration House is using the images to put together a 10 minute video that explains their role in bringing a project like this to fruition.

In a lot of ways, my photojournalistic style that I use for weddings was a perfect fit for giving them an inside view of the day, without interfering with the experience for newcomers.

]]> http://www.ianlozada.com/2009/12/05/editorialevent-work-northpointe-christian-church-lincoln-rhode-island/feed/ 1 http://www.ianlozada.com/2009/09/23/commercial-work-trading-floor/ http://www.ianlozada.com/2009/09/23/commercial-work-trading-floor/#comments Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:37:58 +0000 Ian http://www.ianlozada.com/?p=64

When I started off in sports photography, at the end of a basketball season, or after a number of days shooting at the racetrack, all the photos began to look the same to me.  As a result, I've always tried to keep doing things outside of my usual boxes in order to stay fresh, and to hone some of the skills that I'm trying to develop that I can apply to my main business areas.

Today was one of those opportunities.  A longtime friend called me up yesterday, saying that someone in marketing at her firm in Manhattan asked her if she knew a photographer for a last minute assignment, and, since I'd done a session with her child a few months back...

The assignment was pretty straightforward.  Make a few images of some key people on the trading floor in some work related situations for a brochure the firm was putting out.  The images had to be done quickly, since deadline was the following day, so images would have to be turned around before I left the site, and emailed to marketing, which was in Memphis-- meaning that I'd be working without the direction of an art department or anything of the sort.

I was introduced to the four principal subjects, and quickly realized that they regarded this photo shoot as slightly more painful than the average root canal.  I was given some basic ideas about where on the trading floor I could shoot, and a vague idea what they were hoping I might convey.

One of the locations I was given was a desk that was vacant for the day that was in the middle of the floor, meaning I could incorporate a lot of the action around me into the photos.  More importantly, it gave me an opportunity I always seize:  give everyone a chance to start off with something successful.  I set up a studio light right near the desk, and kept a couple of items I thought I might need nearby.  After one or two frames with Carlos, we added a reflector to fill out his face, and the result was a confidence booster for him when he saw the image on the back of the camera.

They asked me to show some collaboration type scenes, and I tried to get input from Carlos and Helena as to what felt genuine rather than staged, and they brought out some documents that they could use as props.

With Bobby, I wanted to give a more relaxed feel to his portrait.  So I let him turn his back to the desk, which I've always found gives a confident look to guys.

As we sent some of the initial take back to Memphis, they asked for some specific shots, including one vertical shot with Miyuki, Helena and Carlos, that had to have a video screen in the background.  I went back to that empty desk, and used the same setup from the earlier shot-- one light and a reflector is simple, yet does a great job of separating them from the clutter.  I kept encouraging them to get close, not only to keep them in the frame, but to encourage interaction, which gives the photo a little more life.

We ended up swapping the three of them through each spot to give the marketing folks some different psychological feels, but that was essentially it.  Everything was one light, simple, non-intrusive, and kept the distractions for the people working around them to a minimum.

It was a little different to do a job like this without as much direction as I usually get for this type of assignment.  But the people who I was working with, both onsite and in the home office, were flexible and were willing to try things, which makes it fun to do something out of the usual routine.