I realize it doesn't look like it here on the website (a few of our contracts have had non-disclosure clauses in them), but it's been a very busy fall here at Lozada Visuals.  We've been running around with the video equipment a lot on some commercial projects, and done some red carpet work for a Romanian news agency (don't ask), and October was pretty much all weddings and bar mitzvahs.

So it's nice to have something I can finally put on here.

***

I've known Suke for about a decade now.  Well, "known" is a grey area, I suppose, since I only actually met him for the first time in person yesterday.  We both had been regulars on a message board for soccer fans throughout the world (He supports Liverpool, I support Arsenal), and we have similar senses of humor, so we've talked lots over the years on BigSoccer and on Facebook.  Our kids are all in the same basic age bracket, too.

This weekend, I got a note from him:  I need some family photos done quick, we had a bit of a disaster going to the mall photo people.  No problem, we set up a time to get together, and away we go.  When I arrived, Suke and his little guy Kieran were still waiting for his wife Maureen and daughter Josie to emerge from the playground, but Kieran turned it on right away, and by the time big sister joined him, it was clear why they'd had problems with mall portraits:  The kids wanted to love the camera, but they needed to be themselves and move, not sit still for perfect poses.

We spent about 90 minutes letting the kids show their personalities, letting them interact with Mom and Dad, letting them be free to be themselves.  If that meant Kieran would brandish a stick every chance he got, that was OK, because this is the way his parents will this stage of his development-- his favorite toys really are sticks.  And Josie, she's a performer.  She loves the attention, but she also loves to sit and debate silly things with Daddy, and there's great stuff in that interaction, too.

More pictures after the jump...

As I'm going through the photos, I'm trying to bang out individual portraits of each family member, as well as both kids with each parent, both singly and with their sibling, and I asked Maureen and Suke to get in a portrait of just the two of them.

Maureen told me in the midst of this, that they'd never really had a chance to do pictures like that, just the two of them.  They'd had a courthouse wedding and hadn't had pictures done.  So, while the usual family portraits are great, I'd like to think that by having these last few images, I was able to give them something special they hadn't anticipated… a few images to tell the love story still going on amidst the parenting.

I know, I know, I've always been pretty wedding photography oriented, and I've shied away from doing senior portraits. But Ian, you ask, don't you do event shooting, and commercial portraiture and all that? Well, yes, but deep in my past, I started out with a firm that did those assembly line cap & gown shots (I was really hired to shoot the sports and events that were part of our contracts with the schools), and I've never had an appetite for it in the past.

Anyway, recently, Suzi Hjorth from Magnolia Floral Design, whose work you've been seeing little by little as we continue the edit of Ann-Maria & Kevin's wedding, she asked me if I'd consider shooting some senior portraits for her son, now that the cap & gown was out of the way. Well, now that it's a friend asking, that's different. I'll find a way.

I knew when I met Will, that he was probably a little nervous about all this, so I sat down with him, let him noodle around on a piano, while I got an idea of what he was hoping to do. (Mom wanted a shot of him at the piano, so it was double duty, really.) We ended up going to a neighbor's nearby farm, and let me tell you, Will just killed it. He looked like he'd been posing for magazine ads his whole life. Eventually, we also traipsed down to downtown Lexington to get some shots by the graffiti mural on Vine that he'd been hoping to do.

Here's a few from my quick edit tonight:

More after the jump...

More in the gallery below.

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/2009/12/03/the-2009-family-christmas-card/ http://www.ianlozada.com/2009/12/03/the-2009-family-christmas-card/#comments Fri, 04 Dec 2009 02:54:56 +0000 Ian http://www.ianlozada.com/?p=200

Took a break from editing during my too-brief time home for Thanksgiving to shoot the portraits for our annual Christmas Card. With the twins now 20 months old, we're able to get them to do a little more in front of the camera.

The basic setup for this one was white seamless paper for the background with a Alien Bees B800 monolight through a beauty dish, just to the right of the camera, as our main light. I used a white coffeetable as a combination stage/seat, as some of the photos were taken with the kids having their legs dangle over the edge, some with them standing on the table so they could move around. I also had a small flash high above at camera right running through a 1/4 inch Honl Speed Grid as a hair light, and a second small flash with a second Honl Grid behind the table lighting up the background.

Just because you've planned things well, doesn't mean they always work out right.  I noticed quickly that one of my Pocket Wizard radio controllers wasn't consistently firing my main light.  I ended up disconnecting it, and using the hair light to trigger the other two.  That required a second adjustment... it cost me a third of a stop of shutter speed.  Even on self-assigned gigs, you have to be ready to adapt quickly.

Kristina and I had a pretty good idea of our selects before the shoot was over.  The easiest part was the mixing of the five photos-- I've had this concept (and the previous year's card) in mind since before the twins were born.

I'm out of ideas for next year.  Maybe I'll let Kristina come up with the next concept... Naaaaaah.

Mary grew up in Midway, and we really had glorious, warm weather, considering we'd had two absolutely frigid days before this.  Downtown Midway is a really cute town, full of little upscale restaurants and boutiques.  In short, a great place to take some romantic photos.  The other location was by the local mill, and with the recent rains, the little waterfall next to it was more powerful than usual.

Most of these images were captured within a two block radius, but when you pick a place that's both meaningful to you and has strong visual resonance, you can make a lot out a rather small area.

Been working on getting some of the fall engagement shoots edited this week, and I've got another one coming up Sunday, after I do Lacey and Justin's wedding on Saturday.

Just thought you might want to see a shot or two from what I've been getting recently.

More to come soon!

We'd been trying to get the weather to cooperate with us for awhile to take family portraits of Eugene and Lily and their two children, Louis and Autumn.  As you might have guessed by their daughter's name, it was really important to them to have fall colors in their session.  Lily had told me in our initial conversations that while she wanted some posed portraits, she was more interested in having the majority of their images be candid photos of her family being themselves.

We got most of the posed photos out of the way early, figuring that the kids would have more patience for it early, then got them into places where they could play, first a playground, then in an area with great light and lots of colorful leaves on the ground-- if you give kids a chance for free play, they often reward you with their most genuine smiles of the day, and they may even give you a playful moment with Mom the above photo.  In addition, I made a point of getting a few of Mom and Dad together for some relationship shots.

After our session, we wandered over to Angelo's Coal Oven Pizza on West 57th St. for dinner together.  I'm a sucker for coal oven pizza places every time, and I wasn't disappointed.  Highly recommended.

John and Brittney were already married by the time I met them-- they're students at BYU, and they got married in a Mormon ceremony in Colorado, but they wanted to have a reception in Lexington as well, and they added a little twist, giving each other their rings in a small, private ceremony beforehand.  I got to spend some time doing a portrait session with them before all of the festivities, as well as covering the event itself...