About three weeks ago, I photographed a young couple who are expecting their first baby. This is a real couple, Jarrell and Ali. Over the years, Jarrell has assisted me and modeled for me. He is wonderful company and has great style. This shoot was the first time I met Ali, and she was wonderful too. She was 7 months pregnant in these photos! We kept things pretty simple, shooting at my house and then outside at a family member’s home. As you can see, Jarrell is black (African-American to be precise) and Ali is white. About a week after this shoot, my local paper ran a story with the headline, Virginia ranks highest in U.S. for black-white marriages. Who knew? Nationally, the rate of mixed-race or interracial marriages jumped from 3% of all marriages in 1980 to 8% in 2010. It’ll be interesting to see if advertisers use more mixed-race couples in their work. It seems like a no-brainer for youth brands. Most people under 30 don’t think twice about mixed-race couples. But I think a lot of adults over 60 don’t approve. Anyway, here are a few of my favorites from our photo shoot.

Back in February of 2012, I posted a photo of a business man on a cell phone at night. About a month later, I got a call from an Ad Agency in New York inquiring about licensing this image for global advertising use on behalf of a large tech company. The Art Buyer said they were trying to avoid the “boring images” at stock agencies like Getty. This is funny because the photo in question is available on Getty Images. I think the client was trying to get a better price than Getty charges for Global Usage. That same week, a greeting card company in California contacted me about using a photo in their summer collection. These two calls got me thinking about what kinds of images I post on my blog and how Art Buyers might stumble upon them eventually. Because the telecom industry is so big and mobile phones are such a big part of our lives, I am posting another mobile phone photo from my Thailand shoot. This time it’s of an Asian business man moving quickly through a train station in Bangkok. This photo was made in-camera. No fancy Photoshop compositing. Making the photo simply required a few takes at different shutter speeds.

A photo I shot last summer is finally going to press as the cover of a poetry book titled When My Brother Was an Aztec. I shot this photo for our friend Natalie Diaz. This is her first published collection of poems, and I am very excited for her. The poems are very personal, many of them centering around her family. The man in the photo is actually her brother. He was awesome! Natalie and I started with some loose ideas of photographing her brother in a headdress and incorporating other symbolic objects. The real challenge for me was to use light, location, and gesture in a way that captures the surreal nature of some of her poems.  I was lucky enough to get a preview of the book for our photo shoot, and some of the themes of the book that I could experiment with visually were family, alcohol, loneliness, Christianity and identity. It was important to Natalie that we try and hint at her mixed Native-American/Spanish identity. Natalie told me, “My dad is Spanish and my mom is Native, so I’m pretty much the epitome of conquest/colonization.” We shot this in the Mojave desert. It’s my understanding that the Mojave tribe does not use head dresses like this one, but for the photo we took some artistic license. I believe this headdress is Aztec, which fits the title of the book. Below are some other outtakes from the shoot. I think they chose the right photo for the cover. It includes family photos, the figure of Christ and the headdress. It was one of the last locations that we photographed. You should pick up the book and see if I did the poems justice!

I have been very bad about posting to this blog. Maybe it’s time to shift to Tumblr or Pinterest. That said, I need to get back to posting new work and sharing thoughts. In an effort to do that, I am posting a photo I took last year in Thailand. I went to Cambodia to visit a friend, and during our time in Bangkok, I hired two models for a brief shoot in the city. Here is one of my favorites. These days, you have to get at least one shot of a business man on a mobile phone.

I have been very absent from the blog this summer! I have quite a few things that would be fun to post here. I’m going to start with the cover I shot for Old Dominion University’s Magazine called Monarch. It’s an appropriate time to post this photo with the hurricane that just went through Norfolk and flooded many parts of the east coast. The cover story is largely about how rising water levels will impact the region.

The school used to have two separate magazines, but recently combined them into one. This issue is actually the inaugural issue. The creative director gave me these rain boots and total creative freedom. We took the photo on a stormy day, and slowed down the shutter speed to capture the movement of the water. My assistant and the model were really good sports about the rain and slipperiness of the surfaces.

If you have read past posts, you know that back in early March I was hired by NBC to shoot stills for the Ed Schultz show. I took photos in between takes of a commercial Spike Lee was directing in Norfolk, Virginia. Below is the final ad running in Newsweek, The New Yorker and a few other magazines this summer.

I’m sitting here in Bangkok’s Airport with my buddy Gordon on our way to some beautiful Thai beaches. Thought I would post a photo from Angkor Wat that I took two days ago. It was an amazing place to visit but hard for me to relax because I wanted so badly to make some unique photos. This place is photographed so much! I finally let go of that and just made some photos. On the third day I was able to relax and enjoy the temples. Going for a bike ride from temple to temple was lovely!

Here is another photo I took while waiting for the TV crew to set up its shots on the Ed Show commercial. We were at Colonna’s Shipyard in Norfolk on a real work day. The place was so loud! Metal banging around and people welding. I approached this gentleman, and through some basic hand gestures he agreed to pose for a portrait. We tried talking but it was so loud. I wish I had gotten his name. It was so interesting to be around people working with their hands in the outdoors. So much of my photography revolves around people in offices.

A few weeks ago, I got a call from NBC to shoot stills for a TV commercial they were making in Norfolk. The ad was directed by Spike Lee to promote the Ed Schultz show. Everyone was super nice including Ed, who attended Maury High School. I went to Cox HS, which according to Ed, is the first team against which he threw a touchdown pass.  On the second day of shooting, we worked at Doumar’s Cones and Barbecue, a local drive-in eatery. It was tight quarters, so I spent some time outside in-between takes. While roaming around, I found this spot and waited for the crew to move through in a way that created an interesting composition. You can see some of the gear that goes into a production like this including lights, fabric scrim and a ladder.

Tonight is the opening of Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes at the Contemporary Art Center. More details are in the previous post. I just wanted to share the story behind one of the photos in the show. Let’s start with how I got selected for the show. Through my wife’s volunteer work at CACV, I was asked to do a one night program with a group of talented high school art students. I brought in my print portfolio as an example presentation format for their own work. Heather Hakimzadeh, the co-curator at CACV dropped by, and flipped through the book. She liked it and as I found out later, she tacked one of my print promos to her wall. A few months later when she was planning this show she saw the photo on her wall and thought I would be a good fit. She called me up and asked to come by my place and look through more work. I had a lot of prints and digital files ready that spanned several years of photography. After an hour, she selected four photos, including this one. I took this photo in 2001, while still a graduate student at the University of Florida.  When I was a student at UF, NFL scouts came to the school and tested the size, speed and strength of college football players hoping to go pro. This event was the 40-yard dash. Perhaps I am too attuned to race issues, but I was struck by the overwhelming whiteness of the scouts and the predominance of black athletes. There is also the issue of power: the power of the scouts, and the power of the athlete’s body. I discussed the photo with Scott London at London Square Gallery and he helped me come with the title starting block / auction block (NFL Scouting). Too obvious? Let me know what you think. You can see it much bigger if you come by CACV.