Thankfully, this year has started out with a busy streak. For the past four months, Florida Trend magazine has featured photos and illustrations of mine on their covers. February’s was appropriately red for Valentine’s Day with Jorge and Diane Brunet-García, the very cool owners of Jacksonville ad agency Brunet-García. In March, Trend used an image from a portrait session I did at the state capitol with newly inaugurated Florida Governor Rick Scott. I did a photo illustration for an April cover story I shot about big time Florida landowners. My model fell through at the last minute as the deadline was approaching, so I had to use my own worn and calloused claws in the photo and give myself a Photoshop manicure. This month’s issue featured an illustration that had the biggest budget of any I’ve done for them, using 10 bundles of one dollar bills with a Ben Franklin on top for the illusion of real wealth. It was for a story about the issues pro athletes face when the money starts rolling in. That was the first time I had to be given a paper bag to carry away a withdrawal from the bank. Fun times!
I’m starting a new portrait series on folks with eclectic collections. My first meeting was with Mr. John L. Shadd. He’s built a room onto his house to accommodate the hundreds of mounted animals he’s gathered through hunts around the world and taxidermy auctions.
I just made contact with a chainsaw collector, so stay tuned for periodic updates to this project. If you happen to know of someone with a eclectic collection in the North Florida/South Georgia area, please let me know about it.
I recently took a drive over to the State Capitol in Tallahassee for a portrait session with newly inaugurated Florida Governor Rick Scott. I set up a white seamless in a conference room off from his office. While I was waiting for him, I removed my shoes so as to not dirty the paper while doing some test shots. He arrived early, so I ended up shooting him shoeless. Thank goodness I remembered Mom’s advice and wore clean socks.
In the July issue of Charisma magazine, you’ll see that the cover story addresses some questions of eternal magnitute. What you don’t see is that the cover image of Heaven and Hell was created on a much more diminutive scale.
Shot in my garage, a foot-tall block of selectively distressed styrofoam was used for the cavernous vision of Hell and a bag of cotton balls provided a platform for the figure entering the glory of Heaven (actually, that’s me standing in my driveway).
Working in miniature gave me versatility in changing the two landscapes on the fly and was just right for this project’s props budget, which was little more than the cost of the cotton balls.
I’m back after an amazing trip to Milot, Haiti, where I was covering a team of surgeons helping medical refugees staged there. Patients were being flown in by military transport helicopter daily from areas hit hard by the earthquake and teams worked out of the local Hôpital Sacré Coeur in Milot performing surgeries around the clock. It was a difficult scene to witness to say the least and it is seared in my memory forever. In addition to stills, I shot video with my Canon 5d and combined it with interviews with a medical team from Jacksonville to tell the experience through their words.
If you happen to be in the UK this January, stop by a newsstand and flip to pages 6 and 7 in Photo Pro Magazine and you will find my little family gazing up at the space shuttle in an image I took back in August.
Big thanks to Terry Hope at Photo Pro for displaying the photo so well and also to my good friend and mentor John Moran for showing it to David Hobby at Strobist.com, who so graciously put it before an international audience on his blog so that Terry could find it. I (heart) strobist.com.
This is proof to me that you never know were your images will go after the shutter clicks.
Posted on: November 23rd, 2009 Looking Back
I recently spoke to a local camera club about my experience as a photojournalist working for daily newspapers over the last decade. Preparing for the meeting, I went through all the files I had readily available from my archives, and–WHOA–the flood of memories came.
I feel fortunate to be able to take photographs for a living, but an added bonus is the visual diary that’s been created without really thinking about it. At a glance I can see that I was watching an Elvis impersonator snuggle a nursing home resident on February 25, 2003. On April 1, 2004, I was riding in the back of a Humvee in Iraq (shaking in my bulletproof vest). November 2, 2007, was the day I shared a moment with a lovely lady named Nancy Lemmer as she saw her granddaughter for the first time. The woman in the photo above is Mrs. Blanche Cobb, who was 104 at the time that photo was taken on January 5, 2005. Her wit was as sharp as a tack.
It’s not always easy to see each day’s blessing, but looking back at the culmination of moments, I’m humbled by the privilege of being a witness to them all. Click here to see some of the images from the past decade.
My newspaper job has it’s frustrations, but today makes up for every city council meeting and illustration by committee I’ve ever had to do. Doing an advance for the Sea and Sky Spectacular airshow, I had the wonderful opportunity to take a ride with aerobatic pilot Lt. Col. John Klatt in his Extra 300L Air National Guard plane. It was a difficult place to shoot since I could only take one camera and one lens and I had to hold the camera behind my head from the front cockpit position and shoot blindly back at Lt. Col. Klatt, but I liked the frame above as he went inverted. The Canon 15mm fisheye I was using gave the horizon a nice curve that I thought gave the illusion that we were in a low-Earth orbit. It was a very good day to be a photographer.
The House of Heroes came to town today for a show at the Murray Hill Theatre here in Jacksonville, FL, and I had the pleasure of doing an abbreviated 30-minute shoot before their set. Some of the photos will be featured on their upcoming Christmas album.
I shared with the drummer Colin (pictured, center) that my son Isaac often bursts out in song to the tune of one their tracks. He said his three year old does the same thing. So you know, if you’re able to capture the musical interest of a toddler, you’re either on par with Barney the Dinosaur or you’ve really got talent and mass appeal. I think HOH has accomplished the latter (and could take down Barney with one a cappella harmony).
Any way you look at it, they have a great sound, and they’re awesome to work with. Check them out here.
Calligraphy ink and compressed air were the primary tools I used for an illustration about adult Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The pitch dark droplets spread into hundreds of veinous branches with each puff from the air canister. I scanned several of the ink formations along with a few drips and splats and layered them in colorful variations over a portrait of my beautiful bride, Kristie, giving her best pensive stare. For the record, she’s the most focused person I know.
© Jon M. Fletcher 2009