recent shoots

Here’s a little ditty from Milwaukee Mag’s writeup of Master Z’s Cue Club, a big pool hall out in Waukesha. It was fun to just hang out and capture what happened. I like pool and all, but I’m not very good at it.

Meet John Janssen, a scientist at the Great Lakes Water Institute who studies lake trout. This shot for Milwaukee Magazine took a lot of wrangling. It all started, as it usually does, with a phone call to the subject, in this case Janssen. After discussing various photo ideas, we decided I’d better take a scouting mission, so we hung up and I hit the road. I’m sure glad I did. The institute’s docking area is too inland and canal-like. The massive boat they usually work on wouldn’t be available before my deadline. The rest of the place, while cool, just wasn’t visually matching what I’d need to illustrate the story. The trout at the institute are kept in a sterile area, and Janssen didn’t think we could get permission to make a photo like this. But after a little prodding and surprisingly little resistance, the fish handlers came up with a compromise: They would anesthetize a fish, allowing Janssen to hold it for a couple of one-minute rapid-fire shooting sprees. The fish, and thus us, would have to stay inside the sterile area. So it was settled. A garage door would make one background, and if time allowed (which it did… see below), we’d shoot something more environmental near the fish tanks.

So we made our game plan, and the next morning I returned to shoot. I wasn’t sure how Janssen, with his wry sense of humor, would behave in front of the camera. Turns out he was a riot…

Read the rest of this entry »

Meet Tyson Hausdoerffer, local surfer. In Milwaukee? Well, sometimes. But he likes to spend his summer breaks (he teaches literature at UWM) in Mexico riding waves. We took to Bradford Beach one evening in July to shoot some photos for a Milwaukee Magazine profile.

I was a little apprehensive when Milwaukee Magazine asked me to help shoot its best bars feature. They were after the on-camera-flash look, of which I don’t do much. I was super excited, though, that the assignment called for weird crops of hands, drinks, mouths, messy tables and so on. As soon as I hit the first bar, Bay View’s Blackbird, I was hooked. The technique afforded me far more freedom and speed than I would have had shooting available light or with a strobe or two on stands. And I like that flexibility!

A few more photos inside…

Read the rest of this entry »

Had a blast shooting Milwaukee band Conrad Plymouth recently for the Bay View Compass. These four guys were a riot. We started inside the Palomino bar, a spot I’d wanted to shoot at for at least a year. (Big thanks to the manager, Tim, for being so accommodating!) Then  we cruised down to the Port of Milwaukee for some impromptu rambling around — probably my favorite way to shoot. It lets personality to shine through, which doesn’t always happen under the glare of strobes, and it leaves more room for the unexpected.

I photographed the downtrodden Lindbergh Park on the north side for Milwaukee Magazine last month. The kiddie pool was locked up and empty except for a puddle of mucky water and a dolphin statue (perhaps once a fountain?), making for a pretty dead-on illustration of the story.