I’m now showing selections from an ongoing personal project documenting urban basketball courts in the Milwaukee area. Check it out at www.adamryanmorris.com by clicking through the splash page and then selecting “projects” from the navigation bar.

As seen in Riverwest.

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…

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 photographed this cool chili concoction for the current issue of Milwaukee Magazine. It’s the southwest corn chicken chili served on garlic bread at Chili Lili’s in the Third Ward. Can’t wait to go back and try this one! I imagine a nice cold beer, like the one pictured, would wash this down mighty nicely.

www.adamryanmorris.com is now viewable in a new mobile-friendly format. Cell phone- or iPad-using viewers of my site are automatically routed to the new version, which you can check out at www.adamryanmorris.com/mobi. So if you’ve got your phone handy and you’re feeling ambitious, give it a whirl and e-mail me with what you think. (The previous mobile-friendly HTML version of the site is still available for now.)

Right before these last few chaotic weeks began, I shot some portraits of my friend Kaz and his son, Keaton, during a walk around the Riverwest neighborhood. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… I love the freedom of roaming around with just a camera in hand.

You wouldn’t know it from this  blog, but I’ve been busy lately. For now, a present: Some birch trees and sunlight from a shoot (unrelated to this photo) last week in Dousman, Wisconsin.

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…