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From time to time I photograph corporate headshots in Denver and Boulder, which provides a cool opportunity to shift gears a little. Sometimes I can schedule a couple of shots here and there for individuals, while other times I can fill up a whole day doing 20+ headshots for everyone at a company.

Back in March, while I was in the States, I booked a bunch of headshots for individuals. Here are just a few of the images we came up with.

Sue, the first, just wanted a new photo of herself for her health consulting company, while Sarah needed something for her travel company. She specializes in trips to Africa, so we wound up with a subtle hint of her specialty: a zebra print chair. Jon is headed off to business school to lay the groundwork for a biotech startup that could potentially change the world (no exaggeration), so he needed a couple different looks to fit future uses. By coincidence, the morning before we met I watched a NOVA episode on exactly what he will be working on, and was blown away.

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I had a really fun time shooting Pilot, AKA Mister Grumbles, for his first birthday the other day. He’s just learned to walk so he spent the afternoon cruising all over the place with me and my cameras in hot pursuit. We hiked along a trail in Estes for about 20 minutes to get to a grove of aspen trees I often shoot in, and after an hour of shooting, Mister Grumbles still insisted on walking the whole way back. For a 1-year-old, that’ s about a marathon. Awesome little dude. His nickname comes from the constant noises he makes: happy, happy grumbles. Congrats, Mister Grumbles. Hope to see you again sometime!

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Things sometimes just fall into place, which is exactly what happened a few days ago while passing through Santa Barbara. I got a phone call from a bride whose wedding I shot a few years ago, and she was wondering if I’d be in Southern California any time soon. For Mother’s Day she wanted me to take some portraits of her brother, who’s just finishing up his swimming career at UCSB. Well, after a foggy morning shoot and a chilly and wet evening shoot (pools can be COLD when you’re standing in them taking pictures!) here’s what we came up with.

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Tracy and John are getting married later in the year, so we headed up to Lumpy Ridge and Lilly Lake in Estes Park to shoot their engagement session the other day. I’d just returned from a 6 month trip through New Zealand and Australia, so it was really cool to be home and hang out with these guys as they played in the snow. Their laughter is infectious, and I am convinced the wedding is going to be so much fun. I don’t think they know how to not laugh. Congrats, guys, I can’t wait for the wedding.

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The latest WPJA contest results were just announced the other day, and I found that this image placed in the Trash the Dress portrait category. I had a lot of fun with the shots from this series — I took them last year in the Mexican Riviera Maya in Tulum, at Todd and Malissa’s wedding. We actually go to go into a cenote and shoot in a huge underground river. Wow! I brought along my underwater housing and snorkeled around shooting these two. Totally fun.

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Della Terra is open, and wow does it look awesome! Pam let Sarah, her mom, her brother and myself in for a bridal portrait shoot, and we had full run of the property for a few hours. I think Della Terra is one of the best wedding venues in the state — no kidding. The rooms are incredibly well appointed, complete with walk-through showers and hot tubs on the porch! Inside there is a super cozy fireplace and a huge two-story waterfall. And the wedding deck itself looks up onto MacGregor Slab in Rocky Mountain National Park. Good stuff. Sarah and I had fun shooting all over the place — and yes, she did get into a bathtub full of water in her wedding dress. Can’t wait to shoot her and Mark’s wedding next month!

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So back in April I had the pleasure and honor to photograph Rudi and Russell’s totally rad wedding in the Bahamas. They were married at the Abaco Club on Winding Bay, which is perhaps one of the most beautiful beaches anywhere. Anyway, Rudi is starting her own business called Nature Girl Designs making really cool hand-made buckles out of their big red barn back east.

Check out her site if you get a chance and are looking for something really unique. She’ll even turn a photo into a buckle if you’re interested.

Anyway, Rudi’s been touring SoCal and the Boulder area setting up new vendor accounts for her buckles, so she stopped by recently for a few head shots and advertising pictures to use to get the company rolling. Here’s what we came up with on a sunny but absolutely frigid afternoon in Estes Park. Kudos to her for enduring the miserable weather!

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It’s always cool to see what graphic designers do to your work once it’s in their hands. Here are two head shots I took recently, and then the resulting pages/ads designed by Andrea Russell at Optasia Graphics. I think she’s pretty good! I was psyched to be able to squeeze in a short corporate head shot gig and a magazine gig right before I left Santa Barbara for the summer and drove out to Colorado to begin the wedding season. Good timing, and it got the mind limbered up and the creative juices flowing.

The pic of Sam Tyler was taken in the corner of a kid’s bedroom, in front of the only white corner I could find in the house we did this shoot at. So he just stood in the corner, maybe 3 feet in front of the wall and a few feet from the wall on his left. I lit him with just one small flash at 1/128th power shot through an umbrella. It was so low power that I was able to stop my 85mm lens down to about f/1.8 to get a nice shallow depth of field. The idea was to have the umbrella light illuminate Sam and then bounce back off the wall to the camera’s right to fill in a little bit of his face.

The image was for a story about Sam, who makes documentaries. He’s going to produce a doc about what’s going on at the Santa Barbara News Press, my former hometown paper that’s hemorrhaging employees thanks to a billionaire owner who doesn’t understand the idea of a free press and instead uses the paper as her soap box. I’m glad I turned down a job there about 4 years ago! Since last spring, more than 20 (I lost count — I don’t have that many fingers and toes) editors, designers, reporters, etc. left because of disagreements with management. Without going into too much detail, it’s been unprecedented and extraordinarily ugly. As a result, the paper has become the laughing stock of California, and the readers in Santa Barbara don’t have a viable, reliable source of daily local news. Bummer. So anyway, Sam’s doc will likely be very revealing.

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So this is kinda neat — Coastal Woman’s new summer 2007 issue features a shot I took a few weeks ago on its cover. An honor! Check it out!

For the camera geeks in the house (hi Dad!) I lit the shot with two off-camera Canon 580 flashes. I didn’t need to break out the bigger White Lightening studio stobes because I was shooting at twilight and wanted to utilize a lot of the ambient light. One flash is directly behind the chair, adding a little rim lighting to the subjects and also reflecting light backwards to fill in the background a little. The other light was on a stand and was shooting through an umbrella to my left. Both were triggered by Pocket Wizards. By the way, if anyone wants to learn a lot about quick and dirty lighting techniques, they should hit up the Strobist blog at strobist.blogspot.com.