A Photo Blog

My first trip to NASA last year was to photograph Robonaut for IEEE Spectrum. They created an interactive iPad app that highlights robots from all over the world, used in various industries. I was the lucky kid who got to hang out with the space robot.

We created animations that feature Robonaut’s human like hands, its ability to life weights with torque similar to a human, and it’s range of motions. This thing is up on the space station working along side astronauts, and has to use the same tools that they do. So it’s important that it functions much like a human. Except it doesn’t need a space suit. Pretty convenient.

On top of the space robot stuff the app is pretty neat. I thought it was interesting, but my four year old nephew thought it was the coolest thing he’d ever seen. When he refused to put it down for dinner his mom gave him a timeout. Sorry dude.

AARP asked us to create the shape of the United States out of food. Yeah, easy, we can do that. No problem! Then the curve ball…they wanted each state defined. By color. Even Rhode Island… and Alaska… and Hawaii.

If you’ve never been grocery shopping by color, try it. It’s worth it to watch the cashiers face when you go through with one monochromatic cart after another. Also, a big thanks to our UPS delivery guy who is from Alaska and showed up about the time we were styling that state. We had formed the inside passage wrong and he corrected our green beans.

Spirit’s design director, Kevin de Miranda, called me about their past two covers. November’s cover feature focused on forgiveness, and finding (or creating) a good in the darkest of situations. We decided to photograph a dove. An iconic symbol of hope. For readers sitting in a metal tube rocketing through the sky, i’m hopeful that the story was uplifting or insightful. But for me it was an opportunity to spend an evening patiently exploring a dove over a glass of wine. Or three or four. I don’t remember. And it was one of the rare occasions that Robin looked at my images and said  ’what if you light it different?’ I asked how. ‘I don’t know, just different, maybe backlight it.’ So I did.

The October cover required a vintage camera, and lucky us, I have one or two. This ended up being a self portrait. Sort of. I’m not exactly the polyester sport coat and tie sort of guy. But those are my hands!

As in Texas Monthly, who recently launched a redesign. Part of their new look includes this front of the book touts page which sums up parts of the mag like an extra TOC section. We were tasked with creating this ongoing series each month. The idea is to highlight the typography while using images from the magazine. The challenge is to do creative things without distorting the type, and to do it in the last day or so before the issue ships (since we can’t start until all of the art is in).

We started the project very straightforward to establish the idea with readers, and I’m hopeful that we will be able to go more abstract as the project progresses. The possibilities here are really exciting. So far, the jigsaw puzzle is my favorite.