Posts Tagged ‘Editorial’
Last summer I got a call from Lawdragon to shoot portraits of two lawyers here in Alabama for their journal. Lawdragon is a national portal listing of lawyers, evaluations and lawyer profiles and for this assignment they wanted to spotlight lawyers outside of their offices and not in suits. The direction was to place them in environments that matched up with something regarding their own hobbies or interests outside of the office. Jere Beasley and Ralph Cook were my two assignments. I have been wanting to release these for months but as it usually turns out the time between the shoot and when pictures are published sometimes stretches out further than one may expect.
Mr. Beasley lives in Montgomery and was Lt Governor during one of George Wallace’s terms as governor. In fact, Jere was acting governor for 30 days after George Wallace was shot. Mr. Beasley’s office was a short walk from the Montgomery Biscuits’ ball park. At this point I forgot the exact involvement Mr. Beasley has with the park itself and the land on which it sits now but I do remember that he loves to watch them play! That’s where we decided to go for our portraits.
Jere Beasley
Mr. Cook lives in Birmingham and is a lawyer with a firm downtown. I found out that he was the former Supreme Court Chief Justice of Alabama which is a big deal for such a humble and personable man. I called him to discuss the shoot and discover his hobbies and fishing came to the top. He gladly volunteered to bring his hat, vest, waders and fly rod to our shoot. We chose the lake at Oak Mountain to shoot and I waded (minus waders) into the water with him and my assistant positioned my strobe toward Mr. Cook (i.e. held the strobe to keep it from falling into the water).
Ralph Cook
2008-2009 UCP Annual Report
My friends at United Cerebral Palsy (UCP) of Birmingham (follow them on Twitter) asked me to do specific portraits for their annual report using some of the participants in their program along with some of their contributors. Jennifer Ellison wanted something in black and white which we did and they turned out very nicely. Another goal was to try and get some natural and fun interactions between everyone in the subjects and at least one group was having a lot of fun dancing and showing off but they didn’t make the cut for obvious reasons….but there was fun in all these shots. In the shot on the right Daniel is an obvious Auburn fan (who knows why right?) and we had fun picking back and forth about Alabama vs Auburn and shouting “Roll Tide!”
One of the challenges of getting all the shots together of everyone was organizing everyone to be ready on the same day which didn’t happen. The shoot took place on 3 different days with the first day done by bring my mobile studio to their beautiful headquarters and the next two days were shot at my studio. There was one girl program participant who just wouldn’t smile for the camera – until I left to check out one of my lights that had stopped working when I heard everyone yelling at me, “Alan! She’s smiling get over here!” Thankfully we got the shot!
I will post one shot that didn’t make the Annual Report cut but gives some idea of the fun time we all had together.
January - Healthy Living Section
Thanks to WonderfulMachine.com for being found by Southern Living. I got the pleasure of meeting lots of good people both at the magazine and at the bootcamp (BirminghamBootCamp.com). Mary Zarate really kicks everyone into gear out there in Mountain Brook for Birmingham Boot Camp. Everyday that we had planned to shoot it was raining like crazy. There was a tight deadline so we finally found one morning early that was dry – 8AM! Ok that’s not that early but for me it was especially when it was that cold. Thanks to everyone for a good shoot.