Image from recent shoot for ESPN Magazine

Discover magazine hired me to photograph a portrait of David Stevenson, a professor of planetary science at Cal Tech. The “science guy at the university” portrait can be a little tricky, usually it’s a plain boring office or generic lab bench, and you usually have 15 minutes. I had this idea of renting a large fiberglass rock, something that would represent his work, maybe loosen him up, and maybe look a little funny. When we arrived I was pleased that David did at least have a nice topography of papers all over his desk, we could at least start with that. We setup our lights in his office and another setup outside near a mural of the moon. I kept the rock hidden by our piles of gear in the hallway, fearing he would think that was the world’s dumbest ideas ever, and kick us out. We started shooting, moved David from the office to the second shot, around the 12 minute mark I whisper to Finn, “get the rock” 

I recently shot a breakfast feature for Los Angeles Magazine. We shot a bunch of restaurants -- some fancy, some not, some food in the studio, and some portraits of people who get up before 5am to serve our morning fuel. Here is a portrait of David Bullen next to a still life of Stan’s Donuts. David owns a busy craft service company and we shot him on the set of a McDonald's commercial. Shooting on commercial sets can be tricky even when you are asked to be there, but gets even trickier when you're poaching a crewmember, I think David must have bribed production with smoothies or something. Super fun job exploring and eating all over LA; anyone looking for an amazing Lebanese breakfast pizza, I know the place…

A few years ago I had the pleasure of shooting Lucia Eames, the daughter of Charles Eames at the Eames house in the Pacific Palisades. They hadn’t let the inside be photographed in a very long time, and being a huge fan of Charles and Ray, I had goose bumps all day. She was awesome; we basically had the best docent one could ask for, she had a story for every object in the house.

This entire living room has been temporally moved to LACMA for the California Design exhibit, I’d recommend checking that out…

Here are a couple outtakes from a few months ago; Christina Hendricks and Julianna Margulies photographed for the cover of The Wrap magazine. Congratulations to Julianna for her Emmy win the other night. 

Here are a couple images from a recent Wired magazine story that is out now. A company called Switch is making these really cool LED bulbs, they have the same color as the regular incandescent bulbs we all know and love, but use 1/10 the power and last some 20,000 hours. We photographed the R&D lab were these are being developed and Brett Sharenow the man behind the company. Later we shot in studio for a day working on a few different still life setups, both with the new Switch bulb and various piles of old style incandescent. Fun shoot and cool to see some new tech that could potentially change the way we light our homes.

Two months ago I shot a library of images for Microsoft; they sponsor a grant that gives money and software to schools in underserved areas. We were invited into a variety of schools in south central Los Angeles. We met with a lot of inspiring people...from ex-felons studying for their GEDs to gifted kids from underprivileged homes. Everyone we met was truly engaged and wanted to learn. It was exciting to see such a diverse group of people who all had one thing in common: a thirst for knowledge. 

I recently had the pleasure of meeting and photographing some amazing people for a feature in Stanford Medicine Magazine. All of our subjects survived some sort of traumatic event. Sophany Bay (left) snacks on an orange at a Buddhist temple near San Jose; she narrowly escaped the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields. 

Deborah Shurson and Gary Fairchild (right) both survived severe brain injuries. While skydiving, Deborah’s parachute didn’t open causing her to land on a golf course at 125 mph; she broke almost every bone in her body. During physical therapy she met Gary, who was recovering from a brain aneurism. The 2 are now married and living a remarkable life together in Palo Alto. It was a real treat to work on such an inspiring story. Big thanks to Dennis Mcleod and David Armario for such an interesting assignment, telling the visual story of these incredible people. 

Ok, I have been totally slacking on the blog, sorry about that! I had the pleasure of meeting and photographing Steve Samson and his partner Zach Pollack last month for Los Angeles Magazine. I myself have been dabbling in pizza making for a couple months, trying out a couple different pizza stones, different dough recipes, and coming very close to hacking my oven so it goes up to 900 degrees.  It was great to see how the masters do it and talk shop about sour dough starters, and all that goes into a great pie. These guys have a new restaurant in LA called Sotto; very good Italian food and of course amazing wood fired pizzas.