Archive for the ‘Promotion’ Category

Boxes, redux

Monday, July 19th, 2010

Rafting down the Delaware River, July 2010

It’s been a little more than a year since JLP opened the NYC branch (took the plunge?) and my wife and I began our married lives together in the city surrounded by boxes. Now once again breaking down boxes (we only moved 3.5 miles this time to Columbus Circle) I thought it would be helpful to take stock on the grand experiment.

Personally the first year has been fantastic even if I haven’t seen all that much of my beautiful wife as she fought the good fight (and won/survived!) in her intern year in medicine. We both love living in the city and seeing friends (images above from my camping/rafting trip last weekend) and being in the thick of pretty much everything you could ever want to experience. Manhattan is all of the things that you have heard it is (expensive, loud, insane, smelly, etc.) but it’s been beautiful walking these streets, our streets, watching the seasons change and lights flicker.

Professionally it’s nearly impossible to separate and discern what might be you vs. outside factors… did I listen to pop music because I was depressed, or did listening to pop music make me depressed? Same goes with photography and moving and the fucked publishing economies. Things haven’t been crazy busy but I’ve kept working; often back in Miami, often shooting portraits, and occasionally for slightly less than I believed a job was worth. But it’s our Grand Depression, folks, and that just goes with the reality for most of us. I know that relatively I’ve been doing just fine but of course we all want more and better.

During the last year I’ve parted with a rep (no biggie, I’m back on my own), got to do some traveling (Iceland, Haiti, and the American West), have shot more corporate and advertising work, and started/restarted some personal projects. In the categories that matter I’m really happy and am having fun. That’s a pretty simple metric but I’m trying to avoid spending too much time in my head these days. And working hard and seeing results over the last year has been rewarding.

A year later the most obvious spot to improve in is that I haven’t been as smart or aggressive with my promotion as I expected to be mostly because the economy was so ill. I haven’t set up as many meetings or sent out as many cards to really drive home my NYC/MIA twin cities operation as I could have, and hopefully I can change that in the next few of months. But I have been out meeting people, making introductions, and generally hoping to raise my profile a bit in a slow “I’m going to be around for a long, long time” sort of way. And I’ve also been listening to the market and my own creative drive to figure out what sort of career is actually going to continue to make me feel fulfilled.

After a year of working based in NYC – which has been busier of late I think many of us feel – I’ve started to unravel some of the mysteries. And as I mentioned before there really aren’t that many tricks, just a lot of sweat. You start by preparing yourself, then you strip things down both mentally and gear-wise as far as you can, hire more help and also a car, and then get to work. And my clients haven’t said peep about paying more for it. Basically working in NYC is just more legwork; an extra connection when you were used to direct flights.

I’m certainly missing a whole host of things so I’ll open up the comments to any questions that any of you might have.

AP 26

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

American Photography is the only competition that I’ve entered consistently over the past few years, so it was quite a thrill to receive JLP’s first (& 2nd!) honors from the finely-juried annual last week. From our project on the secret life of the Penn State Nittany Lion mascot the jury selected this image (one of only 304 images in the AP 26 annual) of Lion tethered to Earth and his cheerleading colleagues via his increasingly tattered tail. Thanks again to ESPN the Magazine and DoP Catriona Ni Aolain for giving me the great job.

Additionally I’m psyched to have my portrait of golfer Greg Norman and his sun-bespeckled face as he slaps a wedge down range included in the AP website archive as a “chosen” image. The image was shot for and published in Men’s Journal by their excellent DoP Michelle Wolfe.

Of the handful of images I entered last year I would have been extremely hard put to have picked either of them as potential honorees, especially that particular shot from the mascot work, but that’s how it works in contests — and ultimately you are just happy for anyone to have given your work and the stories found within a second look, opening up a new audience to connect. Thanks AP 26 Jury, see you at the party!

Speedy

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

And because it’s Sunday and I’m doing a bit of tidying up around the JLP office, I thought I’d make virtual note of a couple of changes to the website, most important the launch of a new version of the JohnLoomis.com website: the SPEEDY version!

Made using the very cool Indexhibit, the SPEEDY version was created specifically for our low-bandwidth visitors and is built on a HTML/iPhone-friendly template, but of course features the same photography and information as the (newly coined) DELUXE/Flash version. We hope that the new version is helpful to those of you who reach us on a slow connection or who just like zipping through my work as fast as humanly possible – thanks Mom.

Also newish on both versions of JL.com (that you might have missed) is a gallery of my personal work from the Galapagos Islands, including this image of a diving sea turtle that I swam with for about 20 minutes.

And lastly the first JLP newsletter of 2010 went out this week to clients and fans. There will actually be a lot fewer e-mail promotions this year as attitudes towards newsletters and e-mail promotions in general have certainly cooled. It’s all good and understandable, even more so because I’m a lot more interested in a more personal approach these days. So look out for quarterly newsletters this year, and of course if you want to make sure you receive yours you can always sign up here.

2009, Best of

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

The year that was… looking back it’s a blur. There were lots of portraits I’m pretty sure, a bit of travel, some strange little bits I shot for myself, several compelling stories and failed experiments, some work on personal projects, and yeah a bunch of portraits, of athletes and authors, executives and educators, scientists and seniors, divas and the indebted.

Last year I spent a lot of time thinking and looking at scale and felt very strongly that I wanted to incorporate a more removed, grander, almost reverant/classical perspective to serve as a counter point to my portraiture. This year my portfolio has several pieces that definitely are moving in that direction, either in landscape or numbers, and it’s been a really nice challenge and motivation.

In portraiture this year I think that I found a rhythm and method to my lighting style, though that was completely left behind or stripped back when it didn’t fit a particular subject. In some ways I was going at two opposite directions, using a more direct approach with a lot less that had “fingerprints” all over it, and then also building up a whole lot more to create some sort of unmasked ideal. God love my subjects this year who all endured 30-50% more set-ups than I might have insisted upon in years past… I definitely threw more spaghetti/ideas at the wall, which will continue and expand in 2010.

Here then are my (released) favorites, several of which you may have seen:

johnson1

ares12

mascot10

fiolek11

norman6

brown2

jordan1

galapagos4

Curtain call

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

bwsb1

Well if there wasn’t for bad luck we wouldn’t have any luck at all… or something like that. I was pretty busy in November for Business Week’s SmallBiz magazine shooting for freelance photo editor Jane Clark (rumor has it she has now moved on to Smart Money). Just a week after I rushed in my final files for the new Dec/Jan issue seen above and below new owners Bloomberg shut the door on SmallBiz; thankfully no staff was fired.

cerbone2

cerbone3

platinum1

First up I shot a package on corporate diversity in the NYC area, visiting the fine folks at Neil Cerbone Associates and Double Platinum ad agency, both gay-owned businesses certified by the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. Despite taking place in boring offices we managed to find some fun and weird elements to incorporate into each shoot and the subjects were a great pleasure to work with. And fair warning out there: if I find a giant roll of packing bubbles I’m going to use it!

bwsb4

After the success of the first two shoots I was called back to shoot the cover for the issue down in FL on a story about business financing during the credit crunch caused by the meltdown. Honestly I’m really upset with the pre-press/toning for this cover (my final file is above right) which is completely off from what I shot and delivered (the image of Neil Cerbone got abused as well), but c’est la vie.

The cover feature was for a story that had already been shot once, but they now wanted a different look. Unlike the vast majority of my work, the editors and art director had a very clear idea of what they wanted (background, props, etc) so I tried to make a mark on the details & lighting. We still managed a few different ideas and had fun, but it was a crazy shoot because the whole thing took place inside a refrigerated room at Field of Flowers florist in Davie, FL. That’s right, cover shoot inside a flower freezer… it was cold.

Big thanks to the subjects and my buddy Matt who assisted me for their energy and endurance. Here are a couple more of the Flipse family that I liked:

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