studio

For many years, I have always wanted to have a way to let anyone search all my images. Yet none of the solutions I could find was user-friendly or useful. No one wants to see a gallery with 10000 images. Some photographers are using location-based hierarchy, so you need to know what you are looking for in order to find it. For example, if you want an image of El Capitan, you need to know it’s in Yosemite National Park in California in the US. I have always found this way too restrictive. A better system is the one Getty Images uses, where you can search images using keywords. In order to work I need to add keywords to all my images. I do have keywords on my images but I don’t have nearly enough. You need to have keyword for the dominant color, generic...

Debbie Omariba is a friend and a great actor and model. She has been on commercials for  Starbucks, Luminosity, LinkedIn, Apple and Garmin. I’m her go-to photographer when she needs new images. To be honest, she was one of the first models I photographed in 2011, when I was avoiding humans on my pictures as much as possible. In 2011, I made a conscious effort to be more confortable with shooting people. Several artists (like David Duchemin, Zack Arias or David Hobby) will tell you to get out of your confort zone to be more creative and a more complete artist. Actors want their pictures to be relatively close to reality, they don’t want their pictures to be altered in post-production too much. Remember those headshots are their calling cards, if...

In June, I offered portrait images at a lower price. The success has been incredible, I have never been so busy than this past month. In total I had 8 portrait sessions, in 24 days and was very fortunate to work with incredible talents like Debbie, Kara, Sudeep, Brittany, Wendy, Joey, Bruce, Luka, Joe and Taurus the robot. I always try to have two models per session so I can be more efficient (one model is getting ready, while the other is being photographed). We had sessions on location in San Francisco, and some sessions in studio. Here I share a couple of my favorite images: Want to book a session for...

A couple weeks ago, I was invited to take part of a collective photo shoot in an equestrian farm in Sonoma Valley. It was the first photo shoot of a group called: The collective model. The idea behind the collective is to have a group of talented models, make-up artists and photographers who get together to help each other out. Nobody gets paid (except maybe the location) and everyone benefits from the shoot. Everyone gets new images for their portfolio. For this first shoot, the location was a farm in Sonoma Valley, where we had access to horses, stables and rings. There were 5 models (Taylor, Brian, Debbie, Yuliya and Russo) and one other photographer plus myself. After a quick introduction and walk around the property, we got to work. It was a very fluid...

I’m often asked to photograph some of the robots SRI International is working with. Those robots are always one of a kind (ok sometimes there is more than one) and it’s challenging to capture a robot as an image. You see a lot of videos of robots on Youtube but rarely images. The reason I believe, is that we think of robots as something in motion, therefore our mental representation of a robot is not static. A robot is per definition something that moves, grabs, fold, paint, etc. (you get the point, it’s not motionless) while a photograph is motionless. How do you capture the concept of robot in a photograph ? The idea I have used (in the image above) is a multi shot image where you can see the robot grasping the object. The other technique that...

A couple of months ago, I had a call from SRI International looking for hiring a photographer for their new website. SRI is a not-for-profit research center in Menlo Park, CA and they are responsible for some amazing inventions including the mouse, HDTV, and recently SIRI. SRI was building a new website to present the different research projects and they wanted to have one image per project. Each image had to encapsulate the vision and the goal of what the project was about. I was assigned to work with the Artificial Intelligence Center (the folks behind the first version of SIRI). Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not very sexy and visual (unless Apple does it). We started with a lot of back and forth between the project manager, the art director and myself on...