Creative Work
“Creative” is my catch-all for photography that either is a concerted artistic endeavor on my part, OR it might just be work that doesn’t fit anywhere else.
Udon Noodle Portraits for a New Seattle Restaurant
Tonight is the friends-and-family party celebrating the opening of my brother-in-law’s new restaurant, U:Don Fresh Japanese Noodle Station. Yes, there’s an emoticon in the restaurant name. Don’t fret! It’s called clever branding!
The anticipation has been building for a while, and everyone is quite excited for U:Don to finally open. Outside of handling the website and the rest of the online presence, I also took part in some of their photography artwork, collaborating with Scott Pitts, food photographer extraordinaire, to create a pair of large-scale photomontages.
The original plan was to try to use all of these images and more in the large 8-foot-by-3-foot spaces (and thank you so much to Hal, Jaelithe, Doug and Yuko for their time and patience!), but in the end we distilled the idea down to using just two of the images, paired with some of the food photography. Whatever the outcome, it’s still pretty marvelous to see one’s work upon the wall of a new Seattle restaurant. It makes dining all the more pleasurable!
Japanese lesson: To give thanks and begin a meal in Japan, you say “itadakimasu” [phonetically, say: "ee-tah-dah-kee-mahss"]. I think I’ll be saying that quite a bit at U:Don.
Jackie at Seattle Bouldering Project
My good friend Jackie is a certified personal trainer and yoga instructor, and we often shoot a couple times a year for her website, or for fun. This time we were focused on yoga and working in a weight room, but at the end of our shoot at the Seattle Bouldering Project, we ran out into the boulders to get some photos of her climbing.
It’s probably obvious, but Jackie is both strong and talented. In between popping off my flash and trying to stay out of everyone’s way, I was watching many of the young guys bouldering struggling to lift themselves up or to maintain grips. But Jackie was like Spider-Woman as she wove her way quickly up each color-coded path, and there were times I had to ask her to move more slowly or to hold a position so I could photograph it.
These images are all in black and white, because I liked a bit of that gritty dramatic feel, especially on the photo where she’s posing like an Amazon warrior.
Rachel and Warren, Dancers in Flight
I am always on the lookout for inspirational photography, and came across a gallery by New York photog Jordan Matter called Dancers Among Us. Viewing the images is sort of like seeing superheroes doing everyday things around the city, an idea I really liked, and I wondered if it could be adapted for Seattle.
Luckily I know one amazing dancer, Rachel Randall, who you may remember from a couple of my panoramic images!
We decided that Seattle Center would have a high concentration of iconic Seattle landmarks, so on a bright and sunny day, she brought her friend Warren Woo and we ran around shooting them leaping and jumping and dancing. I don’t know that we spent enough time on any one shot to get that perfect floating-in-midair look, but we certainly had a lot of fun. Or at least I did. I was only directing!
