Early this year I attended a party celebrating a friends birthday.  It was well attended with a host of hollywood celebrities showing up throughout the night.  One person in attendance was the actor Orlando Jones whom I’d never met before.  When I was introduced to him he said, “I love your work and have always wanted to work with you.”  At first I thought he’d mistaken me for an actor but then realized he knew my photography work from my first book, Sepia Dreams.  I was honored he was familiar with my work and we spoke for a while that night about life, photography, success in the arts and health.  Orlando is a vegan and he explained the pro’s of being one. 

A few months ago I received a call from a client at an advertising agency saying he had a project coming up and thought I’d be great for it.  The first question he asked was have I ever worked with Orlando Jones.  I was shocked by the question since I’d met him earlier this year.  I told my client I’d never worked with him but that we had a great conversation at a party earlier in the year. 

Pre-production is one of the most important aspects of commercial photography, but especially when working on advertising assignments.  I was awarded the job to photograph Orlando Jones for a series of national ads for Farmers Insurance.  The first thing I did was jump full force into production mode.  My T.E.A.M. on this assignment, (and team stands for together each achieves more) consisted of my New York agent, my producer, set builder, set dresser, stylist, assistants and interns.  For this assignment I studies the concept and sketches provided by my client and looked for problem areas and thought of the best way to tackle them.  I would need to discuss and defend my ideas in the pre-production meeting prior to the shoot.  When studying a layout for advertising it is very important to mentally walk through the process of how you want to shoot the job.  I like to look for the problems and then start figuring out how to solve them.  Every advertising assignment has hurdles to overcome and I love the challenge of figuring them out and being ready for everything and anything.  The hurdle for this assignment revolved around creating the chalkboard.  Every small detail is extremely important, including how to convey the right amount of chalk build-up at the bottom of the board and the eraser makes from countless old assignments on the board. 

My producer is incredible and we worked closely to put all the elements together to make the assignment come to life.  Remembering my conversation and first meeting with Orlando I wanted to make sure we had the right food on the set for Orlando and my producer found the perfect chef to have for the job.

This campaign was one of the most enjoyable advertising projects I’ve worked on recently.  The shoot was a blast and my advertising clients, along with my Farmers clients, had a ball on the shoot.  Orlando was so funny during the shooting process and worked hard to give his all.  I can’t remember laughing as much as we did on the set this day and at the end of the shoot my Farmers clients said great shoot and we will see you again soon. A BIG thank you to my entire team who really kicked butt on this assignment.  Thank you!

Today I’m on the plane flying back from Philly to Los Angeles after speaking to an amazing group of photographers, thanks to Sony.  In the airport coming out, I saw the Farmers ad for the first time so I emailed my client to send me the first of the series of ads.  I am very happy with this series of images and hope it leads to more fun assignments like this.  When I land in Los Angeles I will quickly switch gears and prepare to leave in the morning for a fashion shoot in Trinidad.  My next post will be from the Caribbean.

Always Dream Big