Yesterday’s mail brought a copy of the February 2010 issue of Consumer Reports – I’ve got a photo in the Viewpoint column:

I know it’s a good day when I open the info for a shoot and see a word like ‘Lasermonks.’ How could that not be a fun assignment???

Turns out that Lasermonks is the business arm of a monastery in Southwest Wisconsin that sells (among many other things) toner cartridges. They kind of stumbled upon the toner business on their way to other ideas: in the process of exploring how the monastery would provide for itself, the monastery was producing a lot of research documents, Father Bernard McCoy went to place an order for more toner. He was flabbergasted by the markup on toner, and the Lasermonk idea was born.

I didn’t really know what to expect when I went to the shoot; it was my first visit to a monastery. But Father Bernard and Sarah Caniglia (the Business Development Manager aka “Monk Helper”) were extremely warm and welcoming. I had a preconception that the monastic life is austere and detached, but at least at Our Lady of Spring Bank, outside of the morning hours spent chanting and in other devotional activities, the brothers are encouraged to explore and develop their personal talents and gifts, and the economic necessity of covering the expenses of the community pretty much requires a certain connectedness to the larger world.

Many thanks to Sarah and Father Bernard for their time, for the Benevolence Biscuits Sarah sent home for my dog, and for the glimpse they provided of the Lasermonk life!

Here’s the original version of the image Consumer Reports selected, along with a couple more of my favorites from the shoot.

A couple months ago I had a chance to shoot a small assignment for Uponor – a Finland-based manufacturer of residential and commercial HVAC components whose US headquarters is in Eagan, MN. Uponor’s in-house magazine caters to a global workforce, and the piece I photographed addressed the issues surrounding moving halfway around the world to take a position in another country. That’s my shot on the right: Ulf is an engineer from Sweden who has been living in the Twin Cities for the past couple years.

The hallway where we did the portrait fit the direction I had been given really well, I thought: clean & simple, good for the laying over of text. When I scouted it I envisioned a nice natural light shot, using the row of windows running the length of the hall. Of course it was raining buckets the day my assistant TJ and I went out for the shoot, but we found a very fortuitous overhang outside one of the windows that was the perfect size for a big strobe with softbox. So we moved along Plan B: bring the sun with you! And make sure you’ve got it well-wrapped in tall kitchen garbage bags, with a couple sandbags weighing down the light stand. While we futzed with lighting, Ulf kept us entertained with tales of cross-country RV trips exploring America with his extended Swedish family. (Turns out car problems in the Dakotas aren’t much fun, but make for good stories when you get home.)

Thanks loads to Sanoma Magazines Finland for the assignment! Hopefully we’ll get another chance to work together in 2010.

One of the better things to happen in the past year for my wife and me has been the relocation of our local grocery store, the Seward Coop. Not only is it only three blocks from us now; it’s also twice as big, with amazing all-Minnesota meat counter (with the best hand made sausages in the city), a great deli, amazing selections of the whole world of organic and sustainable food. Basically it’s everything we want in a place to buy our food.

Which is one of the reasons I’m so excited to be working with them on their imagery – you can see the first newsletter I shot for them in PDF form here. The other reasons to be excited: great people who are fully willing to collaborate on the vision of a story, a mission that I wholeheartedly believe in right in my backyard, and amazing layout and branding provided by Spunk Design Machine.

Our first project was a backyard barbecue to highlight the August Eat Local promotion.

For you photog-types out there, a note on the lighting. I was absolutely excited about the evening sun blaring in from behind, but using only natural light would either have blown out the background and washed out the vivid color on the table, or left everything not the sky way under-exposed. So I set my base exposure to where I wanted the background to be, then I set two speedlights back from the near corners of the table to provide fill. The sweet spot was an exposure that gave highlights from the strong backlighting, with just enough fill to give detail and max color on the table and on peoples’ faces. The two speedlights were set to identical power, providing an even field of light over the table and subjects, giving me the ability to change my angle and not have to worry about resetting the lights. Then I could concentrate on composition and directing the subjects.