I’m sitting in a coffee shop that recently opened downstairs from the loft my wife and I live in. It’s a beautiful coffee shop (even though they’re playing the music a bit too loud for my liking) and I came here tonight to be inspired.

Warning: Rambling will ensue…

(decided to run outside in the rain to take a photo of it)

One of the many goals I set for myself this year was to set aside more time for the creation of new personal imagery. Just because. No clients or deadlines. Just art. We were actually booked for a personal/creative shoot yesterday but the weather ended up putting that on hold. It’s cool though, it will happen.

I brought the book, ‘Photo Wisdom’ with me to look over tonight at the coffee shop. My wife gave it to me as a gift. I highly recommend it to anyone with a passion for photography or art in general. This is truly an inspiring book. Not that I dig everyone represented inside but it is an honor for someone as myself to be able to hear these people speak of their process/passions/reasons for being a photographer.

Link to Book

This year has gotten off to a crazy start. And not in the ways your probably thinking of either. In my last post I mentioned a road trip I had recently taken but left out one minor detail: My non glorious fall in Austin, TX which led to me cracking some ribs on my right side (with two days left to go on the road). I left it out because I was talking more on the prior year and also to save myself from the embarrassment of having to answer the ubiquitous question, ‘what happened’? Then with my head held low reply,

“I was driving through Austin and stopped to write and take pictures at a coffee shop. It was a beautiful rainy day and I was sitting outside under an awning. As I leaving I stepped out in the rain and slipped. I fell on my camera bag that was freakin’ heavy and landed right on my rib. Oh…and did I mention I broke my 50mm lens on my ribs?”

But no glorious battles, no saving of lives involved. Just a simple fall that led to a very uncomfortable month of pain that is only now starting to ease up.

And then last night my studio manager Janet was in a car accident. Thank God she is fine but her ankle is in a splint. She was driving in the rain and decided to play slip and slide with her car. She spun it twice before crashing. Now we can say we have an experienced stunt car driver on our crew!

So we’ve had a crazy bone crushing start to the year over at Jeff Newton Photography. See…if you say it that way it sounds so much cooler.

I’m off to San Francisco for three days next week. I’ll be shooting just north of SF and will hopefully be updating either the blog or Facebook with some images from the road.

Technically, I started this post a few days ago but didn’t have a chance to finish so here I am on January 1st – and now the 2nd – of 2010 writing about last year.

Thinking back my thoughts are a bit fractured. It’s hard to look on the year as a whole when you are in the midst of it. You have to step away. So that’s what I did. I just returned from a road trip where I had a good amount of time alone to reflect and journal on both the good and bad moments and now feel that I have some perspective on where I succeeded and where I honestly failed. Not that I plan on sharing all of my failures but at least I know what I need to work on as not only a photographer but as a person.

- From my recent road trip. Taken with the G10 -

This was definitely an interesting year. In no way will I hide the fact that at times it was a hard year. There were indeed months where calls were coming in back to back. But then there were times where the phone was all too quiet.

What I cannot allow myself to forget in all of the craziness is that we did shoot some great projects for new and exciting clients and in doing so we had a good year.

Click through to see read more of my rambling…
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Check out our latest behind the scenes video – In HD – from our recent cover shoot for the
November 2009 issue of AZ Magazine.

Make sure to watch in HD

I am proud to be able to share my first 30-second ‘Massage Envy’ commercial. Did I mention that it is currently running nationwide!

If you watched the stop motion video we previously posted (if not just scroll down) you might have noticed that in between the first ‘blue’ commercial and the second ‘pink’ commercial (still to come) we also shot a print campaign.

The print ad below is running in conjunction with the first Commercial.

Our goal (hint, hint to any agency friends who might read this…) is to continue along the path of being brought on as one production team to both direct the motion and shoot the stills aspect of a campaign. It will be interesting to see where this leads…

I had the privilege of speaking to the Commercial Photography class of Scottsdale Community College last Thursday night. Fellow photographer and photo instructor, Geoff Reed had asked me to speak to his students and I think I thoroughly convinced them all I know what I’m talking about…

It is an honor to be asked to speak on a subject that you are passionate about. Yet at the same time it’s also a bit daunting since words do matter. They have the power to influence the mind in both positive and negative ways. And I’m not a teacher nor do I have a degree. And here I am beginning another sentence with the word ‘and’. I feel like it went well though. A bit random and free flowing but that’s my process.

Here’s a few topics I covered: I spoke on how I began my career and the time I spent apprenticing under another photographer. I spoke on the struggles of living the ‘freelance’ life and the importance of surrounding yourself with creative people who will challenge and inspire you. The importance of placing yourself in situations where the chance of  failure is close at hand which in turn will force you beyond your comfort zone. (I think I was reminding myself of this one a bit) I also spoke on the importance of taking a stance with your work when asked to do things you either don’t morally agree with or desire to create. For being a commercial photographer is truly a balance of art and commerce.

An interesting topic was the recent convergence in the worlds of still and motion. I showed them one of the commercials that I recently directed and spoke on where I felt I was headed in that area. I also brought in some mailers/promos to show the importance of marketing. We briefly covered  the whole social media craziness but I’m not the best person to talk about that so I’ll leave that one to the cats who live for that world. (says this as he writes a blog post….)

The cool thing about speaking to a ‘Commercial Photography’ class on that particular day was that I had just shot for two separate commercial clients that morning/afternoon. I brought in some behind the scenes images from the day and went over them to show our process and answered questions on why I decided to light particular shots a certain way.

My only formal education in photography was at a local community college similar to the one I spoke at that night. I studied basic photo and darkroom techniques in the mid to late 90’s before moving into my apprenticeship. I was always interested in photography but never fully understood it’s ability to be both a passion and a profession. But taking that Photo 1 class is where I fell in love with not only the act but the process of photography. It was inspiring to be around a group of people both young and old who had that hunger to learn that I once and still to this day desire.

Photo’s courtesy of Geoff Reed Photography.

I felt the need to go and take some personal photo’s tonight.
I loaded up my vehicle with some basic gear and headed out. Unfortunately it was already dark by the time I left but I was still determined. After driving a while I approached a couple of people yet to no avail, and was starting to get a bit worried.

That was until I noticed a street party near my neighborhood. A local coffee shop/clothing/performance space was celebrating it’s 2 year anniversary. It’s located on a crazy cool street with old houses converted into galleries/retail/bars so pretty much the whole street was celebrating with music and vendors and such.

I walked around taking everything in but I still wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t want to be disrespectful by pulling out all of my gear (lights/stands/modifiers) and start popping off bright lights in the dark for my fulfillment during their celebration. Trust me, I considered it for a moment though.

I even considered leaving…Stupid me. After bumping into a handful of people I knew I decided to change my original plan of finding one or two people to do formal portraits of and just go with what was happening around me. I went back to my vehicle and grabbed one of my cameras (Canon 5D Mark II with the 50mm lens) and started taking photo’s.

I grabbed that camera over my IDs Mark III specifically for how beautifully it handles low light. And it blew me away. I was shooting in some situations where I had to take numerous photo’s to get one in focus at F1.4 due to how low the ambient light was around me.

So here’s some images from tonight’s excursion. Nothing fancy, but it felt good to get out and shoot for no reason other than the desire to do so.

Click through to see more images.

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Self Portrait while I was out scouting last Sunday for a shoot I did this week for a sports publication. The art director wanted the subject to be shot in the desert for the concept. I love that this is considered the ‘Tonto National Forest’. Where’s the freakin’ forest?

To hear more about what we’ve been up to click through.

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Days 2 and 3: Shooting Days

As you can see, I wasn’t able to keep up with the day to day photo journal that I was hoping to try out on my shoot in Northern California. A few factors contributed to this: First, when shooting for a client you don’t want to reveal too much from the project before it’s released so that restricts what you can actually show. Second, I only had one assistant beyond the art director/make up artist/client so our behind the scenes abilities were a bit limited. On top of that, I was switching between natural and artificial light so I would often be shooting with both camera bodies to get multiple lighting options.

See more from the shoot after the jump.

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Day 1: Travel Day. Location: San Francisco and Santa Rosa, CA.

I am here in Northern California for a shoot that will take place over a two day period. We’ll be shooting people in all different settings for a medical client. There’s even a cow booked for one of the shots on Tuesday. Crazy.
I thought it would be interesting to try drafting a photo journal as I go along on this shoot. Not play by play necessarily but a recap every night. Could be interesting, could be boring?
I am also booked to shoot in New Mexico next week so Im also using this opportunity as a test for future shoots.

Click through to see more images from my travel day.

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We recently had the opportunity to work on a new Massage Envy project with The Lavidge Company.
(See the post below for our previous collaboration)
I was brought on to direct two :30 second commercials and shoot an accompanying print campaign.
The shoot went great and both the agency and client left happy. Always a good thing.
With so many people and so much going on we felt this was the perfect shoot to try out a time lapse video to show how crazy it can get on set. See for yourself.

The team behind the campaign. I’m holding the gift card in my hands which was the subject of the campaign.

Fast forward to this past week….

In the editing suite with everyone working on the first spot. The footage looks great and will be out soon.

Thanks again to everyone at The Lavidge Company (Melissa, Bob, Ken, Rhonda, Daniel, Mercedes, CoCo and Dan) and Massage Envy (Dallas, Dawn) for having us work with you on this project.