I should preface this post with this: my ads ultimately serve the client and what they want. Sometimes that means compromising my vision of what advertising should be. However, sometimes I’m able to to do both, advertise with my approach and serve the client. Those are my favorites. But I also understand that my clients [...]

I had never been to a convention. I can’t wait for the next convention. That sums up my whole experience at WPPI (Wedding and Portraits Photographers International) in Las Vegas. I know I’m not a wedding or a portrait photographer but there is a considerable amount of overlap these days. Especially since I shoot all [...]

I caught this clip on one of the blogs I follow.   Chase Jarvis at CES 2011. from jared abrams on Vimeo. Now, for those of you who don’t know Chase Jarvis. He does great work, a lot of high end advertising stuff. I love what he touches on with “blown moments”. Everyone screws up, [...]

A behind the scenes breakdown of my ad for Florcraft Carpet One.

I really enjoyed doing the whole break down of the Prospector ad so I thought I would do the same thing on a simpler project. Today, we’ll look at a 15 second Pike’s ad. This production is quite a bit simpler so I won’t be going into as much detail here. Pike’s told me that [...]

I had done all the tests, shot some spec ads on my own time to make sure it would work. Edited the spots together and pumped them to a TV to make sure I knew what I was doing. Then, when I got to the set location I pulled my brand new Panasonic GH1, a [...]

People ask me all the time, what camera did you use? What lenses did you get? What were your settings? All of that is good, but when it comes to visuals, I’d say gear is 30% of the equation. You can take terrible gear and make it sing. The best example of this is some [...]

You may have see my “photos” widget embedded in the site, but it’s pretty small. I wanted to share some of my photos in a full post, so that’s what I’m doing here. A few of these are from town here (Fairbanks, Alaska) and some are from the Caribbean.  I’ll let you try and figure [...]

I just spent the better half of my Sunday copying a wedding video to another hard drive and straightening up my working area at home. I went through all my projects, figured out where they were and what I have to get done this next week. It’s a short week thanks to that little holiday [...]

I’m currently soaking up two books on copy writing (the ad world name for scripts is copy). The Wizard of Ads, which focuses on creating an emotional connection with your audience and The Copywriter’s Handbook, which presents a hard sell approach. These two seem to be attacking the same problem from two different angles, how [...]