I was approached about six months ago by the father of an extreme Justin Bieber fan who, along with another girlfriend, had written a book entitled Got Bieber Fever? about the varying degrees of “Bieber Fever”. After discussing the project with her father and working out the arrangements with management, the book was a “go” with 100% of the proceeds going directly to Pencils of Promise, an charitable organization that raises money to build schools in the developing world. Just the first print run alone will build TWO schools! How awesome is that?
With the designing expertise of my beautiful, graphic designer-wife Laia Prats, we put together a super high-quality, coffee table-sized book of my photos and their story.
The book is available on Amazon for $17.95 and includes an amazing, oversized, glossy, fold-out poster behind the dust jacket (below), alone worth the price of the book! Get your copy today and support an amazing charity!
Many of you may have noticed my lack of blogging in the past two months. If you haven’t been keeping up with me on Facebook or Twitter, it’ll come as a surprise that I’ve been on tour with the one and only Justin Bieber documenting every facet of his life on his first headlining North American tour.
If you recall, last December I had my first encounter with Justin while shooting an assignment for the New York Times. It was at that point I realized I had documented something pretty special as he played Madison Square Garden for the first time.
Long story short, after the assignment, I put together a prototype book with the help of my fabulous designer Laia Prats, and proposed a Justin Bieber documentary to his management (at the TODAY Show) and a number of publishing houses. After a few months of hustle and luck, I was told to meet up with Justin and company in Nassau, Bahamas where he was performing at the Atlantis Resort. That was in mid-June….and I’ve been on the road with him ever since.
The bus tour has taken me all across America from the east coast to the west and as far north as Minnesota and as far south as Texas. Soon we’ll be traversing Canada, Justin’s homeland, eh?
So what’s happening with my pictures? Many things!
First and foremost, Harper-Collins is publishing an illustrated book with about 150 of my photos along with text written by Justin himself talking about his transition from a normal kid to international social media celebrity and touring music sensation. The book is hitting the presses very soon and will be on bookshelves worldwide beginning in October.
Beyond the book, I’m creating an exclusive archive of Justin at every one of his 80+ North American shows both on-stage and off. Those photos will be released in some new and exciting ways to his fans and media. More to come soon on all that!
I’ll be on tour until at least the end of his North American tour, which ends in early January 2011. Rumor has it a world tour is in the works! Until then, the best way to keep up with me is through Facebook and Twitter.
I hope to continue blogging from the road, so if you all have any questions or blogging requests, please let me know and I’ll try to answer them as the tour goes on.
Thanks for all your support! I’m really excited to see what comes of all this.
A few weeks ago I was honored to receive a call from the 2010 CLIO Awards inquiring about exhibiting my street art photographs during the awards ceremony that took place last Friday at Skylight in SoHo. The images were projected by seven high-definetion projectors onto the venues 25″ walls cycling through the images.
I’ve only exhibited my work a handful of times. My first exhibition titled “Rebirth” took place at SB Digital Gallery in Manhattan’s East Village last year. My second and current exhibition (if you want to call it that) is a gallery of my Cuba work at Joe Coffee in theWest Village….which should be up for a bit longer, followed by another exhibit at separate Joe location in Chelsea.
It was truly an honor to have my work displayed in a room full of advertising creatives and executives. The evening was certainly a memory I won’t soon forget….they had some fun and tasty hors d’oeuvres and a stellar dinner! Oh, and Rob Riggle of The Daily Show and The Hangover hosted the awards!
Big thanks to the CLIOs for the honor and to all the winners!
I’ve always dreamed of becoming a jet-setting travel photographer commissioned to explore the world displaying my work in publications and galleries. And every-so-often the stars line up and I brush up against that dream. My most recent example starts with a little hustle and luck.
I was on the phone with my awesome photo editor over at the New York Times Travel desk soon after the earthquake in Chile. A separate client of mine had just reached out and was in need of a photographer in Chile to take a portrait and he’d love if he could hire me, but unfortunately his budget couldn’t cover the costs of physically getting me there (the pricey plane tickets, hotels, etc.), which is understandable considering the distance.
Thinking I might be able to kill two birds with one stone, I called the NY Times to see if they happened to need anything shot in the Chile, which would enable me to get down south. She took a look at her planner and informed me that there was nothing in South America slated for publication anytime in the near future, except for a few assignments in Colombia.
“I’ll take it!” I said, which resulted in laughter from both of us…then a bit of silence… “No, seriously…” I encouraged.
After chatting a while longer, I was able to arrange the timeline and budget to make it work and I was tasked with two separate assignments in Colombia slated to be shot April 5-11.
The first assignment I shot was Bogotá 36 Hours, a weekly Travel column that gives travelers ideas of places to see during a quick visit to random destination cities around the world. I recently shot one of those in Palm Beach, Fla. But, I’ll talk more about that one after the NY Times publishes the article….
After bouncing around Bogotá three days shooting my first assignment, I hopped an hour-long flight to the coastal Caribbean city of Cartagena. Cartagena’s Old City is completely surrounded with a mammoth cannon-studded fortress wall and a massive castle that once protected the Spanish port city from English pirate attacks in the mid-1600s.
My job was to illustrate a story about famed author Gabriel García Márquez who wrote many fictional novels, one of which won him a Nobel Prize. Nearly all of his novels took place in a cities heavily inspired by Cartagena, a city in which Márquez still lives. Cartagena is a truly beautiful city, has stunning architecture, vibrant colors, amazing people, and stellar flavors…a place certainly pleasing to all of the senses.
I must admit my favorite stop, though ever-so-short was to the Basurto Market that was mentioned in the article…it was a complete contrast to the tourist vibe in the old city and was a winding path of stalls that sold produce, meats, fish, grain, food, booze, and more.
I was fortunate to have a wonderful fixer, Dayro Reyes, who helped me along the way arranging transportation and my entire schedule so I’d be able to get to all the places mentioned in both articles. I tip my hat to you, Dayro. Thank you.
I had a total of 35 hours on the ground in Cartagena before I had to catch a red-eye flight back to Bogotá and sleep overnight in the airport to catch my early AM flight back to NYC.
I’ve neglected my blog for the last month or so, not because I have no content or dislike blogging, but because I’ve been busy building something I’m very proud of – The Photo Brigade.
About the time I was drafting my Haiti blog post is when the idea of Photo Brigade came to me. There are hundreds of photographers like myself who keep a blog showcasing their latest and greatest work, but it’s just so dang complicated and time consuming to keep on top of them all. There are tools like Google Reader that allow me to subscribe to blogs and see new posts come through on a timeline, but I still have to filter through many uninteresting posts to get to the good ones.
Other questions remained: How do I find the amazing blogs to watch in the first place? Wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a single blog or website that featured the posts of freelancers like myself all around the world?
I first tested the concept by creating a Facebook Page called The Photo Brigade in which I simply linked to the work of photographers I enjoyed. Over the course of a few weeks I noticed that literally hundreds and hundreds of people began subscribing to the Photo Brigade feed by becoming a “fan” of the page and it was obvious to me that there was not only a desire, but also a need for a service like this.
At that point I began working with my web designer extraordinaire, Laia Prats, to develop the concept into an actual blog to do just that. The result was more than simply a blog, it became a community of photographers, editors, students, and photo lovers alike – all converging to one place to see the daily features of hard-working, freelance photographers from around the world.
I decided to exclusively feature the work of freelance photographers like myself for numerous reasons. For starters, it’s not a secret that the media industry has taken a huge hit with the turbulent economy and recession of the past few years, so not only have there been less and less jobs available, but also staff photographers have been getting laid-off by the truckload. Unless those photographers decide to choose an entirely new career path, their only choice is to become a freelancer on their own and their blogs are one of their greatest marketing tools. We freelancers have to be savvy businessmen (and women) and continuously keep our names at the top of our clients’ call sheets. No greater way to do that than by posting our latest work to our blogs.
But how do we get our blogs seen by the masses? As a blogger myself, I religiously keep track of the traffic and analytics my blog and website produces and wonder how I can grow that number. In my experience I’ve found the best way is by building my social network and filtering traffic through Twitter, Facebook, and other blogs, especially if those referring outlets have a large following. Simply put, as my network has grown, my traffic has grown – thus my bottom line has grown as a result. It would stand to reason that if freelancers as a whole were to build a large collective social network, we’d all benefit by the added traffic and awareness to our websites, and as a result we’d get more work and most importantly, some recognition. This is the model behind The Photo Brigade.
I took the concept one step further by creating the first three (of hopefully many more) regional Photo Brigade blogs: Ohio, Missouri, and Rochester. The concept is the same as the main Photo Brigade blog, to use social media to promote the work of the individual photographers we feature, but each regional branch will be focusing on promoting specifically the work and blogs of students, alumni, and faculty from each respective university. You can read more about the regional blogs in a blog post I wrote on Photo Brigade titled “Ohio, Missouri & Rochester, oh my!”
There are more features we’ll be rolling out that will prove to be an amazing resource for photographers and editors, so stay tuned for them!
I sincerely hope you support my effort of promoting the talented photographers we feature by bookmarking The Photo Brigade and also by following us on Twitter, becoming a fan on Facebook, simply spreading the gospel, and most importantly by submitting your work!
