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santa cruz photographer

Staff Portraits, Action Shots, Details and Interiors/Exteriors @ Santa Cruz Business (Current eBikes)

Staff Portraits, Action Shots, Details and Interiors/Exteriors @ Santa Cruz Business (Current eBikes)

Santa Cruz local business Current eBikes needed a refresh on their image library for their new website and marketing efforts. I’m an expert in creating diverse, high quality media libraries for my clients – typically in one or two sessions. This typically includes interior and exterior “architecture” style photography, to show the space/location of the business. Next are owner headshots / environmental portraits to highlight them in their natural habitat in a pleasing way. Staff headshots are an easy add-on while we’re at it. Also, if the business has services involved (like working on bikes), it’s great to include candid (or directed) photos showing that service. Lastly are detail / product photos – in this case all inventory comes with great product photography from the manufacturers, so I captured detail shots that could be used in any number of ways for design, advertising or marketing purposes.

Santa Cruz Commercial Food Photography

Santa Cruz Commercial Food Photography

I’ve done a lot of food photography in my day, and I can tell you one of my most dreaded subjects is also a four letter word: S-O-U-P. It’s flat, often the color of throwup, and is basically about as uninteresting a subject in the food world as you could ask for. So when Edible Monterey Bay magazine asked me to do a recipe shoot at Persephone Restaurant in Aptos, I was excited for the work but meh for the subject.

Chef Cori was a pleasure to work with (she didn’t kick me out of the kitchen for food prep) and was able to add some visual interest to my subject, the SOUP.

So how did I make it a little more interesting? Using a sofboxed Profoto B1 above and behind the subject, I placed the soup under the lightsource to feather the light and make it appear to come out of the shadows. Because the shot was top-down, but slightly shooting toward the light source, we got some nice spectral highlights on the oil drizzled on the surface of the soup, giving it texture and visual interest.

Normally I’d use a dedicated macro lens for food photos, but the Nikon Z system has yet to release an actual macro lens. Luckily the 24-70 2.8 S lens can focus pretty close, and on the hi-res Z7 body we have plenty of detail to allow for cropping in closer, if needed.

Santa Cruz Corporate Lifestyle Headshots

Santa Cruz Corporate Lifestyle Headshots

Something medium to large corporate organizations struggle with in regards to executive portraits is inconsistency. If you try to exactly match certain background with different photographers in different locations over different time periods, even if the photographers do a good job there’s going to be variation in that media collection that will be obvious to everyone. One of the things I like to do is give each person a variety of settings to shoot in so that we’re baking variety into the photographic cake, and those subtle variations in lighting, etc will be much less of a factor. This shoot had 5 or 6 spots I’d picked out for each person with wildly different lighting requirements – ranging from 1/125 to 1/2000 shutter speed to keep a consistent 1.8 to 2.2 aperture setting for a shallow depth-of-field look for all the waist-up shots. All these were shot on a Nikon Z7 with the native 85mm 1.8 S lens with one Profoto B1 flash off-camera shooting through a 30” Profoto Octa. I love keeping my lighting setup simple and mobile, which cuts down on how much time I need with each executive while also delivering a diverse library of images for each person to choose from.