If you are headed up north this weekend, feel free to stop by Stockbridge MA on Saturday July 2nd where our NY Mets photographs are on display at the Norman Rockwell Museum.  The Museum is hosting “Play Ball!� which celebrates the Game and Rockwell’s baseball art.  I will be speaking at 1p.m. about the Mets photos, which are on display in larger than life sized prints.  Bring the kids and grab a hot dog with us!!

We are very excited for Co:Lab, the ad agency that designed our commercial website.  They have won two 2011 Connecticut Art Directors Club (CADC) awards for their design of our website and business cards.  We were attracted to them for their clean, modern look with a sense of fun.  We loved working with them for their great personalities and professional manner.  Congratulations Troy, Rich and Constanza!

Some commercial news from earlier this year…we were thrilled when the London office of our client Swarovski called asking to publish our photos of Cascade–a striking multi-story Swarovski crystal chandelier hanging in the stairway of a Gramercy Park NYC residence–in their Swarovski Crystal Palace book.  A true coffee table book–this is a huge and very cool book.  Here are a few images of the book…

I’ve just begun a personal project that I’ve been thinking about for a long time…it’s called “Reinvention” and it’s about women who reinvent themselves mid-life.  In addition to my own reinvention story…becoming a photographer after nine years in the corporate world, I noticed many of my friends and the women around me had totally switched gears in their 30s or 40s to do something more fulfilling in life.  Meet Sally…smoking cessation counselor who loved making jewelry and launched Sally Lerman Jewelry a couple of years ago.

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Happy Opening Day!  Wonderful to be working with the New York Mets again for the third year…and this time in color!  The images are shot early morning on Photo Day during Spring Training in Port St. Lucie.  We’re the last stop on the players’ photo tour of all the media outlets and have a studio set up in the visiting team’s locker room.  The players are warm, friendly, and fun to shoot!  It’s a fast shoot with 1-2 minutes per player.  The first shot was at 7:45 am and the last at 9:30, so an hour and 15 minutes to shoot 60 players…definitely an adrenaline rush!  This year we went for a more serious set of photos but I can’t help snapping when the players crack a smile!  SportsNet NY integrates these images into their television video clips among other uses by them and the Mets.

Thanks again to Julie, the SNY producer, who’s been a great on- and off-set partner in creating these images and took a chance on us three years ago as non-sports photographers!

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I love mixing photojournalism with a studio set-up so shooting Hannah Fluet and Alejandro Bobadilla, two of the Hartford City Ballet dancers, in action was a real treat.

Given this winter it was especially nice to be back in Port St. Lucie, Florida last week for our 3rd annual photo shoot with the New York Mets at Spring Training for our client SNY (SportsNet NY), the “Online Home of All Things NY Sports.� It’s a really enjoyable assignment and we thought we’d give some insight into how we shoot it.

These aren’t sports shots or even outdoor photos; instead, what we’re going for is intimate studio photos of the players, some straight on and others with pitching or batting action.  Last Wednesday we set up a studio in the visitor’s locker room at Digital Domain Park using our Profoto lights with a softbox and umbrella and a pop-up black background.   Mike and I flew with all the equipment…I have a big suitcase I check for stands and non-breakable gear, the two Profoto monolight heads go in a Tenba backpack, and we couldn’t live with out our Thinktank Airport International roller bag for bringing all our cameras on the plane.  The bags always get hand-checked, but I’ve never had a problem.  After the set-up and lighting tests, we met with SNY’s Supervising Producer to strategize the shoot and then had our own meeting by the pool : }.

On Thursday–aka Photo Day, we arrive onsite about 6:30am.  After the baseball card shots and other promo shots are taken upstairs on the field, the Mets players make the rounds into our locker room “studio� starting at 730am…we’re the last stop on the photo circuit.  We shot the 54 players with the Canon 5D Mark II and the Canon 85mm f/1.8 lens.  It’s a very fast shoot, 1-3 minutes with each player and the shoot was over by 9:30am  The Mets players are great to work with–loose and natural in front of the camera.

We can’t post the 2011 photos until Opening Day in April, but here shots of David Wright and Angel Pagan from our shoot in 2010.  Check back on our blog and Facebook page on April 1 for the 2011 photos of the Mets.  We’ll also send out announcements on Twitter.

It was a pleasure meeting Ernie and Christian Trefz last month for a Connecticut Magazine photoshoot on their living the American Dream.  The Trefzes own more than 25 McDonalds stores in Connecticut, having gotten into the business back in the 60s (they worked closely with Ray Kroc).

A great entreprenurial story…and it was fun sharing a McRib and shake after the shoot to hear firsthand about their successful business!

As promised…here are some more photos of UConn’s superstar Maya Moore from this past summer.   I love to shoot a portrait but just as much I love to shoot what happens before and after in a photojournalistic way.  This make-up shot is probably my favorite from the shoot for that reason.

Maya Moore this past Sunday became the highest scoring women’s basketball player in UConn history–congrats Maya..and go Huskies!!  Coinciding with this…our photoshoot of Maya for December’s Connecticut Magazine hit the news stands as well.  We visited Storrs last summer for the shoot where NYC photographer Brian Finke also photographed Maya for Glamour Magazine’s Top 10 College Women of 2010.   Here’s the article…we’ll post more pics from the shoot soon.