Phoenix Arizona Location photographer
Womens Health Magazine: Weight Loss Success Story
Over the summer I photographed a Weight Loss Success Story for Women’s Health Magazine in Tucson, Arizona. The article was recently published in the November edition of the magazine.
I wanted to show a sample of shots from the assignment that show a health/fitness feel to my portrait work, slightly different than some of the work that is currently on my site. Below are a few photos from the shoot and the article from the magazine.
Weight Loss Success Story, Slim-Down Strategies - At age 12, Loida Fraijo moved with her family from Hermosillo, Mexico, to Tucson, where she discovered fast food. “I supersized everything,” she says. “My sister and I would each eat a foot-long sub and then split a third one.” By the time she was 19, Loida was carrying 173 pounds on her 5’7″ frame. She dabbled in crash diets while attending Pima Community College in Tucson, but she could never commit. “I’d get upset and start eating again,” says the 30-year-old aesthetic laser technician.
THE CHANGE - Although Loida was a size 14, she squeezed into the short skirts and tight tank tops her thin friends wore. “I didn’t feel comfortable or pretty,” she says. Then, at a party in the summer of 2000, she overheard a guy announce that the “chunky girl”—Loida—was leaving. “When I realized that’s how people saw me, I knew I had to change,” she says. “I wanted to transform my life more than I wanted a hamburger.”
THE LIFESTYLE - Loida replaced fast food with fresh spinach salads, grilled fish, and chicken, and treated herself twice a month to veggie-loaded pizza or bunless burgers with a side salad. Setting foot in her college gym the first time, Loida says, “I felt like an alien.” She had to stop and throw up after 15 minutes of walking on the indoor track, but she managed 25 more minutes after the nausea passed. “I knew if I left then, I’d never come back,” she says. In three months, she was power-walking four days a week. As the pounds gradually peeled off, she busted plateaus by adding strength training and Zumba, cycling, or kickboxing classes to her routine twice a week. After five years of small changes, in August 2005, she was down to 125 pounds.
THE REWARD - Now a size 4, Loida is thrilled to wear the cute clothes that felt too tight in college, and she has more confidence too. “I love bikinis—and I look good in them!” she says. “With my body in better shape, I finally feel at peace with myself.”
LOIDA’S TIPS - Think (and cook) ahead. “If I know the next day is going to be hectic, I’ll prepare healthy meals the night before so my diet stays on track.” Surprise yourself. “I switch up my routine every few months by hiking, running, or climbing the bleachers at a nearby school. That way, my muscles never get in a rut.” Auto-tune your workout. “I listen to up-tempo music at the gym. When you move to the beat, your workout is easier and flies by.”
Wired: Paul Davies, Putting Scientists on Mars
I photographed scientist and Arizona State University professor Paul Davies for Wired recently. Here are a couple of photos and an excerpt from the article.
Eminent physicist Paul Davies has a proposal for you: a one-way ticket to the Red Planet. As it’s typically conceived, a round-trip Mars mission would take about two years and cost at least $80 billion. But you could cut 80 percent of the expense, Davies says, by nixing the return and initiating a permanent Mars colony. The hard part, he says, isn’t subsisting in a hostile environment millions of miles from home but changing the Space Shuttle-era culture of timidity. That’s starting to happen, though: The NASA Ames Research Center teamed up with Darpa to put $1.1 million into a study of manned interstellar travel. Even so, no one’s going anywhere, Davies argues, unless we can bring the price down. To do that, the ticket has to be one-way.
Read the whole article online at Wired.com
People Magazine: Looking for absent royalty in Gila Bend
In late September an assignment for People Magazine took me to the small town of Gila Bend, Arizona. The premise was to photograph where Prince Harry would be staying during his visit for military training in October. Gila Bend is a small town in the desert off Highway 8 between Tucson and San Diego. It is home to a United States Air Force Base and is a regular training place for Allied Foreign troops.
Other than the Air Force Base there just isn’t a whole lot there. The town only has three restaurants, one bar and doesn’t even have a grocery store. It has several hotels including the somewhat well known Space Age Inn that carries a UFO theme throughout.
Most of my editorial work involves photographing people and places but rarely empty spaces. This project was about showing how different the area is than where Prince Harry comes from in England and capturing the personality of the town.
We spent the day on base and around town gathering photographs and some on camera interviews with the local people. Many of whom were very friendly but seemed unconcerned with a visiting celebrity who would be third in line as the king of England.
University of Arizona Medical Center campaign
In August I photographed an advertising campaign for the University of Arizona Medical Center in Tucson. I worked closely with the creative team at SPM Marketing and Communications in Chicago to create six different ads over two days on location at the hospital.
Above is the first of the series of ads that has been released this fall for the rebranding campaign for the hospital. The concept for the campaign was to show the duality of the doctors: 1)in action during surgery 2) interacting with patients in a more clinical setting. As the other shots get released I will ad them to my commissions section of my site.
I’ve also included a few shots that I took on set each day with my phone:
We were working in operating rooms between actual tramas and had to shoot quickly in case a room was suddenly needed. Here is a portrait of part of the crew in the operating room during a break in shooting.
Wall Street Journal, Home Front: A New Addition
Here is some recently published work that I photographed for the Wall Street Journal’s Home Front section. I photographed husband-wife architect team Matthew and Maria Salenger at their Tempe, Arizona home and architectural studio.
The work was featured in the newspaper and an online gallery in September. Please view other work I have photographed for WSJ’s Home Front section here.
AT&T – Mobilize Everything campaign
In April I photographed an advertising campaign for AT&T. Here is one of the final ads that have been published in Arizona showcasing their expanded network in the Phoenix metro area.
2011 PDN Faces Winner
My project “interacting With The Past” was chosen as a winner in the Photo District News: Faces photo contest for environmental portraiture. Two of the photos are featured on Page 63 of the August issue of PDN and five images are featured on the website in the winners gallery.
I would like to thank all my friends who have participated in the project. Here is the link to a previous blog post about the project: Interacting With My Past. I have already started photographing for the next installment and have plans to return to the midwest this fall to continue work on the project.
more ‘Stills of Imagined Films’ coming soon…
This summer I will be working on new productions for my series “Stills of Imagined Films”…
Stills of Imagined Films – trailer from Mark Peterman on Vimeo.
Thanks to my friends Lovers In Transit (Jeremiah, Ryan, Mychael and Bronson) for allowing me to use a snippet of their song ‘Cities’ for this piece. It’s one of my favorite songs of all time.
Texas Rangers Josh Hamilton for Christianity Today Magazine
In March, I photographed the Texas Rangers Josh Hamilton for Christianity Today Magazine. In the story Hamilton discusses his past battle with drug addiction. The feature is in June edition of the magazine out this week. Here is the opening spread…
Portfolio: new print books
During the first few months of 2011 I spent time reworking some of my marketing materials. This process included getting new print portfolio books done. It had been over 2 years since the last time I had new book covers and slip cases created for my print portfolio (pages I update twice a year or before portfolio showings) so it was time to rework that aspect of my branding.
When approaching a redesign I didn’t want to totally change the design and layout of what I had before with previous versions of my print portfolio but simply improve upon it. I wanted to retain the minimalistic look and feel that I established with the branding of my website and other marketing materials and even take it a bit further on the design side. In modifying things, I decided to use a similar type of book cloth for the covers and cases and even a similar page size for the printed pages.
In the past I had always taken a very active step in creating the books using my own book making skills learned in art school. At this time I realized where my limitations lie and wanted to extend that responsibility to a more experienced party. In the end I worked closely with Roswell Bookbinding in Arizona to get a final product that met my expectations.
So far it has been a busy spring with meetings and book showings across the country and its exciting to have the new books along with new work to show during these meetings.
