Sorry I’ve been gone for a bit, some unexpected things came up just at the time I normally write my blog posts.

Several years ago, I photographed in the early morning at St. John’s Bridge in Portland and was blown away by its beauty; my favorite bridge in the Portland area, perhaps Oregon. One event that happened while I was there that unexpectedly made for some great photos, was a kayaker came paddling under the bridge. Since then, I had been trying to arrange for someone I know to do this in a situation where I could have the image fully released.

This turned out to be quite a bit more difficult than predicted. Sourcing a boat and finding someone willing and comfortable with what was required was quite challenging.

Well, fast forward several years later and I was in Portland photographing the skyline during blue hour and I ran into a photography student and she came up to me and started asking for some tips. (Can’t remember if I told her how challenging the business side is.) We exchanged cards and we both went on our merry way.

A week or two later, she calls me and tells me she has an extra credit project she needs to do, and asks if I could help. She says the idea she has is to photograph a friend of hers in her wedding dress, with some wild red boots, and we would be a bit reckless with the dress. So, we agreed to meet in the exact same location. The shoot was a bunch of fun.

I have since pretty much lost contact with the student, but the model has become a Facebook friend. Somehow, I had a feeling, she had some experience with paddling. Thus, one time when we were discussing shooting and saying we should do something like that again I brought up the kayak and St. John’s Bridge idea. Unfortunately, Oregon is experiencing a bit of a toxic algae problem right now, so we nixed the actual paddling part of the shoot, but still decided to shoot the portrait part of what I had in mind.

The kernel of the plan was to shoot the hero type shot that I’ve discussed here earlier. The one thing that’s changed is I am now doing the post processing with a little more nuance, having become well aware that high clarity doesn’t look so great with out of focus parts of an image. The other item though was that I wanted to really make the most out of this opportunity, since it took me so long to find it. So, I tried to come up with the widest range of images I could think of in the scenario we had placed ourselves. I am happy how that turned out.

I would like to thank Alex for her help with this.

Please take a closer look at these images, or my people portfolio, or portfolio of my heroic, people with vehicle photos.