Today, the Portland Timbers introduced the new head coach for next years MLS team. Besides having a big press conference and talking to all the media, he gets to get his photo shot by me. I kid I kid. I setup a little studio in a conference room at Adidas and shot a bunch of stuff. Here is one of my favs. Cool dude looking forward to working with him.

Kit Taylor plays the piano, and is really freaking awesome at it. Besides being a solo artist, playing at places like Portland City Grill (check out this video of him playing Lady Gaga at the grill), and teaching youngsters the in’s and outs of the ivory keys, he plays in my favorite local band, Intervision. He’s also just a really cool dude. He hired me to shoot some promo photos of him and I was happy to do it. We wanted to shoot him with a Grand Piano, but those aren’t easy to come by so we found a church willing to let us shoot. Next we just had to light the place to not look like a church! I also noticed a sweet red door at the front entrance so we shot outside too. Here are a couple of my favs. If you reading this on Friday night, Intervision is playing a show at Jimmy Mak’s tonight. Go check them out.

I shot this portrait of Oregon Ducks Basketball coach Dana Altman a while back for USA Today. We shot him at the new Matthew Knight Arena that is still under construction in Eugene. The story finally ran in today’s paper after the Ducks hired a new Athletic Director yesterday.

The setup was pretty basic, one large softbox to the right and a light with a grid behind him to mimic the rim light coming off the windows at the top of the arena. Coach Altman was a very cool guy. I also shot the teams workout that day and for a while it was just the two of us at Mac Court while we waiting for the team to come up from the locker room and we talked about hockey and kids (his kids play hockey). The new arena is really amazing. Can’t wait for it to open.

Here are a couple of photos I shot in the last 24 hours that I like. The photo of the left was shot for a law firm in Portland. Conference rooms leave a lot to be desired as far as a photo goes, but it had a very nice reflective table, so I tried to use that to make the photo a little more interesting. First, I setup a speedlight on the floor behind her with a CTO gel to turn to give the white wall a little color, then I placed a speedlight with a grid behind her, a third speedlight with a 1/4 CTO gel in a small softbox was used for the mainlight and finally a white reflector on the shadow side for fill.

The photo on the right was shot in the studio. The main light is a strip box directly overhead a ring light for fill and two 20 degree grids behind him. I’ve been using the “one overhead light with 2 side lights” method a lot lately and am still working to perfect it. This was the first time I used a stripbox as the main light and I like it. Let me know what you think!

Ryan Pore is a goal scoring machine. He has 9 of the team’s 13 goals this season and has played over 1,200 minutes on the pitch. The team wanted a photo of him for the next edition of the program/magazine. Ryan is a really nice guy, but on the pitch, he’s a tough as they come and works hard. We wanted to show his toughness and hard work in the photo. I shot him right after the team got done practicing. Right outside the team locker room, in the bowel’s of PGE Park near the kitchen, there was a silver garage door that would make for a perfect background. You can see a photo of the setup here. To make him look nice and sweaty I took a towel and wrung it out over his head a bunch of times until he was nice and soaked, then I had to try to get him to look mean and tough, easier said then done, but he was great and we made a cool photo. Shot with a 50mm at f2.0