2019 Highlights

Last year was the first time I put together a blog post reflecting on my highlights from the year before. I was pretty proud of the progress I made throughout 2018 and honestly remember thinking it would be hard to live up to those highlights in 2019. After reviewing my calendars, camera rolls, social media feeds, invoices, and receipts from the past year, I’m both surprised and happy to say that 2019 was even more eventful. I was reminded about the significant growth in my business, landing huge new clients like Lexus, Hilton, the National Park Service, the County of LA, and shooting projects for global engineering and architecture firms. 2019 also marked a complete decade of many things for me. Ten amazing years together with Erin, my girlfriend turned fiancé soon to turn wife. Ten years since graduating high school, and ten years in the real world. It’s actually wild to think how much of a baby I was in 2009. I literally didn’t even know how to take a picture on a DSLR! Now a decade later I use them to make a living. In no particular order, here are some significant highlights that happened in 2019:

Ireland Adventure

Last year my big trip was to Alaska, and this year it was to Ireland. While wrapping up Graduate School, Erin had the opportunity to attend a large chemistry conference in Dublin for a week. We decided to make a whole trip out of it together. We took bus tours, visited castles, drove through hills and hedges, and even met up with a UK friend. We drove up the coast to Northern Ireland to explore incredible locations like Giants Causeway, The Dark Hedges, and Carrick a Rege rope bridge. We drove east to Galway, Dunguaire, and the Cliffs of Moher. I had always heard good things about Ireland, but I must say it dramatically exceeded my expectations. I was truly impressed and inspired by the country and scenery, and had a blast extensively shooting both urban and natural landscapes. I shot over 20,000 images and over 1,000 gb of data on this less than two-week trip and had my work shared by a number of Ireland pages. I also made one of my favorite short films on this trip, consisting exclusively of cinematic 4K time-lapses. Watch the film here.

Discovering Prismagraphs

Last year I teamed up with @safewaysign to create a new interactive way of experiencing art. We printed my photos on a reflective sheeting material that causes them to illuminate when lit directly from the viewers’ perspective. Since the material is made up of microscopic prisms which bounces light back towards itself, the only way to properly experience the work is to light it from the same angle as your eyes. I developed the concept to hand out LED flashlight glasses and other light toys that viewers could experiment with. The process calls viewers to interact with art in a whole new way, forcing them to participate in the act of “exposing” the images. I installed the show at the Moxi Museum in their Interactive Media Theater for an experimental pop-up exhibit. The genuine excitement and responses from both kids and adults were awesome, and it gave me more ideas to expand on the concept, refine this new series, and exhibit the work at more venues down the road. Video and Blog post here.

TurningArt Collaboration

In the middle of the year, I was contacted by a company called TurningArt that would eventually lead to some of my favorite client projects of the year. TurningArt is an art advisory firm and art sales platform based in Boston but are quickly expanding all over the country. They first discovered me because of my Albany photography. I ended up working closely with their team to supply almost a dozen large prints of my work to a brand new corporate office in Albany, NY. A few months later they had to find artwork for a few other west coast corporate offices and once again connected with me to collaborate. One of their clients based in Irvine, CA had a very specific need for images of six popular beaches in Orange County. I ended up being commissioned to go on a photographic scavenger hunt to shoot these places I had never been to. It was one of the most unique, challenging, and fun assignments I’ve had. I spent days on pre-production to virtually scout the locations, visualize most of my shots, and plan out a shooting schedule that would take advantage of the best lighting. I spent a day and a half shooting Newport Beach, Laguna, Doheney, Capistrano, Salt Creek, Dana Point, and Crystal Cove State Beach. It was an interesting challenge to see how much quality work I could actually produce in a short period of time without any control over the light or conditions. For my personal work, I’m typically more interested in shooting at golden or blue hour, but for this assignment I was forced to make good images of unfamiliar places in the middle of the day with direct sunlight overhead. For the limited time and amount of control I had I’m pretty pleased with the overall collection that I came home with and delivered, and so is the client!

Big Corporate Art Prints

2019 was a year that I began printing my work significantly larger than I ever had before for corporate installations. First, I worked with a company called SB Card Connect that was based in the same office building as me. They had a huge 8-foot wooden frame that they wanted to be filled with a classic Santa Barbara print. We worked closely together to select the image they wanted, and I went on an assignment to capture an ultra high-res panorama of the scene. I stitched hundreds of photos together to make a super sharp and detailed print that tells stories along the SB coast. Then right before I moved away from SB, one of my original Goleta prints was mounted and installed inside the lobby of the Hilton Garden Inn of Goleta. It was great to find it a good home in the same city it was captured! As discussed in the previous highlight, my collaborations with TurningArt lead to corporate art installations of epic proportions. For the first time ever, my work was actually blown up and printed onto an entire wall in PwC offices on both sides of the country. Before my OC photo assignment, I invested in a new 50MP camera to increase my standard image resolution. With that combined with panoramic stitching, I was able to make files at over 20,000 pixels wide to be printed on vinyl wall mounts. The most extreme case was a panorama of the Newport Pier that was literally printed 40 feet wide across multiple office walls!

Big Licensing Deals

This is possibly one of the highlights I’m most proud of 2019, and it was also the one I could have least anticipated. In 2019 I generated the most revenue from licensing my photography than I have any other year by far. The most epic case of this is my deal with Lexus. They discovered my blood moon time slice photo online and ended up purchasing a license for a full year commercial campaign throughout Canada, using the image in advertisements on bus stops and billboards. I made a behind the scenes video and post about this project, you can check that out here. Another very exciting deal was with the National Park Service. They discovered my Alaska time-lapse footage and licensed it to be included in a museum exhibit in Anchorage. The Hilton of Santa Barbara licensed one of my aerial “4D” photos of their hotel and used it in a full-page advertisement in the annual Visit Santa Barbara Magazine. The University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) licensed one of my aerial drone photos of downtown Santa Barbara to be used in their 2019 student admissions brochure on a full page. ACI jet, a private charter jet company also licensed an aerial photo of Santa Barbara to be used in their annual sales catalog brochure. Finally, the Italian construction company Permasteelisa licensed my aerial photo of the Academy Museum of motion pictures building for their annual calendar publication.

Big Video Shoots

In 2019 I was fortunate to be involved with a number of exciting video projects. The first one that stands out is the project my company made for the County of Los Angeles called OurCounty LA. The video highlights an ambitious county-wide sustainability plan. Along with my team, we attended multiple community events across the county, interviewed politicians, community and organization leaders, as well as passionate citizens on the topic. We spent weeks editing together a short inspirational film to spread awareness and enthusiasm for the plan. The film was even shown on the big screen before an LA County board meeting. Watch that film here. Later in the year my company also had the chance to shoot interviews with the Mayor of Santa Barbara and a CA Assemblymember for a feature-length documentary film on women in power. Just like we did in 2018, my team shot even more fun video projects about the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in LA. We made a few films for BuroHappold, the engineering firm responsible for the structural and mechanical design of the museum building. Watch our most recent project here. I was also hired many times for my drone work, including a fun jet-ski action sequence, and also on a commercial shoot for Harley Davidson. 

Prismedia Growth

It’s interesting to see my production company transform, adapt and evolve over the years. Because of increased project demands, last year I began expanding my team and hiring subcontractors much more frequently. Also, instead of personally editing every project by myself, I experimented with hiring both video and photo editors to help share the workload. There was even a time that I was on vacation but still facilitated a shoot, wrote a script and directed a team remotely to cover an event for my client. Another measure used to evaluate my company growth is the investments we make into equipment. As more frequent, higher-end, and more advanced jobs come up, my kit of tools grows as well to keep up with those demands. There were a few big camera upgrades that were needed to step up my production value. The Canon 5Dsr is now my primary photography camera with 50MP resolution, so all this large scale printing I’m doing won’t be a problem. On the video side, I’m now using a Canon 1DX Mk2, a powerful tool I’ve wanted to have for a long time. For increased aerial demands I invested in an Inspire 2 drone, which is a huge upgrade in image quality, power and versatility from my previous drones. Learn more about it here. Last year also came a motion control slider kit that allows me to get incredible dynamic time-lapses, and that I also use to get perfectly smooth and effortless slider shots during my multi-camera interview setups.

San Diego! Starting a New Life in a New Place.

In 2019 Erin completed her 6th and final year in graduate school at UCSB. Since 2013 we enjoyed six amazing years in Santa Barbara building our own life together, making close new friends, and establishing my business. Once Erin finished her Chemistry PhD it was inevitable that we had to move to a new city with great biotech jobs. We essentially had the choice of San Francisco, San Diego, or Boston. We ultimately decided on San Diego, because it was a closer transition and felt the most like home. Erin found an incredible job that she is thriving at, and I was able to continue working closely with my LA clients as well as establish myself locally. The move definitely signified another chapter of adulthood. We once again were wiping the slate clean, and starting fresh in a new city to build a new life, explore new places, find new clients and new friends. It was sad to move away from SB, but also refreshing and inspiring to reinvent our life and routines. We got a larger apartment that gave us much needed extra space, but it also nearly doubled in cost from our last one. I moved out of my SB office and went back to working from home, although this time I’m using an entire master bedroom as my office which is meticulously organized and increases my productivity. I’ve already started networking and meeting some great people that I’ve partnered with… have influenced/contributed to my business. I include this photo of a Mormon temple because it’s right next to my house and I see it every single day!

I kept this pretty focused on my professional highlights, but there are plenty of personal things I didn’t even have a chance to mention… Like how I started the year wearing a boot with a terrible ankle injury, and from there made a comeback & got back to good health. I competed in half a dozen ninja competitions, and in a few of them placed on the podium to advance to finals in both NNL and UNAA leagues. I can already tell 2020 will undoubtedly be a huge year! My wedding, my honeymoon, traveling to Hawaii and China, Ninja Warrior, and shooting more epic architecture. I already have a handful of client projects in the planning phase. I can’t wait to continue growing my team, improving my work, and pushing my capabilities as an artist. Thank you to all my clients for an amazing 2019. I’m excited to reach new heights and grow together in 2020!