Two very different stylistic takes on portraits of the amazing Casey Bitzberger.

This was a very playful shoot – in addition to the formal portraits that we created there was also large number of iPhone and mobile images from the production – of which the above was my favorite.

And Finally!

Just us having fun shooting video on my phone after the shoot.

Casey and I having a Gaze Off! after the production wrapped.

She won…

Special thanks to Nicole Barry and Tom Newton.

EMT and Fire Lieutenant Gabe Cassuci from the Bellevue Fire Department called me a few weeks ago to talk about creating some portraits for an advertising campaign that they had coming up to recruit new volunteer fire fighters for the department. I am always excited and happy to photograph firefighters and other emergency workers – so me and my team packed up our gear and headed out for the Bellevue fire house to spend a day creating a series of black and white portraits of the brave men and women of the Bellevue Dept.

The images above are two of the first from the series that will be featured on a series of billboards, posters, displays, and online recruitment uses over the next year.

Supreme General is getting ready to release a new album this summer and the Buffalo born rapper wanted to create a visual persona for this series of images that was very different from his past promos. Inspired by his own service in the military – Supreme and I talked about creating something that touched on his own experiences as a soldier, writer, musician, and artist to create something that mixes classic and modern styles to tell a very different story than the images that have accompanied his past releases.

This was photographed on the site of an old demolished outdoor nightclub on the Lake Erie shore called The Pier, which was torn down years ago.I actually have some  personal recollections (albeit fuzzy ones) of it as the scene of a particularly nasty concussion I received during a concert that got out of hand a few years ago.  They have since turned the area around it into a number of dog walking trails, bike paths, and open fields, but these remnants of the foundation and asphalt parking lots remain.

(Check out a Preview track of Supreme General)

Every now and then the color starts flying during a shoot…

The last day of winter was a bright and sunny seventy two degrees so I decided to enjoy the weather and moved my shoot with Dakotah outside after our in-studio production a few weeks ago.

Off the plane from all the color and noise of Vegas and right into the studio for this beauty assignment – Clouds of pigment were flying during a fun session that found my subjects Holli and Hillary covered in color by the time they left – Holli liked the result so much that she decided to wear it home after the production wrapped.

Maybe it is all the bright lights and neon of Vegas having an affect on me, but I want to drown myself in color lately.

Models: Holli Arnold + Hillary Snyder

Makeup: Nicole Barry

Posters that were created for the BSC annual fashion event Runway - A showcase of student fashion design and textile arts. Erin Habes has done an amazing job producing this show year after year for some very talented students, often with the help of top minds in the fashion industry who donate their time to this event for the students. Each production tops the last in scope and ambition. Many of the students involved in the program were actually in studio during this shoot to observe the production of these images – so in addition to the styling/production team and talent it made for a crowded but fun set.

Special thanks to the team at Block Club for the poster design, all the students involved, the whole production team, and Erin Habes and Joseph Incao (Former Senior VP of Prada Retail Operations) for styling these images.

Kyle Makrauer and I recently collaborated on an online feature for Papercut Magazine that delved deeper into Molly Hoeltke’s reclaimed fashion concept label Once Vintage - a design label I have shot with before. I very rarely find myself collaborating with another photographer in such a direct way as I did on this shoot, but Kyle and I wanted to try it as an experiment.

Below is a small gallery of my contribution to the project, you can see the rest of the images including those shot by Kyle on Papercut’s web feature.

RIT Photography student Tom Newton visited the set of a production at Victory Studios in Buffalo a few weeks ago to check out how one of my shoots flows. Naturally he was pressed into service as a stand in for this test shot that I ended up really liking. You should totally visit Tom’s portfolio site – he creates some really wonderful images.

I made these images of Dakotah recently,  during a test session on what coincidentally happened to be her birthday.  Dakotah and I have had many near misses on assignments prior to this – often coming very close to working together but never quite being in the same place at the same time due to scheduling differences. It took our mutual friend/stylist Nicole Barry to finally introduce us in person last month and make arrangements for this Happy Birthday shoot to happen.

This is an editorial portrait of Garrett Thomas, who is a magician, artist, and lecturer on the nature of the creative process well known in the global magic community. For over twenty years Garrett has been a creator of truly original illusions and worked as a consultant/instructor to celebrity magicians like David Blaine and Marco Tempest. In one of those strange small-world moments I had actually first met Garrett years ago after seeing one of his performances in Buffalo only to find out shortly after that my downstairs neighbor at the time was a good mutual friend of both of ours.  Since then I have been fortunate enough to see Garrett perform his amazing close up magic on many occasions and even had the pleasure of having dinner with him in the days leading up to this assignment – where we discussed our approaches to creativity and the similarities and differences between the worlds of magic and photography.

Some personal images created during a recent assignment on country music impersonator Don Thompson, during which I was lucky enough to get a small sampling of his chameleonic musical abilities. Don can literally walk out a room as one person and walk back in a few seconds later looking and sounding like someone completely different – but these simple stripped down images of him from our shoot are my favorites from the day.

On July 10th, 2009, Melissa Barthelemy went missing.

The Buffalo, NY native that had aspirations of someday opening her own hair salon was living in the Bronx and working as a dancer and escort on Craigslist when she disappeared. Starting just after she had gone missing and continuing for several weeks afterwards, her teenage sister began to be terrorized by a series of obscene phone calls originating from Melissa’s cell phone by someone who is believed to have been the person that abducted Melissa. These calls ultimately climaxed with the caller claiming that he had killed Melissa.

Melissa Barthelemy remained missing until December 2010, when her remains and the remains of three other escorts (Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Megan Waterman, and Amber Lynn Costello) were found near the ocean side town of Gilgo Beach on Long Island. Due to the brutal nature of the killings and the proximity of the bodies to one another police were convinced that the murders might be the work of a serial killer.

To date, police have linked approximately ten victims to the Long Island Serial Killer – six more sets of remains that the police believe predate the remains of Melissa Barthelemy and the other girls found in December 2010 have been found, and investigations are ongoing into other murders that may be linked to the case. Authorities now suspect that the killer has been active for fifteen years or more.

When I met Melissa’s mother Lynn Barthelemy, and Lynn’s husband Jeff Martina, it had been two years since Melissa’s initial disappearance, and only a short time since she had even had her daughter’s remains returned. I met them when I was on an assignment for Blast! Films, a UK-based production company that was producing a documentary on the  investigation for Channel 4 in the UK and A&E Television in the US –  Blast! had sent me to create some portraits of the family to help in promoting the film.

I spent  the afternoon with Lynn and Jeff learning about their ongoing search for Melissa’s killer and listening to them speak about their experiences and their daughter in a touching way that the media often did not convey due to Melissa’s profession. The factual and stark basis of news reporting often overlooks and overshadows so many of the stories and emotions that affect the families and friends of the victims in a unforgivingly real way – one that can only really come close to being conveyed by hearing them share their own stories and memories. Lynn shared pictures and stories of Melissa with us while we shot, and also talked to us about the media coverage on the case that she has been involved in as the investigation continues to unfold.

I won’t pretend to try to understand what these people have gone through – it is impossible – the things they have experienced are so unimaginably horrific that there is no way that anyone who has not experienced a situation like this firsthand could ever fathom what it is like. What happened to their daughter is what most parents fear in their worst nightmares, yet Lynn and Jeff were very open about what has happened to their family over the past few years as they strive to raise media awareness and keep the search for this killer in the public eye. We can only hope that the ongoing investigation is successful and that these families someday find justice for their lost loved ones.

There has been a long-standing collaboration between Marie Vaccarello and I – we started working together when she was just starting her career as a model and I was returning from my long self-imposed exile from the photography business to begin shooting again with a fresh start.  We have been lucky enough to work on some great projects together and have had clients send us on some pretty cool adventures. From the earliest days of shooting in my basement before I moved back into a studio, to rooftop productions on downtown buildings high above the street, legendary historical structures, and even in the remains of crumbling churches we have been lucky enough to continue to push each other to constantly be better at what each of us does. I love to work with Marie because in many ways she serves as a reminder of just how far I have come from a time when I almost gave up. Every now and then I go back and look at all the work we have created together throughout the years to see how much we have both grown as artists.

Most recently we came together to create some images for another friend of ours – stylist, curator, and designer Molly Hoeltke. Molly and I have worked on many editorial and commercial assignments together (more than a few with Marie), but recently Molly also launched her new fashion collection - Once Vintage, a sustainable fashion reuse project that brings together her eye for one-of-a-kind vintage pieces and impeccable garment construction skills. Molly recreates past treasures by updating them with a modern aesthetic edge – both reducing waste and creating truly unique garments for her buyers.

Makeup: Stephanie Signorelli

Hair: Jessica A. Tozzo

Portraits of Adam Varga that were completed during some downtime between productions. Simple and stylish was the perfect way to capture Adam in these images – I love reducing things to their simplest elements and creating images like these that both encapsulate the subject’s personality and make simple but profound statements about their style. Simplicity and a sense of minimalist style are very important to me in my work, especially now that I have been creating black and white images more often. There is something delightful I find in the reduction of extraneous information from an image that is much more satisfying than adding too much to a shot and diluting its impact.

Television personality Lydia Dominick has been in front of my camera many times over the years so much so that we have become regular creative collaborators on a variety of projects that she is involved with in her local community and good friends as well. When it came time for Lydia to update her personal portraits for her media and online needs I wanted to create something a little more refined and formal that the images we had created in the past. A selection of gorgeous gowns and a cameo appearance by model and actor Adam Varga were perfect compliments to Lydia’s always glamorous presence.

"Fandemonium," Block Club Magazine, Issue 27, Winter 2012. Images courtesy Block Club Magazine.

To live and die as a fan in a city whose sports history has earned inclusion on a Wikipedia page devoted to sports curses is no easy task, but vital fan dedication to the teams in Buffalo, NY  is palpable in the city, regardless of which sport you follow.  Most sport fanatics know the rundown  - four consecutive Superbowl losses for the Bills, zero Stanley Cup wins, and innumerable playoff letdowns for  Sabres fans. But if you look below the surface you see start to see the high points – Amazingly dedicated (often fanatical) fans, a city that is regularly in contention for the best tailgating city in the NFL, multiple championship wins by the Buffalo Bandits (and the only perfect season in NLL history), home of the best team in the WPS (The Western NY Flash) and a sports tradition that stretches far back into the city’s rich history. Fans in Buffalo are always chasing those championships, their emotions shifting with every goal, win, loss, and BS bad call.

This ebb and flow of emotions – hope, anger, joy, disappointment, elation, disbelief, shock, and every subtle variation in between – was a driving factor in telling the story of Buffalo’s sports for Block Club Magazine when they gave me the challenge of capturing what it means to be a fan in Buffalo for their Winter 2012 issue. It was a fascinating look at a community whose ravenous enthusiasm for sports has given it a resilient pride – not just in the triumphs of its team, but its failures as well. It was summed up well in the article itself with a quote from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (One of my favorites, I love anything that quotes some Cormac McCarthy) ”Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real”

Go Sabres!

I shot these images right at the end of 2011, but I wanted to hold off on sharing them with you until today to kick off the new year with some style. I was introduced to Adam through my friend and client, WGRZ television host Lydia Dominick, when he was in Buffalo recently as part of a production I had been working with Lydia on. Adam is a fellow Canadian and one of those subjects that you develop a rapport with instantly (much like Lydia). After working with him on one project (which will debut in a couple of weeks) I ended up having him back in the studio later that same week to create this elegantly simple series of portraits.

And it looks like he broke out that fur hat just in time, as the first real winter storm might be rolling in tonight after weeks of mild winter weather. I am excited to get out and shoot in the snow soon.

A look at some of my favorite images from client and personal projects over the past year. I am  excited about the work I will be releasing in 2012. I already have some unbelievable new imagery to share right after the new year, and several very cool projects in pre-production right now.

Personal Record is an ongoing stream of the images I make outside of my professional career. The personal images, mobile images, outtakes, and random candid images that I take on whatever camera I happen to have handy at the time; a documentation of my day-to-day life and the things I come across that interest me visually. It’s a quick one this week as I gear up for the holidays, but I will be back next week with all sorts of interesting pictures from my weekend off. 

A small collection of images from my weekly dinner adventure with Erin, I have been drafted into service as her in-house food photographer.

Some holiday visitors to the studio who came dressed to impress.

A trip to party city somehow resulted in me leaving with an armful of miniature toys. I haven’t decided exactly who I will put them to use, but you can bet they will be making an appearance in the coming weeks.

Happy Holidays! See you next week!