The Sea is Dead

The Dead Sea (Yam Hamelakh -- "The Salt Sea") is the lowest place on earth, roughly 1300 feet (400 meters) below sea level.

BABIES LOVE ERIKA

I get this kind of look from people all of the time. Wassup? What am I doing wrong???

SKATING

today we shoot skaters. this is an outtake. i like.

TIME OUT TOUGHNESS

Last weeks Time out cover was of this badass gal, Brooke, who happens to play lingerie football on the side. I never knew this existed, I love learning about new things on the job!

ALTPICKING

Today i found out from Nicole Radja from Time Out Mag, that I was the feature artist on the Altpick website. What a pleasant surprise!

Cakes are yummy

I love chocolate, I love cake! I did a shoot for Vosges yesterday and we shot their new pancake mix. These photos are evidence of me testing out the product. I later found a similar photo of my brother, Marc, who had the same idea as me.

RAVEN

Collaboraction!!!! Last week I had the great opportunity to work with Joseph Ravens, a great performance artist, in making a piece for Collaborations upcoming show, Sketchbook. Joseph and I are both interested in the morphing of the human body using gesture and form. I am particularly interested in the skeletal and muscular gesture inevitably expressing surpressed emotion.

makro funk

John and Brad came over to the studio last weekend and we decided that macro photography is freaky. We ended up shooting super tight portraits of out teeth and eyes, FREEEEEAAAKY.

Planet Earth!!

Thanks Julie Tallarida for your awesomeness. You are a ball of light!! It was great shooting your casting for www.planetearthagency.net

All of you real swanky funky lookin peeps out there should consider putin your mugs on the panet earth site!!

All you swanky magazines and ad agency's should consider using the swanky fun characters from Planet Earth Agency

Nicole Radja from time out started a new blog featuring Chicago photographers and their stories. Check it out!

http://instudioonlocation.blogspot.com/

We Were There!

Erika and I were in Grant Park last night to hear our new president-elect speak. What an amazing ending! Or beginning. At any rate, a friend sent me this link to this morning's Chicago Tribune:

In case they remove the link, here's pic #8:




(Erika was snapping a pic of me at the same time) And here's my shot of her with a phone:

This month's Vanity Fair

Does this mean we're famous? We should be rubbing elbows with George Clooney any day now, right? Erika's already picking out her evening wear for the galas. It's a little itty bitty feature on one of our favorite clients - Katrina Markoff from the immensely successful Vosges haut-Chocolat - but hey it's Vanity Fair. (Did we mention it's Vanity Fair? For real!)



Speaking of Vosges haut-Chocolat, Katrina brought her family's 3 mastiffs with her to her last catalog shoot. If you're not familiar, mastiffs are a cross between a dog and a water buffalo. And yes, one of them is a puppy
.

Crackberry addicts rejoice!

There's a neat little video just released promoting the new Blackberry Bold phone, featuring stills by Erika.

New pics from San Fran

We took a little decompression trip to the Bay Area recently...

Erika featured in PDN magazine

Check out this month's PDN magazine for an interview with Erika about a shoot she did for DraftFCB New York.

The assignment for Reliant Pharmaceuticals, to shoot a trade ad campaign for a drug designed to fight triglycerides, started off quickly, but it wasn't long before our pace slowed considerably. The assignment went from a shot of a runner to a person in a perfectly stationary position.

Read entire article here (subscription required).

Bar hopping through the ages

Erika and Seth, sitting pretty at Berlin night club on the set of the TimeOut Magazine story on Old-school Chicago bars.

Desperately Seeking... Someone.

The project we did for Chicago Magazine's Singles story "The Naturals" just hit the news stands, and we couldn't be happier with the results! Here's a behind the scenes video of the goings on:


Chicago magazine's Singles 2008: Behind the Scenes at the Photo Shoot from Chicago Magazine on Vimeo.

Location provided by Ranquist Development
Styling by Amy Lauhoff Obrien
Hair & Make-up by Christine Stahl
Asisstants T. Harrison Hillman, Nicole Stege, Seth Mooney

We're number 3!

Just found out that our shoot for Chicago Magazine's Aliens story on invasive species won the Bronze CRMA (City and Regional Magazine Assoc.) award for photo essay. Neat!

Herman Miller or Lord Helmet?

Joe does his best impression of one of his favorite Cinema stars, Lord Helmet from Spaceballs.

Cooler By The Lake

We pretended that it was Summer the other day and did a little cover shoot for Chicago Magazine's Lake front issue. Here's an out take featuring our favorite stand-in model Nicole, backed by our stylist Amy fishing out some Unidentified Floating Objects out of good old Lake Michigan.