Update from the Road – Part 2 Spring 2016

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Hi there…   me again.    Thanks for coming back for Part 2 of my “Update from the Road”   Spring 2016 edition.   When we left off earlier this week I was recounting the various shoot projects from our stay here in Park City from the last couple months,  but that is just part of the story.      For those of you scratching your heads wondering “how the heck is this guy able to do this?”  I thought I’d share a little insight on what it takes to make it happen…   No I didn’t hit the lottery,   nor was I born with a silver spoon in my mouth.    Just good old hard work and careful planning & budgeting…

So what does it take keep this journey successful and profitable?   It is no different than if I were in my office back home in Florida.  Well it is different in that my view outside my office window is always different.   🙂

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Day after day in between shoots and when we are not traveling,  I put in the long hours that feed the machine and do the things that make it all happen.  Like any small business owner I wear many hats….  The producer hat-   This entails countless days on the computer and the phone planning and producing our next project.    The retoucher hat-   There is a ton of post work from shoots past….  processing of images that need to be retouched, color graded and finished.    The marketer hat –   Once the images are finished comes the job of pushing these images out to the various portals such as online portfolios, websites, stock agencies,  social media,  getting new work to the reps and working on creating new marketing materials.   I’ve doubled down on my advertising budgets and am going heavy with my media buys this year.  We have just finished sending out our next three spreads in The Workbook for the book that comes out this fall.  Also we are going to be advertising in Communication Arts for the Photo Annual that comes out this summer.    I’m also very excited about the direct mail piece we are mailing now….  It is a 28 page 6.5 x 8 inch printed booklet of images from my American Worker Project  that is hot off the press at the printers and is mailing this week out to 3000 creatives and other clients across the country.    Click the image below to thumb through the booklet.

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I also printed 5 hard cover books of images which are a Volume 1 of the American Worker Project…  That will serve as a supplement to my printed portfolios for in person showings.

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It Takes A Team:      Last but certainly not least are the people who support me…  All that I mention above is just part of what it takes run the biz…   I am fortunate to have a great team behind me and there is no way I could do all this without them.  My reps Blake and Glen at VISU are busy making the rounds with portfolio showings at advertising agencies all across the country from NY to Detroit,  Chicago and on to Minneapolis this month and they will show in the west from Dallas, on to LA,  San Francisco and Seattle later in the year.

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I’ve also been working hard with my my marketing partners at Wonderful Machine getting some great press and establishing a ton of new contacts.   Working closely with Alex (pictured left and center below) we have implemented a whole new marketing plan….     She has been busy creating new,  targeted lists and then promoting to those people by sending out emails and working the phones,  getting people to look at the work and setting up meetings for me to show the work when we get to various cities around the country.

Meanwhile I’ve been working closely with my publicist Jessica  (also from WM – pictured on right below) to put together a press release announcing the work we are doing with my American Worker Project.    She then sent them out to a targeted list of about 40 photography trade publications and we have had a fantastic response from them.  To date we have had about 8 interviews and articles written about the project.    You can read some of them here.       Future plans are to broaden our reach to include various photo blogs and podcasts and outward to the advertising trades, consumer magazines and newspapers as well.3up

The proof is in the pudding:    Judging from the analytics that report activity on my website and blog, we are doing something right…  People seem to be liking what they are seeing.    Traffic on my website and blog over the last month has spiked as much as 15 times my normal daily traffic after some of the articles hit and my overall average has just about tripled on a day to day basis in since the articles ran.

The results of all this hard work:    It is very rewarding to see that all this work is leading to positive results….   The calls are coming in for bunches of cool projects.     Most of which I can’t give you the details of as we are under NDA’s.    But what I can tell you is  that we are up for a shoot with global reach for a beverage company shooting with an international sports star shooting in late June in Orlando.   I also had a call this morning for a job for AirBnB.

Jobs that have been awarded….  We have also had the good fortune to land a few really great gigs that are happening over the next two months…      One of these jobs is an awesome sports lifestyle oriented shoot with a large Pharmaceutical company that will have us shooting in the mountains of North Carolina early next month.

I am also extremely excited to be working on a project with a legend in the advertising industry, on some really exciting work for a Whiskey distiller.     This is an ongoing project that I will be shooting at various points in the upcoming month as we travel across the west from here in Park City on down through Monument Valley,   the Grand Canyon,  back through Sedona and then westward to California.    Should be some killer stuff that hopefully will catch the attention of the awards shows when finished.

Next week we are heading down to Jamaica for a quick job for Vista Print.   Should be cool,  it’s been a few years since I’ve shot in Jamaica.   Will be great to get back.

And last but not least,   getting back to what I mentioned earlier in Part 1,   I’ve just returned from Florida where we shot a tandem Print and TV shoot with Huffy Bikes alongside the talented director Ernie Mosteller of Fried Okra Entertainment.   Fun Stuff!!!

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Wrapping this up….     So that’s it for now.  Thanks for following along,  if you don’t already follow me on Instagram,  please do… my Instagram handle is @petebarrettphoto and is chock full of interesting shots from our adventures.

Don’t forget to check back in!!!  –  Stay tuned for more great adventures from the road in the coming months as we press on up the coast of California and north up the Pacific Coast Highway up through Big Sur,  Yosemite National Park,  through big sequoia country and northward through Oregon, Washington and hopefully British Columbia!

Update from the Road – Part 1… Spring 2016

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Well it’s been a while since my last “Update from the Road” and time has just been flying by!     When I last left you we were on our way to Park City, Utah to catch the tail end of the snow season with plans to shoot a bunch of winter and mountain adventure sports.      Today is the 6th of May & I’m typing this on a plane returning to Utah from a job we just shot in Orlando, (more on that later)  & reflecting on the last couple months.   Once again, our time here seems like a blur.

So much has happened….      If you’ve been keeping up with my blog entries,  you read about my shoot with Park City PowderCats.   If not you haven’t had the chance to read and see the photos yet,  you can read about it here.    It was such an amazing couple of days on some of the best snow imaginable, making some really cool images images and I also had the opportunity to meet some really great people.

We also shot with RAMP Sports which is a really cool ski and snowboard manufacturing company based right here in Park City Utah.    They have a very unique culture and make awesome hand made skis & snowboards using a very Earth friendly sustainable process using bamboo as a base.  All their products are not only green but they are also certified “Made In America”  as they are hand made right there in their shop.     I spent the day shooting a bunch of their employees at work and captured the various stages of the process of making these killer skis & boards.   Later that week I spent the morning skiing up high at The Canyons,  shooting their CEO Mike on one of the last powder days before the closing of Park City for the season.    I’ll post the images here on the blog as soon as I get the all clear from RAMP as some of the shots are proprietary in nature.   In the meantime,  here is a little teaser of one of the guys grinding the edges on a snowboard.

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It’s different up here…   It’s interesting being in a resort ski town and seeing the changes that occur after the resorts start to close.     The days are warm, the grass gets green & leaves start budding and flowering on the trees… which in itself is just like anywhere else in the spring I guess, but with one major difference…  While the lower elevations warm up quick and soon resemble spring,  it is still cold up high on the peaks.  Often times it will be warm and sunny and you look up at the mountains and they are covered in clouds….  Cold and clouds means SNOW!   That’s right,  there is still fresh snow up at 10,000 feet and higher and folks are still hiking and snowmobiling in and doing back country ski tours.    Just this past weekend Snowbird,  (where we shot last week) got 19 inches of snow over 2&1/2 days.     You’d never know spring has sprung there…. yet 15 minutes down the valley the sun was shining and it was a beautiful 60 degree day.

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Spring has sprung!     So as time presses on it would seem spring is here to stay.    As things in the lower elevations are warming up you start seeing people switching gears.   The snow toys get put away and out come the summer toys and along with them,  the road cyclists, mountain bikers, golfers and fishermen.  You know what that means?   Summer is right around the corner!!

We teamed up with fly fishing guide Joe Mitchell of Stony Brook Fly Fishing recently to shoot some cool fly fishing stuff on the lower Provo River just south of the Jordanelle Reservoir dam.   With the increased snow melt streaming down the mountains the rivers are running cold and fast and the fishing is great.     Up and down the rivers fishermen and women are out doing their best to catch their fill of the various fish that inhabit these waters.   I hope to be getting back out to get more of this tomorrow before pulling out of Park City to continue our journey.   I’ll be posting images soon from these shoots so stay tuned!    For now,   here’s a little teaser.

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Meanwhile back at the office….      The nice thing about being here for an extended period is we have been able to take the necessary time to shift into a different gear and hunker down and do the all important job of marketing.    As any photographer will tell you,   while we would all love to be shooting all the time,  most of our time is spent feeding the machine and beating our own drum doing the various things that we do to keep the work coming in.  After all,   if all you did was travel and shoot photos,  but never put in the hard but necessary work of getting it out there to the right people to see,   the proverbial well would run dry pretty quickly.    Then you are no longer a photographer and his family on an amazing photo journey but just a dude in a trailer who can’t afford to go anywhere.  or even worse…  a guy “living in a van down by the river!”   – Chris Farley.

Well,  the flight attendants are telling us we need to prepare for landing which is my cue to bring this post to a close.   We have lots of other news and information to share so the next post will likely be just around the corner.    Tune in next time… (later this week) when I talk about what it takes to make a journey like this not only possible but profitable.  I’ll be sharing some details about marketing & promotion and the results we are seeing from all our efforts.

So as they say in Germany…   “All feet are the same!”

*Update…. what the heck does that mean?  Why is he talking about Germany and feet?Sorry…  Bad language joke: if you say “All feet are the same” in just the right way, it sounds sorta like Auf Wiedersehen (German for Goodbye) & that is exactly what I am doing!   🙂