Excited to share a recent creative & collaborative partnership effort for The Hotel Emery from Pete Barrett and Sammy Todd Dyess . – Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Client: @HotelEmery @Davidsonhospitality
Co-Director & Still Photos: @SammyToddDyess
Co-Director & DP: @PeteBarrettPhotos
Production Coordination @Maddie_Flom
1st AC & Movi Operator: @AleutianCalabay
2nd AC & Grip/Gaff: @ChrisSpraungel
Hair & MakeUp: @MikiMori2
Wardrobe: @KateMoroneyStylist
Talent: @CDoty
Talent Agency: @CarynModels
I’m happy to be able to share with you a recent shoot we did for Dish Network shooting celebrity portraits onboard a yacht in Miami of Captain Lee from the show “Below Deck with Captain Lee”. This was my 2nd time shooting for Dish Network with Captain Lee and this shoot was even better than the first one. The Captain is just a great person to work with as he is super approachable, extremely engaging and and generous with his time.
I also had the privilege of working alongside a fantastic film crew, (which I do quite often) who were shooting a commercial spot promoting the show. It is always a pleasure to work alongside such talented and hard working professionals in creative collaboration to make great work. Looking forward to the next one!!
I recently had the opportunity to work on a really cool project shooting alongside a large production creating a spot for TaxAct called “Stranded”. Working on a large film production is always an amazing experience and this one was particularly great. There were a lot of logistics and moving parts to produce this story of a castaway who is stranded on a remote desert island.
The spot opens with a disheveled castaway spear fishing and complaining about how he has to do is taxes… Suddenly a down draft hits him from above and a ladder drops from the sky and down the ladder comes the TaxAct guy who proceeds to tell him all the things that Tax Act has to offer. Down the beach a TaxAct accountant is lowered with her whole office onto the beach and proceeds to help him with his taxes. The spot ultimately culminates with him calculating his return and money spitting out of the computer. It’s a fun tongue and cheek spot that took a ton of work to pull it off.
See the link below to see the final spot… But first, here are some behind the scenes images of what it took to make it all happen.
Lastly, Here is a link to the finished spot. Enjoy! http://youtu.be/S9_W3kUKrN8
It’s my pleasure to be able to share with you a two part assignment that I shot (pre-Covid) right here in South Florida for Florida Blue Insurance. It was a great project that required all sorts of problem solving.
For the first part I worked in tandem alongside a great motion team shooting the stills version of a TV spot of a woman jogging and thinking of affordable ways she could insure her employees for her business… a problem that many small businesses face. You see her jogging and being followed by a seemily endless group of other small business owners who also have similar insurance needs as she does. Florida Blue has programs that fit all sorts of businesses. To produce this we shot on a camera car with our hero talent and a good size group of various workers jogging behind us. We then shuffled the group and reshot them at various distances so we could composite the final shot you see here with people running all the way into the distance.
The following day was raining so we moved the stills production in studio to shoot a bunch of our various small business owners individually. These images were lit so that they could be retouched by me later in post into various job specific backgrounds, (some backgrounds shot by me and others were stock backgrounds).
All in all it was a great shoot! Many thanks to my amazing crew, without which none of these shoots would happen. Also to Mutt Films for working me seamlessly into their TV production. Always enjoy the opportunity to collaborate with film crews and directors to make the magic happen. Last but not least, thanks to Philipe and Rafael from Alma Advertising. Always great working with the folks at Alma as they are one of the top shops around!
See below a few of the shot laid into their final ad format:
At long last we are finally able to share with you the images we shot earlier this summer for Lowes Home Improvement for their current Craftsman Tools Campaign.
This year marked the introduction of Craftsman Tools being sold at all Lowes locations. We had the pleasure of once again teaming up with the good folks Kreber in a collaborative effort to create images for an Ad campaign, POP, in store signage, web and social media outlets over the course of several days. During this time we photographed several people in a woodshop location working on various motors and machinery and also several people in a home garage environment with Craftsman tools.
As always it was a fantastic shoot with a great team! Many thanks to all our wonderful clients from Lowes and Craftsman Tools for the opportunity. Also thanks to Kreber for their collaboration and all their amazing support crew for doing a wonderful job of handling the production and coordination of this fantastic project! Always a pleasure to work with such a professional and capable operation. I look forward to the next one!!
Here are a few screen grabs from a recent short format motion project shooting a Chevy Duramax Diesel cruising down a dusty road at sunset. Stay tuned to see the edited piece.
Well after a long wait and much anticipation the Miami Cancer Institute has finally begun to roll out it’s ad campaign shot by Pete Barrett last summer. Shown here are the first two in a series of eight ads which Pete and his team created for MCI working in close collaboration with Republica Advertising and Cortez Brothers Productions. All post production and retouching of the images was done by Pete Barrett. Pete also worked closely in collaboration with Saddington & Baynes out of London to create and later incorporate the CGI letter “C” element that is a recurring prop in all of the ads. 
This was a great shoot that involved a fairly complex production, something that Pete is very well versed in. Working closely with Cortez Brothers Productions (who was also producing a series of TV spots for the client), Pete and his team of roughly 25-30 people shot 8 different executions of final images that involved combining lifestyle shots of people in an environment with a large 3 dimensional letter “C” also in the shot which would be created digitally in a CGI environment. This required shooting many elements to be layered and retouched into the image in post as well as capturing lighting, shadowing and size & dimension measurement info that would later be used in the creation of the 3D – CGI letter “C” element made by Saddington and Baynes ensuring that it would look like it was actually physically there in the space. 
Still to come are 6 more ads which we cannot disclose at this time as they have yet to be released to the public but as soon as they hit the streets we will post an update. Stay tuned!!
Well it has once again been a while since my last update from the road… So what have we been up to? Summer came and went by in a flash and it was probably the busiest summer I’ve had in 20 years. Since my last post we have been nonstop with one project after another. The last two months alone I’ve crisscrossed the country from corner to corner multiple times crossing the Mississippi 12 times for various projects. We’ve been to Arizona, California, Maine, North Carolina, Jamaica, Florida twice and back to Oregon on projects for Huffy Bikes, Merck Pharmacueticals, Miami Cancer Institute, Vista Print, High West Whiskey and Alaska Brewing. Most of these projects are still in post production or not yet released to the public so I can’t show them yet, but I’ll post them as soon as I am allowed.
It is hard to believe but it has been a full year since we first left on our journey across the country. It has been a whirlwind trip so far and we have no plans to stop for the foreseeable future. To date we have logged close to 16,000 driving miles and I’ve flown well over 30,000 miles on various jobs that happened over the last year as well. See our Google MyMap to see where we have been.
It’s been the experience of a lifetime…. we have been to some amazing places and met some really great people along the way not to mention shooting a zillion photos. I have to thank my wife for pushing me to do this as if it weren’t for her persistence we never would have left on this trip and the opportunities and projects that have come from it probably never would have happened. My American Worker Project took off with a bang and continues to garner great exposure. Back in July we shot hot air ballooning in Sedona Arizona and most recently I shot in the Firestone Walker Brewery in their wooden barrel aging plant. A few new proposed shoots to continue the project include potential shoots with the US Coastguard training at Cape Disappointment in Washington and also shooting with the brave men and women who fight the wild fires out that have been raging throughout California this summer. We have also been shooting a ton of travel related subjects featuring the many amazing locations we have had the pleasure of visiting.
Some of the best and most epic locations we had the pleasure of visiting included Monument Valley, The Grand Canyon, Joshua Tree and Yosemite National Park. We took advantage of all these locations for the High West Whiskey project which is currently in post production and creative stages with the ad agency. I am very excited about the images we have created here and can’t wait to share them with you. For now these teasers from my Instagram will have to do.
As we steam headlong into fall things are continuing to look good as we are being considered for assignments and image uses for various projects for Chase Bank, STP, Fidelity Investments, and Orvis Fishing. Fingers and toes crossed on these as they look to be some really cool projects!
Stay tuned for future adventures as our fall calendar is packed with travel to Washington, up into BC Canada, (around Vancouver up near Whistler) and returning back down through Oregon… With later plans taking us back into California, Utah and Colorado over the winter.
I had the pleasure recently to travel back to Jamaica on an assignment for Vista Print. I always love going to Jamaica. The people there are always so nice. We’ve spent many a month down there traveling to all corners of the map on assignments for Superclubs Resorts, Jamaica Tourism and the like….
This particular assignment was for Vista Print. We were tasked with the mission to go to their international call center and photograph some of their most valued employees for a new customer service oriented campaign. These are the people that man their call centers and are responsible for sales and customer relations and support. Having a call center based in Jamaica is a bit out of the norm these days as most are hosted out of India. The folks that work at this particular call center are a special bunch. They all seem to genuinely love their jobs and it shows in the way they treat their customers. Customer service is job one but it goes beyond that. They have been known to develop ongoing relationships that go beyond what you would expect of even the best customer service employees. One of these fine ladies actually had someone bring her cookies when she was taking a vacation to Jamaica with her family. She tracked her down took time out of her vacation and brought her cookies! Safe to say they are very likeable.
Because of that, and the fact that they provide a quality product a very competitive prices, Vista Print enjoys a large percentage of repeat and loyal customers. The picture shown above is one of the many people we had the privilege of meeting and photographing. Her name is Saju. She had an amazing energy and was so pleased to be a star for a day for us.
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.
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.
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.
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! 🙂
As I recently posted, I have begun my new series, The American Worker Project which will be an ongoing project as we travel around the country, documenting the American Worker. I chose to start this adventure and visual assignment in my home town in Belgrade Maine. As many of you know I grew up in Maine and it is where we spend the better portion of each summer for the last 14 years when not off on assignment somewhere.
I figure what better place to start than the area you know best. I chose Hammond Lumber Company because it is a classic example of a good old fashioned family business with its heart and soul wrapped firmly in the people that work there. It also helps that I am friends from back in our childhood days with one of the principles of the company.
Hammond Lumber is a company that was started back in the early 50’s by Skip Hammond with only $50 and a dream. It has been a staple in the town and now around the entire state of Maine ever since. For over 60 years they have grown from a small mill with 3 employees including Skip himself to a large company with 13 stores and counting with many many loyal employees, many of whom have worked there for 20 – 30 years or more. Hammond Lumber is one of those special kind of businesses where you know you are much more to them than just a number. They offer personal service that is rare these days, all at a fair price.
I’d like to thank Mike Hammond and the other great folks at Hammond for giving me cart blanche and basically unrestricted access to film in their main saw mill. Over the coarse of 3 days we shot a ton of video footage and stills of their hard working employees.
Here are just a few images from the shoot. Click here or on any of the images to see a larger gallery of images posted to my website.
The earlybird catches the wake skater! Got up early on this morning to shoot wake skaters at Camp Modin. Nothing like waking up at 4:15 and on the water at 5:00 am on a crisp 52 degree summer morning in Maine. These kids braved the cold and never once complained. When it’s chilly like that the water actually seems really warm!
Shot from way back. Shot in Jamaica on a Superclubs shoot for Tinsley Advertising.
We recently had the opportunity to shoot the “Microsoft In Education” global print campaign. It was an awesome gig which had us creating 45 shots over the course of a fast paced 3 day shoot. Talent on the shoot ranged from young grade school kids up through collegiate age students and teachers. All in all the production from casting, scouting, prepro, shoot and post lasted just over 2 & 1/2 weeks. The Microsoft in Education program is a program that gives computers and software technology to schools around the world so that students of all ages can learn and grow. Working with an awesome team we were able to create a large amount of quality images in a short amount of time. Thanks go to our awesome clients at Microsoft, NHS and FCB. I wish all clients were as great to work with! Also could not have done it without my amazing crew! Here are a few of the first shots of some of the older students. More to come…..
Here is a compilation of video taken from the spots I recently directed for Pure Protein.
Client: Pure Protein
Agency: Moosylvania
Director: Pete Barrett www.petebarrett.com
Cinematographer: David Hall www.iphotoinc.com
Editor: Emily Mitchell www.filmsaboutfamily.com