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!!
Here’s another few images from a series of images I shot on the “Only at TaxAct” film shoot. Here we see our brave and loyal TaxAct Spokesperson getting branded with the company brand.
This was a super fun one to shoot in a great location with an amazing dedicated crew who worked into the wee hours of the morning. I think the results are worth it all the hard work that everyone put in. Can’t say enough about the people we work with. NONE of this would be possible without the hard work and expertise of these folks!
Pete recently had the privilege of shooting and editing this :15 second spot featuring the Minnesota Wind Energy farms in South Eastern Minnesota.
Sustainable energy is big business these days as more states are taking advantage of this valuable sustainable commodity with wind turbines that dot the landscape. Each one of them creates up to 5.2 million KWh annually which is enough electricity to power nearly 600 homes. This green alternative to fossil fuels, while still more expensive, is Earth friendly and goes a long way to improving our planet’s environment.
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!!
I had the distinct pleasure to shoot with Garden and Gun Magazine recently. Garden & Gun is an amazing publication with not only great editorial content but is also coveted among photographers as a publication that “get’s it”. They have a history of working with really amazing photographers and giving them the creative freedom and support to do their very best work. It was truly a pleasure working with them and I hope we have many more opportunities in the future.
For this assignment I was contacted by Margaret Houston the photo editor to shoot for an article featuring Captain Chris Wittman. Chris is a fishing guide in Florida (Stillwater Charters) who heads up an organization called “Captains For Clean Water”. After being briefed on the article and what CFCW was all about, I jumped at the chance to hop a plane back to Florida from Utah to shoot for G&G and do my part to support such a worthy cause.
Captains For Clean Water is a Grassroots Nonprofit Organization Advocating for Clean Water & Healthy Estuaries Across South Florida. They started out as a group of fishing guides that “had enough” of Florida’s poor water management practices. Given the destruction seen firsthand, they were convinced that if everyone knew what they knew, the problem would have been already fixed. They discovered, the solution has been delayed for decades because of a lack of political will and public awareness.
On average, billions of gallons of nutrient-laden fresh water flow into our lower estuaries via the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers every day. The concern to our estuaries is not just that these unnatural discharges contain pesticides, herbicides, fungicide, high nutrient loads and bacteria which have led to public health warnings; the volume of the fresh water alone is enough to disrupt our fragile marine ecosystems. The nutrients, and other pollutants, enter our waters through agricultural and urban areas in the center of the state, mostly north of Lake Okeechobee. Thankfully, with cooperation of farmers throughout the state, they have slowly been able to reduce phosphorous and nitrogen loads that enter the water supply, yet nutrient levels remain much higher than natural lake and river water.
Here’s what it’s all about…
Under normal circumstances, Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) farmers may not contribute substantial nutrients to this water supply. When we experience heavy rains, however, sugar and other farm lands south of Lake Okeechobee flood. That water is then drained into ditches and ultimately pumped into Lake Okeechobee. This practice is known as back-pumping, and it adds fair amount of fresh water and nutrients to the lake. Back-pumping doesn’t happen on a daily basis, only during periods of heavy rains. The practice is justified in the name of reducing flood risk in largely agricultural areas south of Lake Okeechobee, however it is arguably a violation of the intent of the Clean Water Act and works mostly to the benefit of agricultural corporations operating in the EAA. And it is just one example of the many Lake Okeechobee water mismanagement issues facing our state.
The excess nutrients in Lake Okeechobee discharge water works to fuel toxic algae blooms in our marine (salt and freshwater) environments. The nutrients also have the potential to “fertilize” an already present red tide organism. These recurring fresh water discharges can create two deadly options for marine life in our estuaries: die in the fresh water discharge or be washed out to sea into a supercharged red tide bloom.
The murky, turbid Lake Okeechobee discharge water also kills seagrass, oysters and other life on the sea floor. It blocks light from reaching the seagrass and prohibits photosynthesis. Prolonged exposure to low salinity also kills grass, oysters, and other marine life.
Our seagrass beds and oysters are the foundation of estuarial marine life and an incredible natural filter. Without them, our estuary ecosystems face an uncertain future.
For many years we have witnessed, first hand, a decline in the lower Caloosahatchee, Pine Island Sound, and Indian River Lagoon estuaries due to this long term water mismanagement. While we drown in fresh water, Florida Bay is suffering from a lack of it, causing the water to become too salty to support critical sea life.
Our state needs land in the Everglades Agricultural Area necessary to clean the Lake Okeechobee discharge water in an attempt to restore natural sheet flow to Everglades National Park and Florida Bay. This will take large tracts of contiguous land for the construction of storm water treatment areas that will substantially reduce phosphorous and nitrogen levels in the water. Nutrient reduction is critical so we do not simply send our problem south. For more information, head over to www.captainsforcleanwater.org or pick up a copy of this month’s Garden And Gun Magazine and you can read the article!
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The BigLife Magazine article is out, featuring the photos that I shot at Park City Powdercats both last year and the year before. 
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! 🙂
Update from the Barrett camp…
Well we’ve been at it about almost 2 months and it seems like a blur. I have been non stop shooting one project after another. We’ve been so busy I have not had time to update this blog but will be adding new stuff soon. If you’ve been following along on Facebook or Instagram you have no doubt seen my steady stream of teaser iPhone photos. This upcoming week I am actually trying to schedule some down time to work on processing, finishing work and color grading on a backlog of finished shots and will be posting them to my blog and as well to the various social media channels soon. We also have a ton of video that hopefully will make it to the editor in the coming month to expand my reel.
Just a quick recap of where we’ve been and what I’ve been shooting. We started our journey by heading to Maine to shoot in the remaining nice fall weather. Immediate plans have had me shooting everything from flyfishing with fishing guide Mike Guarino of Maine Wilderness Tours in the Kennebec River for Maine Tourism type stuff, Shooting on a freezing 28 degree day on a lobster boat, the “F/V Pud Lee” with Captain Patrick and his sister Sharlene Grant, a couple of hard working Lobster Fishermen. I also spent several days shooting a reportage documentary style people shoot in the saw mill at Hammond Lumber in Belgrade Maine, shooting both stills and video. This project also marks the start of a series that I am working on called “The American Worker Project” where we will be shooting real people in real jobs all over the country. Very Heart of America kind of stuff. It’s a great opportunity to get out an meet new people and shoot some killer new stuff for the books. It also doesn’t hurt that this type of work is in very high demand right now and is great for getting all sorts of clients.
After leaving Maine, we headed south to Boston to take a few days showing the portfolios to some ad agency clients. I also had the opportunity to shoot Sid Abbruzzi who is the owner of WaterBoys in Newport Rhode Island which is the oldest surf shop in New England. Sid is also about to be inducted into the Surfing Hall of Fame and is a really great guy with a million stories to tell about the interesting life he has lead. I also shot some neat stuff of some guys working in a motorcycle shop for the American Worker Project. While I was busy shooting. The rest of the family got to explore Boston and learn about the history of our country touring the Freedom trail and other cool stuff.
From there we found ourselves in New York City for 5 days. I had a quick editorial job to shoot and spent the rest of the time doing personal work, street shooting and hitting a few of the iconic NY spots with the family.
This last week as you’ve seen has been spent in Lancaster County in MidWestern Pennsylvania shooting Amish Country and some really cool old steam trains. Which brings me to the present… Suffice to say, it feels like a whirlwind so far. What an awesome trip for all of us.
Tomorrow we head towards Philly and I shift into post production mode for a few days as I literally have tens of thousands of images to be edited. Thursday is a much needed down day as we stuff ourselves on Turkey day visiting Deirdre’s side of the family in Southern New Jersey.
Speaking of stuffed…. Our calendar for the next 30 days does not have a free day on it. What we have scheduled for the next month makes what we have done so far look like a stroll in the park. Many miles ahead of us as we zigzag through the the entire Southeastern seaboard. Some of the travel is part of the various RV road trip photo projects and, oh yeah, I actually have a couple pretty decent ad jobs that I am scheduled to to fly out for as well. All this before a much needed Christmas break down in Naples FL.
But that is a story for another night….
Please stay tuned for more installments… Thanks for all the “Likes” and great comments, keep them coming and please feel free to share with your friends. If you have not done so already, Please follow me on Instagram @PeteBarrettPhoto as I am steadily growing my following there as well.
Until next time….
All sorts of new and exciting things happening in the Barrett Camp these days! We have been busier than ever with a new extended ongoing travel project. Some of you may already be following us on our adventure, via Facebook and Instagram (follow me on Instagram @petebarrettphoto) but for the rest of you that don’t yet know, here’s what we’re up to…
It’s no secret that I love to travel and I am fortunate that I have a great career that very often finds me traveling to shoot photos for great clients all across the country as well as elsewhere in the world. My wife also shares that passion for travel and several years ago she planted the seed for an idea of getting an RV and traveling all over the country with the family. Something everyone would love to do at one point in their lives but for someone with a busy career and a family, it seemed like a “pie in the sky” idea to me at first. I have to credit her with being persistent and the more I considered it the more it started sounding not only do-able but also an amazing opportunity to shoot a TON of new work all over the country which also goes a long way toward giving me new and exciting things to promote for new upcoming assignment work.
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.
I was recently asked to shoot for a really good cause for a program called “Flashes of Hope” This is a program where photographers donate their time and services to photograph young cancer pediatric patients and their families to help in the fight against childhood cancer. It is a fantastic program that raises money for cancer research for kids and also gives the kids and their parents a nice experience of being a star for a day and the parents receive a lasting memory of their child to cherish. Special thanks go to my assistant Abdiel Thorne and my make up artist Candace Wessinger who also generously donated their time for such a worthy cause.
