Philips Medical North America

I have had the pleasure of shooting for Philips Medical for the past 10 years whenever they come to Florida. Normally the jobs would be filming video interviews of doctors, patients, nurses and executives. They also specialize in making really cool medical exam devices such as MRI imaging machines and such and the rooms are really high-tech, kind of like the crime labs on the TV show C.S.I. and I shoot these rooms for publicity.

Florida Hospital Orlando has just doubled the size of their main hospital just a few miles from my house and Philips teamed up with Walt Disney World to create what they have dubbed the "Ambient Experience" for children. In short, there is a pediatric emergency room dedicated to kids and the idea is to use mood lighting and video programming to calm them down while they are in their room.

The whole concept is to have a virtual light show and video interactivity controlled by the patient with a remote control.  Philips wanted me to shoot this for publicity and internal use across the world to show employees how the final product turned out.

I arrived with my video crew  and started shooting at 5 a.m.. We were told that we had approximately 2 hours to get in and get out. The goal was to film 6 locations with models before the ER room officially came to life -they had 38 kids run through these 8 rooms the day before!

Luckily, I brought my Canon5DMKII with me with about 8 lenses for the still shots. The video camera that I had was not really wide enough to get all of the effects of the lighting  even with a wide angle adapter screwed on, so I showed the client the room using the 5D with a 20mm and a plugged in HD monitor. She loved it and from that point on the rest of the shoot was filmed with the camera. I must admit, I was thoroughly impressed when I exported the footage into my Final Cut Pro edit suite. The colors popped and everyone was thrilled with the quality. The roughs were sent up to Boston where they were edited into a 2 minute final movie and aired 2 days later in Amsterdam.

Unfortunately I can't show you the video footage or many stills so this is all you get but I will post the final product as soon as Philips gives me the go ahead. It is really cool to see the rooms change color and how the nurse interacts with the patient.

ARCA race 2009

Speedweek in Daytona Beach has officially begun and the action has been very hot at the track in Daytona. The ARCA boys and girls took to the track on Saturday and only 21 of the 43 starting cars stuck around to finish the race. I shot a ton of wrecks but none as scary as the above sequence. The green car spun, slid around the upper turn 4 curve and was then T-boned by another driver who could not see ahead of him due to the large amount of smoke covering the track. This is every racecar drivers worst nightmare and it happened. Both drivers were transported to the hospital after taking 24 minutes to extricate them from their cars. Broken vertebrae, bruised lungs and plenty of aches and pains are in store on their road to recovery. I will post more action after the Daytona 500 race this upcoming weekend.

Pepsi Smash Concert

A few days before the Superbowl, VH1 aired a live concert featuring performances by Lifehouse, Fall Out Boy and Rhianna. The Ford Ampitheater in Tampa was the venue and it was pretty cool. It was raining out really hard and the venue is nothing but a few huge tents covering the stage, it worked out rather well however. The concert was decent with Fall Out Boy performing the most of any of the groups and Rhianna doing her skit live for the VH1 cameras. I love shooting concerts and this one was fun and something to do a few days before the Superbowl.

Superbowl XLIII

Well I finally did it! I had the opportunity to shoot a SUPER BOWL and I did it, I really did it...

I have shot many NFL football games in the past few years, (14 teams to be exact-but who's counting?), but this game was by far the biggest in my sporting career. 

I shot media day, the Pepsi Smash concert series and then of course the game.

Let me explain how the process worked once I got there. I checked in all of my gear through security, lying all of my gear on the ground for the Police dogs to sniff, and then through a metal detector to check me out, very similar to an airport screening. I was then given a yellow vest with the words Upper Level Photographer on the back. I was originally told to leave ALL monopods and tripods at home, we would not be allowed to use them. Imagine if you will holding a 400mm lens with a teleconverter attached trying to shoot from above with the camera set to ISO2000, f2.8 at 600th of a second, following a man in red running the ball with no monopod... if you are not a photographer let me explain it like this:   Hold 2 gallons of milk directly out in front of your body for 1o seconds, squint, bend your upper body forward about 9 inches so you can see the tops of your shoes, push your trigger finger in and out, rotate your body to the right 66 degrees while still holding the 2 gallons of milk directly in front of your body with your arms still straight out in front of you! RELAX for 20 seconds-now do it again and this time get it in focus.

I snuck the monopod in just like 40 other photographers and used it religiously on every play.

The game was very exciting and I would love to shoot next year in Miami, hopefully the Dolphins would join me.

I shot over 1200 images of the game, packed 6 lenses with 2 camera bodies and drove home after the game like an over excited 10 year old boy.  I love the NFL!