Wow. I feel like it’s been forever since I’ve updated everybody on new work, etc. It’s been a very crazy year already for my wife and I. We just returned to NYC after lots of traveling and shooting. It will be a month or two before I can start showing most of it – so definitely stay tuned to the blog.
I have some work that I want to show today, but before I do that, I wanted to share a quick word of advice. If there’s one thing that’s really paid off lately it’s been making personal work and getting out there and showing your work. I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes I get wrapped up in the business of photography and only concentrating on the jobs that have a paycheck attached to them, but I’m typically always thinking in the back of my head about shooting for myself – Whether it’s an actual series or just a simple portrait I want to make of someone. My wife and I recently started photographing people of the Alabama Blackbelt. We just wanted to go on long drives through the country and photograph the people we encountered. It’s still a continuing project, but I thought I would share some images. You can view the gallery here. The project was an effort to lighten up my work a little bit. Sometimes I tend to be very dark in my photography which is fine, but I am working on showing some range, while still staying within my style and taste.
Now to showing your work – This is really my main point that I would like to touch on. Photographers – start showing your work now. There’s really no excuse and there will never be a better time. A few years ago, when I was 19 or 20, I made a big effort to start showing my work to people. I had no idea what I was doing and my images weren’t that great. But that was not the point for me… the point was to meet the people that could potentially hire me and start a relationship with them. A few years down the road I started getting hired, and now I can call most of those people clients and friends. I truly believe that when you make something you need to put it out there and let people see it. Just like the Blackbelt – It’s still an unfinished project, but it’s up on my website – People are seeing it and reacting. Don’t hold back on showing your work.
Enough of the talk, here’s some new work.
Marco Tempest, the virtual magician, for Wired.
The owners of Eataly NYC
Personal Work
Print ads for Children’s Hospital / Agency: Scout Brand
Commissioned Work, Personal Work, Words
Advertising Photography, Alabama, Birmingham Advertising, Children's Hospital, Eataly, Marco Tempest, miller mobley, miller mobley photography, New York City, NYC, Portrait Photography, Wired
I was recently commissioned to shoot Panos Ipeirotis for Bloomberg Business Week. To put it simply, Panos is an expert at crowd sourcing. He also started a company, Tagasauris, which recently helped Magnum Photos tag there hundreds of thousand of images in their digital archive. Check out the article here. These are a few out takes below that I particularly like. Enjoy!
A few months ago I was hired by the awesome people at Lewis Communications to photograph the new print campaign for Alagasco. Alagasco is Alabama’s natural gas company. The shoot was one that I will not forget. Everything seemed to go perfect. Everybody did not just do their job, but every task was executed beautifully. I feel like our team really worked hard on this one. Props to Art Director, Ryan Gernenz and the rest of the Lewis crew, for coming up with the great creative. It makes advertising 10x more fun when you have a great art director to work with – that’s when you know it’s going to be a portfolio piece. This is somewhat of a departure from what I usually photograph. I’m not known to photograph very light/open photographs, but it’s always fun to show range – even if it’s a baby! I think it’s important as a photographer to always keep a unique and consistent vision/style, but it usually feels good to be hired to photograph something different. I also threw in a couple of BTS photos. Thanks again to the people at Lewis. Enjoy!
Big thanks to my great team:
My wife/manager – Jana Mobley
Producer – Duquette Johnston
Stylist – Morgan Johnston
Makeup – Chaney Boatright
Grip – Seth Newell / Sean Kirby
If there was a king of pop-up books and paper engineering, it would be Robert Sabuda. I photographed Robert about a month ago in his New York City studio for The Wall Street Journal. He has become widely popular since he started designing mostly pop-up books for children. He even has his own line of pop-up cards that can be bought at The Museum of Modern Art… pretty impressive. Anyway, it was a great shoot, and I can’t get over all of the people that I’ve met this year. So many of them have been extremely interesting people that I would not have the opportunity to interact with if it weren’t for photography. Another reason to love what I do. Thanks and enjoy!
Thought I would share a few personal portraits I recently shot for my wife’s blog, ALA>NYC. The subject is our friend, Sam Masters, who happens to be my old college roommate. You can head over to my wife’s blog to read his interview. Lately, I keep reminding myself to always be shooting personal work, it’s probably some of the best advice I can give as a photographer. Would love to hear which one is your favorite… Enjoy!
If you get a chance, head over to the Profoto Blog where you can learn a little about how I got started in photography and some of the background info behind some of my favorite portraits. Big thanks to Fredrik at Profoto for reaching out to me!
Thought I would share a few new photographs of my friend, Steven Cole. Mr. Cole is an internationally acclaimed character tenor. He has traveled the world performing in different symphonies and operas. I met Mr. Cole at the 23rd and 8th street subway station when he asked me for directions. I had only lived in NYC for about 3 weeks, but felt confident enough to give him directions. I came to find out that he had been living in NYC for close to 30 years! Mr. Cole has never driven a car in his life… he rides his bike everywhere. He has bikes stored all around the world at different opera houses so whenever he is performing, there will be a bike waiting for him. The sign on his bike reads, “One less car”. We’ve stayed in touch ever since. Check out this great article about Mr. Cole.
A few weeks ago I flew down to Alabama to shoot an advertising campaign, while I was there I ended up getting a call from Inc. magazine to shoot Hartley Peavey. As you might know, Mr. Peavey is the founder and CEO of Peavey Electronics. We drove over to Meridian, MS where the Peavey headquarters are based. It was an honor to take his portrait and to hear some of his stories. As we talked, I learned a few interesting things about him. He used to sell his speakers out of a van, going shop to shop to see if they would carry his product and now he’s built an international company that’s recognized around the world – That’s inspirational! Big thanks to Travis at Inc. for giving me the opportunity to shoot this assignment. If you have any specific questions, feel free to leave them in the comment section. Enjoy!
Here’s an outtake, but one of my favorites.
Lori Marino, pictured above, is an expert on all things Dolphin. I flew down to Atlanta a couple of months ago to photograph her for Discover Magazine. She was incredibly sweet and willing to try a bunch of different setups. She is a professor/scientist at Emory University and that happened to be our location for the shoot. As you can imagine most college institutions can be some what dry/boring locations. We did a few shots against a seamless background and then moved into her office, which had no windows. There’s one quote I always remember from the famous photographer Arnold Newman, I believe it says,”Photography is 1% talent, and 99% moving furniture”. That’s exactly what we did! Her office was filled with stuff on the wall and desk, so we decided to remove everything and then place certain things in the frame that we thought enhanced the mood and photograph. In the end, I was pretty happy with the two photographs below. I made a conscious effort to lighten things up a bit and I think it worked.
Have you ever been scammed by a senior? Well, supposedly seniors are scamming other seniors these days! AARP decided to write an article about the issue and they chose me to photograph the sneaky seniors. We had an absolute blast! The man and woman pictured below were both models that we hired here in NYC to pose as a mischievous senior. We thought that it might be an interesting idea to have dollar bills falling in the background. My incredible assistant, Trevor Reid, did an amazing job of standing on a ladder with 300 $1 bills and making it rain for a straight 10 hours! Huge thanks to Caitlin Peters at AARP for entrusting me with this awesome assignment.
(behind the scenes iPhone pics below)
