December Cover for Hispanic Business

The year started with the cover of SLM magazine and now it ends with the cover of Hispanic Business. That makes for a nice feeling of completeness for the year. Goal for next year: a cover for the other 10 months!

Latina Bloggers

I recently photographed a couple of Latina bloggers in LA for the cover and story for Hispanic Business magazine. Ana Flores founded  www.Spanglishbaby.com and Monique Frausto created www.blogsbylatinas.com. Spanglish Baby is a blog for parents raising bi-lingual and bi-cultural children. Blogs by Latinas is an online directory of Latina bloggers that Monique started just a couple of years ago and now has over 900 blogs from around the world!

I photographed them before a conference of Latina bloggers that Monique was hosting. Somehow amidst all the madness we were able to get some pretty good shots which I attribute completely to both Monique and Ana being such great fun to work with.  I wish them all the best of luck!

Scotch Nearly as Old as I am (or was)

As long as I'm taking a trip down memory lane I thought I would take it all the way back to the first spread I did for Hispanic Business. This was the first time they set me, as an intern, loose to "see what I could do". It went well and they were very happy with the images, much to my relief. So, historically and personally, these were pretty important images because from then on out I was given a lot more photo work which eventually led to my being hired officially by HB after I graduated. They even created a new position for me. Something called a Digital Imaging Specialist, which is sort of a fancy term for an "Image Manager" or better yet, "Image Beautician" which is a pretty fancy term in itself.

Venoco

Many times photography can lead to unexpected adventures. I've shot politicians, sports stars, and musicians from the front row of concerts. These are some images of my biggest adventure to date. They are of an off-shore oil rig I shot this past summer. I was working for a magazine at the time and they were doing a story on a company that operates oil rigs just off the Santa Barbara coast. I gave them a call to see if I could come down and take some pictures. It just so happened that later that week they were giving a tour of one of their rigs as well as doing some aerial photography, so I asked if I could come along. They said yes. So, a few days later I found myself riding in a boat at 5 am and then hanging out of a helicopter taking photographs. This was both my first time taking a boat out on the ocean and riding in a helicopter. I thought there was a possibility that everything could go terribly and I might just wind up being sick the whole time. Luckily, that was not the case. I wound up getting the cover shot and the images were featured on the magazine's web site.