There are times when you know you’re just one little cog in a much bigger machine, but that fact doesn’t bother you one single bit. You know that if you don’t do your best, the rest of the machine will not function properly.

Those were my exact thoughts a year ago while I was in Bowling Green, Kentucky, when I was commissioned by Chevrolet to shoot the 2012 Corvette. One of my many tasks during the trip was to shoot a series of head shots of a few important Corvette folk. Some of you may recognize Tommy Milner, the Corvette Racing driver. After completing the head shots, I was released into the Corvette factory during the quiet after hours and had my way with the place however I saw fit.

I gave my photos to Corvette’s design team who, in return, used them in creating the 2012 Corvette brochure which is now handed to customers at all Chevy dealerships throughout the country. My work is also featured on the website for the complete Corvette 2012 line on Chevrolet.com.

Although my photography wasn’t the focal point of these pieces, my vision and photography ultimately assisted in the creation the brochure and website.

I throughly enjoyed my time touring the Corvette factory and seeing how these iconic American cars are put together. The most surprising revelation was the fact that these cars really are hand built, not a single assembly line robot was seen throughout the factory. I also enjoyed having the chance to use a set of Profoto D1 1000 Air strobes for the head shots. I’ve used Alien Bees previously, and the Profotos are leaps and bounds better. The light coming from the strobes was extremely clean and the refresh times minimal. Are they worth their weight in gold? Yes. Very much yes- but only if you have jobs coming in to supplement the cost.

Being a star quarterback has its perks, but being the guy that holds the line for the quarter back is just as rewarding. That is the experience that working with Chevy brings.

The full PDF of the brochure can be downloaded here.

Back in December, I had the opportunity to piggy back on a commercial spot with BFGoodrich and shoot some behind the scenes photos for the launch of their G-Force Comp 2 Sport tires. The shoot was located in Los Angeles around to the 7th street bridge industrial area. I’ve shot on and around the bridge for numerous photo shoots previously where I usually shoot full guerrilla style while trying my best stay out of the law’s way. I was now able to explore the location legally and free of those pressures. It was quite literally a light capturers playground!

The idea for the commercial was a take on the classic cat and mouse story. This time, the cat and mouse have been replaced by two growling muscle cars: a Hurst Chevy Camaro and  a Hurst Dodge Challenger. Their job was to chase each other around this industrial complex and my job was roughly the same except I had to chase them around while dodging the video cameras laid all throughout the shoot location.

Here are a few shots from the day. I’ll be taking a more behind the scene’s look at the shoot in the next blog post.

Here is the resulting spot which was shot by Will Roegge and put together by the guys from Mondial:

And here’s a more behind the scene’s look at the shoot:

I’ll always remember the feeling of getting my first camera and that initial flurry of creative juices that seemed to flow out endlessly. I had a massive thirst for learning all little intricacies of aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and all sorts of post processing techniques. And after 4 years of being a photographer, I noticed that my work was beginning to become somewhat predictable. I found a style of shooting and editing that I enjoyed which I always ended up resorting too. Like many before me, I slipped into the dangerous creative comfort zone.

I primarily shoot with natural light. The sun is my modeling lamp.

I wanted to try something new. So last week, I borrowed a set of Profoto AcuteB 600s, drove out to the desert, stepped out of my shooting comfort zone and learned how to use artificial light. I found the process to be excruciatingly slow and the art of finessing artificial lights was a process all its own. The act of balancing the strobe’s flash power with my camera’s settings, the strobe’s shoot angle, and its distance from the subject proved to be the biggest challenge. But when I got back home and started looking at the photos in detail, I saw the potential of artificial lights, the magic that can be created with it and realized that a whole new frontier has been right in front of me all this time.

Apparently, I have this thing where I like to take a photo of someone working on their computer by an open window.

Back in February, I had the opportunity to be whisked away from the balmy wintery weather of Southern California to a ten day shoot on the east coast. In those ten days, a carefully assembled film crew and myself ventured to the state of Virginia, to attend a rainy track day at Virginia International Raceway (VIR for short), then to the snow covered states of Vermont and New Hampshire for some light capturing fun in the extreme cold.

There in the snow of Vermont, the film crew, which included filmmakers, Will Roegge and DC Chavez, and I captured a Toyota Rav4 as it plowed through the white powder. We then moved to the Team O’Neil Rally School in New Hampshire for a bit of rally fun. The end result of those ten days was to create content for BFGoodrich Tire’s website, BFGoodrich.com.

The Fuji X100 is a camera that looks like it only partakes in the poshest of posh events. It’s a fine wine, aged cheese, Brook Brothers wearing, Aston Martin driving sort of character. But when a camera becomes part of my day-to-day life, it instantly becomes a blue collar worker.

It’s good to know that even this nose-in-the-air sort of camera can be thrown into all sorts of weather conditions, trip, fall, pick itself up, brush off a bit of dirt (or snow in this case) and continue its light capturing.

 Photo by Larry Chen

A few months, back I visited the Getty Museum, here are a few more photos from that day.