My assistant Dave and I just dropped my latest mailer into the USPS’s hands. The 17 x 22 inch poster, printed on newsprint, features some of the beefcakes that I photographed for Philadelphia Magazine back in 2010. The images ran in the 2011 Best of the Shore issue in a photo essay about New Jersey Shore lifeguards. And, hey, who doesn’t mind looking at 22-inches of ab-tastic men and imagining you were on the beach.

Credit where credit is due: printing on newsprint was really Dave’s idea. Awhile back, Dave was telling me about experimenting with sending different media through his inkjet, including newsprint, and I immediately thought it would be the perfect timeless medium for the timeless image of a shore lifeguard. Nevermind that sending it through the inkjet might ruin my $1200 printer. Sometimes you just have to say “Fuck it.”

Because each of these is a hand fed print, we only sent out about 50 posters. If you’d like to see a copy, feel free to touch base and we’ll try to get you a copy and maybe put you on the list for next time.

Walking the labyrinthine back hallways in order to scout was a way cool endeavor in of itself. We even stumbled into the room where they preserve specimens (see right). They had monkeys in jars! We saw books dating back to the 1500s and stuffed Andean condors that are the size of a man. BTW, stuffed animals that have been sitting around since the 1800s have a pretty…interesting, yes, interesting smell.

Anyway, the scientists and curators couldn’t have been cooler. I recommend you read the article  because it really is a fascinating place filled with fascinating people.  Below, you’ll find some more images of the printed magazine and some of my favorite outtakes.

Thanks again for the great assignment, Tim!

The shoot was a week full of non-stop photography, good food, friends and not-a-small-amount of adult relaxation aids (you know what I mean). We had a great time shooting the Polaroids (even though they’re now Fuji instant images) for the nostalgic opening spread of the feature. And, as much as I’d like to take credit for all those images, the whole crew (creative director Michael McCormick, photo director Zoey Sless-Kitain and assistant and Bro-seph-in-chief, Ryan Collerd) shared in that creative endeavor.

Michael had a rough go of it during the shoot of the toll booth, which turned out to be one of my favorite images. Poor guy was a little afraid of the heights (see video below), though, truth-be-told, the traffic was way scary. (Michael, I’ve been waiting a year to tease you with that one.)

We also had a great time hanging with the waitresses at Uncle Bill’s pancake house, coming away with mad respect for their steady hands and seemingly unlimited patience.

And we met tons of great lifeguards, including the crazy times at Wildwood beach where off-shore hurricanes kept the guards busy the entire time we were there. I’ve attached a special slideshow of my favorite lifeguard images, below. Use the fullscreen button on the bottom right of the slideshow in order to see them larger.

Thanks to everyone at Philly Mag and ‘down the shore’ for their help in making this a successful Shore issue.

The campaign was going to be huge: six ads, shot over a month, multiple locations, big budget, big ad buy, bus shelters, billboards, bus sides, magazines, newspapers, etc., etc. (At least it was big in my professional experience.) The production was hectic. Coordinating locations, models (some pro, some not), clothing, wardrobe, make-up, all at the last-minute. The crew worked hard and fast and we produced some great images, IMHO. And it was all for a great cause!

But….then the crash happened right as the ad buy was supposed to take place. The TPF decided it was unseemly, in the face of all this financial misery, to place a huge ad buy while people were losing their jobs and businesses were failing. And so, our ad campaign, though completed, was a casualty of whatever it is that we’re calling the financial meltdown of 2008.

The license has finally expired on the images and I can show them. Unfortunately, I never got the finished ads (with the copy, logo, etc.), but I did get the retouched images. The big hand in the photo must seem like a non-sequitur without the copy, but I still think the images are pretty good. The copy would have read something like this: “When you give to the TPF, you’re lending a helping hand to students.” (or libraries, or seniors, community gardens, etc.)

Thanks to all the crew that helped on this, art director Holly Fiss (the creative force behind this whole thing), and the Karma Agency.

It’s always fun to make pictures in a building as beautiful and historic as The Academy of Music. For a photographer used to making pictures of “real people,” as we call them in the news biz, having the opportunity to photograph a beautiful and professional ballerina in a 153-year-old opera house is like shooting fish in a barrel. Abigail Mentzer, a principal dancer with the Pennsylvania Ballet was lovely to work with as was her artistic director, Roy Kaiser. Together, they gave me some wonderful poses and stayed patient as we tried to time Abigail’s jumps with my shutter release.

If you’re in the market for dance wear, check out Abigail’s designs.

And as always, thanks to Jess Hawkes, at Philly Mag, for all her help. Here’s the online version of the story.

And just for fun, who remembers that The Acedemy of Music was featured as a stand-in for a vintage New York opera house, in the opening sequences in Scorcese’s Age of Innocence.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that Abigail (and a some other members of the PA Ballet) were recently featured in the Darren Aronofsky film, Black Swan. Pretty cool, huh?

Just wanted to give a shout to everyone that helped make Philly Mag’s Cheap Eats cover story a success: Michael, Zoey, Jess, Ryan, Isaac, Matt. A special thanks to Design Director Michael McCormick and Photography Director Zoey Sless-Kitain, for the surgical styling they performed for both the cover and the sandwich spectacular….whew, that was a smelly day. We photographed all those sandwiches in about 5 hours and went through probably 2 rolls of butcher paper and about 8 million toothpicks.

Here are some of my favorite pages (Great work Michael!) and a couple of outtakes and BTS images:

** No sandwiches were injured in the filming of this feature.

(For the geeks out there, it’s a 12″ x 12″ Chinle Ice portfolio by Moab and Case Envy. The prints were printed on an Epson 3880 on pre-drilled Moab Lasal Matte paper.)

Here’s a little sneak peek:

Thanks to Robert West, of Walker Lundee fame, for the music. Have a great weekend.

It went down like this: Yoga Journal asked me to shoot 3 separate assignments in one day because all the subjects would be in NYC attending or teaching at the annual Yoga Journal Conference at the Hilton. So in a six-hour period my assistant, Ryan, and I had to come up with 3 distinct portraits that wouldn’t run until the following year and make them look as though the subjects weren’t in the middle of an urban jungle (save for one subject who is a rapper). And with subjects that only had a bit of time in-between classes. Fortunately, we were within a few blocks of Central Park, which offered us a million location choices. Almost too many. I could have shot each subject for hours.

Thanks to Leslie Kaminoff, Lilias Folan and MC Yogi for being great subjects and to Yoga Journal Creative Director Charli Ornett and Assoc. Art Director Ron Escobar for the tapping me for the gig.

Here are some outtakes from all 3 shoots:

Photo by Chris Hamilton. Sweetwater, Texas, rattlesnake round-up. ca. I-Have-No-Idea.

WARNING: This is long and rambling. And this is the NY Times article that spawned the rant.

11-years ago, my first job in photography was as a part-time photographer at the Arlington Morning News in Texas, a small suburban paper owned by the Belo Corp., which also owns the Dallas Morning News. I was laid off, after about a year, when Belo decided to absorb the paper into a zoned section of the DMN. It was subsequently suggested to me by some of the management that I should stay on as a freelancer and wait for a job opening, which was supposedly coming down the pipeline. So I did.

My cohort of freelancers and I at the DMN, of which there were probably 10-15 “full-timers,” often worked 7-days a week, sometimes for month-long stretches. Often we would pick up 3, 4, maybe even 5 assignments a day. And we did a great job. We produced imagery that was often on par with (dare I say, even better than?) the staff photographers. And we did this all for $75 per assignment and without vacation, health insurance, company equipment (more on that in a second), retirement matching, liability insurance, etc. etc. (Texas did have the one advantage of having no income tax.)

This is where the story begins to relate to the NYT story linked above: When all the photography at the paper was still shot on film (ahhh, the glory days) the newspaper gave us loads and loads of film in order to produce the imagery, just like they did staffers. We were also allowed to checkout specialized lenses, which mostly meant long, fast telephotos for sports coverage (imagine 2-3 high school football games) per weekend, maybe even per Friday night, just like staffers. Freelancers were required to come into the office after assignments to process film, have that film edited by staff photo editors and then scan those images using company computers and scanners just like staffers. Essentially, we did everything exactly like a staff photographer did it.

Enter the lawyers. In order to continue working for the paper, freelancers were required to invest in digital equipment in order to fit into the new work flow of the paper (I only recently paid off my debt from that initial investment in cameras)  and, most importantly, they were requiring us to sign a new contract, which made it official that we acknowledged we were Independent Contractors in addition to signing away our rights to the photographs we made for the paper. The dreaded Work-for-Hire (mwah hahahaha). I’m proud to say, that for a brief period, some of us freelancers actually stood up to the management and rejected the contract. We had a month hiatus, which my friend Matt and I used to go on a crazy road trip through….Arkansas? Hmmm, that now sounds lame. In the end, we barely got any concessions (a little more money per assignment and co-ownership of the images), but at least we made a little stand.

For me, that was the beginning of the end of newspaper photographer. (sigh.) Eventually, I was denied a job when it came up. I yelled, ranted and ran away to Mexico for a bit. Came back. Held (hold?) grudges. Fell into the same routine, only for a larger paper, the NYT. And then wised up and realized that I was in a cycle of working my ass off and producing good photography for absolutely no money and no real appreciation. I finally broke the cycle, realized the value in my photography and told people they could piss off if they wanted me to sign away rights and undervalue myself and my work. That doesn’t mean I’m not guilty of still accepting the odd under-paid job or not negotiating terms to my best interests, but for the most part, I don’t.

In the end, I’m better off for never having gotten a job. It was a long and rough path for me to get here, but at least it happened when I was young, with no more responsibilities than feeding and housing myself and a dog. I never tasted a steady paycheck so I never got accustomed to one.

A number of years ago, I remember reading a column by the NPPA contributor Mark Loundy on the topic of increased use of low-paid freelancers in newspapers and how that fact foretold the end of the staffer as we knew it. And we’re seeing this come to fruition now in both photography departments and in the writing ranks. Why continue to pay benefits and taxes for staffers when you can get the same quality work for waaaaaay less? I’ve been approached by numerous newly laid off or bought-out photographers and writers wanting to pick my brain about freelancing. Or, even worse, I see them continuing to work for their former employers as freelancers for the same shitty wages that caused this whole thing in the first place (sigh.)

I hope that this crackdown on companies by the Obama administration will bleed over into the media world. Maybe if the media world had to treat it’s freelancers more fairly than maybe it might give them more incentive to hold onto their staffers. Ultimately, though, in the end it’s up to us as freelancers to understand the value of what we bring to these companies and simply reject their offers for terrible pay, treatment and contractual terms.

Oh and since this is a photography blog, I thought I’d just end with some pictures from those glory days: