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.

I was tapped by the good people at Philly Mag to produce a set of portraits of people who will help shape various facets of Philadelphia life in the near future. As always, I want to thank every one of the subjects for their patience and help in making these images that I am proud to show. And thanks to Design Director Michael McCormick for the great typography and design surrounding and supporting the images. Here’s how they ran in the magazine:

And here’s a little slideshow of my favorites and outtakes:

It’s always fun to get out of your usual box and try something new. For this feature in the Wharton Magazine, the editor and art director had told me they wanted vibrant, punchy colors because we going to be photographing the students against colorful flags. So I turned to one of color photography’s best friends…the ring flash. I can’t say that I’m going to make the ring flash a regular lighting tool on my sets (it seems to make the photo less about your subject and more about your ability to buy, or rent, a very expensive piece of equipment), but it certainly does make photos look cool.

The Wharton Mag was recently redesigned by Aldrich Design and, I have to say, they have done a fantastic job. It’s hard to tell in the images above, but the paper stock is a beautiful matte paper. Thanks to Emily Aldrich and editor Tim Hyland for showcasing the images really, really well. And good luck to the students who were profiled in the piece.

There’s a great new feature on my website, which will allow all you wonderful people out there to download a custom PDF of my photographs. Want to show your clients a selection of my images? Want to print out a couple cool photos for you wall? Go here: http://ryandonnell.com/pdf/ and try it out. It’s easy peasy. Have fun.

And as you might have noticed, Notes From the Home Office has a new look, too. The blog has been a bit of a work in progress, so please be patient, as I figure out the best way to get you all my little news tidbits.

Thanks for stopping by.

It was fun and I want to thanks photo editor Zoey Sless-Kitain and Monsieur McCormick for the chance to make the images and the great play in the magazine. Also, big shout out to all the portrait subjects for their patience and willingness to share and to play along, from being hoisted onto forklifts and splashing beer around behind the bar. Thanks.

Check out some outtakes at my archive or via the slideshow below:

Philadelphia Beer Scene – Images by Ryan Donnell

The March issue of Philadelphia Magazine marks the end of a small epoch for me. Since November of 2005, I’ve been given the honor of making the opening photograph of the calendar section in Philadelphia Magazine. I haven’t made every single one of these images during that time period, but I did complete a lot of them. To give you an idea, I’ve cobbled together 32 images of images that ran as the Pulse opener from my archive, which represents 32 issues of the magazine. This doesn’t mean the section is leaving the magazine, just that I won’t be shooting as many of the images for that section, if at all.

The assignments took on different formats through the 4 years that I did it. When I first began making the images, we were approaching the assignments from a journalistic approach, trying to find newsworthy events for the upcoming month’s issue that we could photograph in a candid, documentary approach.

What made the assignment particularly challenging at that time was making a singular photograph that communicated the story, but also fit the VERY specific format of the page, e.g., the format had to be slightly more vertical than square and with a lot of negative space in the composition to run type in two very specific places. Suffice it to say, I would often find a composition and just sit (sometimes for hours) waiting for that story-telling moment to take place within my little viewfinder. If I missed it, well, I didn’t miss it. It was a challenge and a lot of fun.

Eventually, the magazine decided to start running portraits of newsworthy Philadelphians in the Pulse spot. It offered me a chance to meet some fascinating people in and around Philadelphia. It also afforded me a chance to test my lighting chops. We, my assistants and I, almost always took our little studio on-location to where the subjects lived. The challenge was to create a fairly consistent portrait on the road. The set-up was almost never the same.

As I looked through the images, particularly the older images, I was struck by how many things I had experienced and people that I had met along the way: South Philly men dressed as Brazilian Mardi Gras dancers, Sixers dancers, Rocky in the Italian Market, homicides in the Southwest, rowing on the Schuykill, hanging out of the 56th floor of a skyscraper to photograph a crane operator, Eastern State’s gargoyles, Larry & Alicia, behind-the-scenes of a mall Santa, riding the Zamboni at the Flyers, flower show contestants, monkeys brushing their teeth, crawling around an abandoned roller-coaster from the ’60s, wudder ice, the Wildwood tram, high school rivalries, Comcast’s video wall, a congressional hopeful, an R&B legend, a surfing prodigy, an artists’ granddaughter, and so much more.

What other job in the world gives you access to that? Damn, I love this job sometimes.

Thanks to all the Philly Mag staff and alumni, the subjects and as always my assistants that helped make these images possible.

So, as a little homage to the good times that I had making those photos, I’ve put together a little video slideshow:

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:

Ireland – Images by Ryan Donnell