One of the many things that I have been working on these last few weeks has been to prepare for a jewelry project that should be starting soon.  Jenny Miller is the artist and makes amazing jewelry pieces by hand in her workspace out of her home.  She designs and makes all the pieces herself and typically no two are 100% identical.  She first got into her jewelry after the tragic death of her brother as a way to remember him. 

Her work is just beautiful and I’m excited to be working with her on the project.  These photographs of her were taken a couple of weeks ago.  We were in our photography studio in Seattle, Jenny and her close friend Julie were working on naming and descriptions of a number of the pieces, Josh was coding her new web site and I was setting up my photography equipment and lights to take photographs of the jewelry. 

We took a little bit of a break from the work and took some fun photographs of her wearing her art. All in all quite fun!

A few weeks ago I was working on assignment taking some corporate head-shots of a bunch of fun people.   The group was a mixture of guys and gals but all three ladies that I was photographing were all called Michele or the version with two ‘l’s - Michelle.  The assignment was on a Monday and I figured its a Monday so a perfect day to post the Michele’s. 

Maybe we should rename Monday to be Michele!

One of last week’s studio projects had a musical flair to it which was fun.  The special guests were Richard Amster and Tarik Abouzied who are in a new Seattle based jazz group called Viaduct Jazz.  They were looking for some publicity photographs of the pair of them to use as they pitch different gig’s and such.  Viaduct Jazz was formed last year by Richard who retired from his old engineering job to focus all of his attention on getting more people to enjoy jazz.

The Viaduct Jazz group comes in two varieties, the larger Octet that Richard will often call Seattle’s little Big Band and then the Duo of just Richard and Tarik.  They play everything from jazz standards from masters like Horace Silver, to their own original compositions, and then special Jazz appreciation concerts starting in the summer.  I think these jazz appreciation events are going to be very interesting where they plan to profile the various artists talking about how they started, stories from their life and in-between all the talking playing the music from the artist.   The first concert will feature the jazz legend Miles Davis. 

I just started to review the photographs and thought I would post these few previews for Richard and Tarik.  I had to include the one of the guys having a laugh as it summed up the session nicely!  

More details on the Viaduct Jazz can be found at their site here.

A couple of months ago I was working covering a Microsoft event, tasked with photographing the various speakers and attendees.   The conference was Microsoft’s Women’s Conference which is typically held about every 18 months or so and brings together women from around the world that work for the large Seattle based company.  This year there was approximately 4000 attendee’s at the Seattle event with another event happen in San Jose at about the same time.  Its a large investment that runs over multiple days with heaps of speakers and impressively put together by the amazing folks that run it. 

This year one of the speakers was Dr Carol Scott.  Trained as an emergency physician Carol is also a very talented speaker on the subject of stress management in today’s corporate business world.  She works with multiple large companies and their staff advising them on ways to deal with the stress and pressure in today’s busy world, especially focused on women in the workplace.  I got to photograph Carol multiple times during the conference and although I didn’t get to hear her speak in full from the reactions from the audience during her talks and afterwards I would say that she clearly knows her stuff.  These three photographs were taken during her various sessions and then when we went outside to grab some shots.