Well I now know that KIDS RULE! And, being a kid once myself I am reminding myself to act more like one!
I just finished shooting one of the most fun, energetic and pretty much over the top projects I’ve ever done. And the great thing was that it involved kids, families and my great friend Todd Davis. Todd is the author of the Handy Dad series of books published by Chronicle Books and this is his second book. As a sequel to the best selling Handy Dad, Todd talked me into (in about 3 sentences) shooting the hero shots for Handy Dad in the Great Outdoors.
Background on Todd: Extreme skiing, snowboarding, wing suiter, with his own TV show on the HGTV network called Room Crashers. Check out the article here. He also owns a very cool design business www.epic-spaces.com
Well, I worked around Todd’s insane TV production schedule which was about every day for the last year (acutally we tried to shoot kids in the outdoors about 3 times in the winter, which was kinda dumb) we shot in San Francisco and finally finished it up last week in perfect weather here in Oregon.
It was an epic adventure of laughter, energy, late night editing, dusk to dawn shooting, and me going “is that a little over the top?” and Todd going “that’s perfect!” In about a week we pulled off about a years worth of crazy, cool images of kids having a hell of a lot of fun.
I thought I’d share some of the out takes with you over over a couple days. This shot is a long exposure where I framed the Golden Gate and SF (Todd lives in the city), he took a red flashlight and light painted the word Handy Dad and then stood over on the left and I popped him with a softbox. Looks like a bunch of photoshop, but it wasn’t. Enjoy!