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Posted on:May 4, 2012 Comments: No Comments Categories: News Photography

Big in Rotterdam – one of my images ends up working in a Dutch kitchen

I recently got an enquiry from a company in the Netherlands, looking to license one of my images to use in their new office kitchen.

As I mostly do commissions (for small businesses, non-profits and families) and some assignment work (for publications), stock enquiries like this are rare, and most of my images aren’t suitable for stock use.

But I have a few images posted, and they’d come across one of mine that they liked. Since they’re based in Rotterdam (one of the largest container ports in the world) and focus on trade with Asia, they were looking for an image of containers on an Evergreen shipping lines vessel.

A quick Google image search later, they’d found one of my images in my small stock library hosted as a quiet part of one of my sites.

They found it because I’d captioned and tagged the images accurately (and because there aren’t that many good Evergreen container ship images around apparently), and they got in touch and asked about fees to license the image.

Posted on:April 24, 2012 Comments: No Comments Categories: News

Wanted: Dogs in the Office

Santa Fe is a town that loves its dogs. Half the cars you pass have canine passengers, and the love for the Humane Society and the dog park (not to mention the unofficial dog club that meets in Patrick Smith Park for illicit off-leash adventures) underline how important our pooches are to us here.

And to me, nothing says this more than the number of us who bring our dogs to work. I’m going to start on a photography project documenting dogs and their owners in the workplace. I’ll shoot some photographs, and then interview the owners about what its like having their pets around.

Corrie (our own dog pictured above) is right: We’re looking to photograph all sorts of dogs and all sorts of workplaces in Santa Fe – law offices, schools, stores, architecture firms, artists’ studios, non-profits, auto repair shops . . . you name it.

Why Dogs in the Office?

Workplaces are both public and private – in theory we’re supposed to leave our personalities at the door, but since we spend so much of our waking lives in them, our private lives tend to creep in round the edges.

And nothing shows this more than bringing our dogs with us to work – here’s a part of the family hanging out with us in a professional environment. I’ll look at how the relationship between the owner and dog changes in the office, and also how the office is changed by the presence of a dog. And it’s such a Santa Fe thing, I think the rest of the world would be interested in this too.

What happens to the Photos and Interviews?

I see the project as having several components – one is the still images, which I’d like to put together into a show. Another component is the audio interviews which would be used to build a video piece in conjunction with the stills. Finally there’ll be a book made out of this, with the stills and some written text based on the interviews.

If you feature in the project, you’ll get a limited edition print of yourself and/or your dog.

Want to get involved?

Drop me an email david@moore-consulting.net or leave a comment here, and I’ll be in touch. Corrie and I thank you.

Posted on:April 15, 2012 Comments: No Comments Categories: News Photography

Editorial Portrait Assignment for PracticeLink Magazine

National medical magazine PracticeLink has just published a photo assignment I shot for them in February.

The job was to shoot an editorial portrait of Dr James Melisi, a surgeon who had recently moved to Santa Fe from the Washington DC area.

Posted on:March 29, 2012 Comments: No Comments Categories: News Photography Strategy

It’s Time to Get Real – Notes from a Documentary Photography Workshop

: Jean-Luc looks out at life from his Airstream kitchen

I’m not much of a manifesto guy, but the last week has made me want to jump up on the barricades and take a stand for a particular type of photography.

I’ve just finished the Documentary Storytelling workshop with Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Deanne Fitzmaurice at the Santa Fe Photography workshops. Over four days (that included class time), I shot and edited a story about French chef Jean-Luc Salles, who’s given up running high-end restaurants to cook excellent food from scratch that he serves out of a 1960s Airstream trailer called Le Pod that sits in a parking lot here in Santa Fe. (I’ll write a post about him and show more of the photos later).

I learned a great deal, met lots of good people, and the experience enhanced my love of documentary photography as the most powerful and compelling type of shooting (not to mention the hardest to do well).

Posted on:March 19, 2012 Comments: No Comments Categories: News Strategy

Seven things you can learn from the Kony 2012 Video

How would you like over 80 million views of the video you made for your not very large non-profit? Well, as you probably know, the folks at Invisible Children have just done that with their Kony 2012 campaign, raising awareness of the LRA leader Joseph Kony, responsible for horrific acts of child kidnapping, murder, sexual abuse and forced slavery in Africa.

I don’t know enough to know the full motivations of its creators (which have been widely discussed), but the video has been a social media triumph, so let’s break down some of the keys to its massive success (and not spend too long on the sad follow-up to the triumph):

1) Make it personal and passionate

The video wraps the cause in a personal story involving the film maker Jason Russell, his son and a survivor from the LRA the family befriends. They could have given many more facts about the case (and some have criticized the video for not going into the details), but telling a more personal story makes the audience (of regular people not journalists or historians) identify more strongly with the campaign. Especially when Russell’s passion and commitment are so apparent.

Posted on:March 2, 2012 Comments: No Comments Categories: Writing

What medieval manuscripts can teach you about social media

: Book of Deer (public domain, courtesy of wikipedia)

Back in the early 1990s I spent a lot of time studying medieval manuscripts, and what I learned has proved to be a valuable way of thinking about social media. Unlikely

My undergraduate degree was in Dark Age languages and history, and I spent hours in the libraries of Cambridge poring over manuscripts written over a millennium ago with a quill pen in a freezing scriptorium on cow hide by monks writing in a language that wasn’t their own. Those illuminated texts were almost impossibly hard to produce, but they are beautiful works of art that changed lives at the time, and have since survived centuries of age and abuse.

Interestingly, the monks who copied these texts also wrote little notes about more day to day stuff in the margins of these beautiful books. These marginalia (often written in the monks’ vernacular languages, rather than the Latin of the main texts) commented on the weather, or complained about their colleagues. There were the social media posts of their time – ephemeral but personal and revealing.

So there was the long-form, well-produced and considered work, and the looser and shorter marginalia. We need both too, to present a rounded picture of our organizations.

Posted on:November 18, 2011 Comments: No Comments Categories: Photography Writing

New Article and Photos for New Mexico Magazine

A piece I wrote and photographed for New Mexico Magazine has appeared in the December issue.

Back in March, I went up to Brazos Pass in northern New Mexico to talk to Stuart Penny, who teaches snowkiting – a fast-growing and exciting winter sport. I also photographed him in action.

Posted on:October 11, 2011 Comments: No Comments Categories: Photography

Rio Grande School uses photography to make their case

Good photography is crucial for school websites and other communications, but having worked with several schools on website projects, a common mistake I see is for the schools to think that any kind of photographs will work, so long as they include children.

Often there’s a big difference between what the images shows, and what the image says. It might show some students having fun on a project, but if it’s a poor quality image what it might actually say is more cluttered and confusing.

Posted on:September 2, 2011 Comments: No Comments Categories: News Site announcements

New version of New Mexico Community Foundation site

We’re delighted to announce a new version of the site for the New Mexico Community Foundation.

Four years ago we worked on an earlier redesign of the site and we’ve maintained and updated the site in the meantime.

But with a new CEO and changing priorities, it was time for a major overhaul. Working with Eric Griego of Firestik Studio, we helped the NMCF identify their key audiences and objectives, and translate that into a structure for the new site that would be easy to navigate and expandable.

Posted on:August 20, 2011 Comments: No Comments Categories: Photography

Photographing the q-bio conference

I was delighted to be booked to photograph an evening of the q-bio conference in Santa Fe this weekend.

Held at St John’s College, but organized by the Center for Non-Linear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the event explores cellular information processing and ‘is intended to advance predictive modeling of cellular regulation’ – (no, I don’t really know what that is either, but everyone there obviously did).

Why Dogs in the Office?

What happens to the Photos and Interviews?

Want to get involved?

1) Make it personal and passionate

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