Polish Festival at Our Lady of Czestochowa in Phoenix, Az

First Responder.

Summer road trip, rolling through Montana.  Taken out of my car window traveling 70 mph, I refer to this as "drive by shooting".

Headbangin'

Headbangin' post metal band Sorxe at the Yucca Tap Room,Tempe, AZ.  Two bass players, how cool is that!

Balloon Glow

                 Just for show, hot air balloons fire it up at night in Cave Creek, Arizona.

Admittedly, I not much of a blogger, but I do post on Instagram, so I invite you to follow me: @jamesadyrek.  Thanks.

Lluvia Flamenca, which translates to Flemish Rain, is a flamenco dance troupe that travels the world and performed recently at the Crescent Ballroom in Phoenix, Arizona.

The Fish in my backyard.

Scooter

A commercial photographer from Phoenix, Arizona on assignment in the French Quarter, New  Orleans, and the food was unbeliveable, too!

Ordinarily, I would be shooting this kind of subject for a corporate or industrial client.  As a commercial photographer, I would be on site with my hard hat on.  But I caught this image around the corner from where I live.  Always glad to have a camera ready....

Touring New England, the Zakim Bridge in Boston, Massachusetts.

This is Chance Tinder, an incredible guy and great musician.  He does an Elvis tribute with his band Kentucky Rain.  This band is the real deal.  They do Elvis material as if he stayed country.  I photographed their promotional images and I was able to shoot one of their shows.  It was great fun and brought me back to the start of my commercial photography career when I was shooting the emerging punk screen in Boston in the 70's.  It was a lot of fun to be shooting rock and roll again.

Sunset along the Arizona Canal which runs through the heart of downtown Phoenix, taken on an evening bike ride.  As a commercial photographer, I am most often shooting in an industrial or corporate setting.  But I often ride a bike around the city and I like to bring a camera, just in case.

Location Shooting

Here is an image that I recently made on location.  I have equipment that let's me travel with everything I need to provide photographs that look like they were taken in a studio.  As a commercial photographer, this allows me to provide the highest grade of service for my clients.

Arizona Centennial

This year, Arizona is celebrating it's centennial anniversary of statehood.  In conjunction with this, Arizona Highways magazine enlisted the help of local photographers to commemorate the centennial by asking us to make photos on the anniversary date that Arizona was admitted to the Union, February 14, 1912.  A photograph that showed off Arizona.  This is my effort.

What you are seeing is a commuter train station in downtown Phoenix. The commuter train is very new addition and a major commitment to public transportation in the city.  The sculpture has no title as far as I know, I refer to it as the Stone Ring.  An interesting piece which I had been looking at and tried to photograph before without success.  It was not until this assignment, which came through the Arizona chapter of the ASMP, that  I knew how to put this together.  By the way the primary colors in this photograph are the colors of the Arizona state flag.

As  a side note, behind that train, is a parking lot where my wife is sitting in my car, while I am waiting for the light to be just right, she is waiting ...

for a couple of hours ...

I am taking her out to dinner, after all it is Valentine's Day.

She's a keeper.

Kids in a Water Fountain

I do not think that there is a lot to say about this photograph.  These are not professional models, just kids.  Having fun in a water fountain. Shadow provided by the sun.  It made a great magazine cover.

Dish

Form follows function. This is a satalite dish in use by a CATV company . It receives signals from space:  tv, movies, music, words and whatever other information is being sent from outer space.  It is a huge thing. This photograph is not meant to show how large it is but rather its shape against the sky to emphasise what it does.  And this thing looks like what it does, in the Bauhaus tradition.  When I do commercial shoots of industrial locations with big machines or big objects like this dish, I try to photograph the object in way to emphasize it's design.  In this case, the dish was located away from the building near the parking lot.  People walked by this everyday, probably never even looking at it.  This shot was used in company print materials and on their website.  This photograph was also ordered as a large fine art print for corporate headquarters.

GoDaddy

This is a great example of the kind of executive portraits I like to do.  It is environmental, showing a dramatic setting of a computer screen and equipment.  Without knowing anything about who this is, you certainly get a very definite idea about what his business is.
This is a photograph of Bob Parsons aka GoDaddy.  The way I heard the story, he made a zillion bucks in some business, retired, got bored, and started GoDaddy for something to do.  Made another zillion bucks and some great Super Bowl commercials.  An impressive man and a busy guy, I had fifteen minutes to make this photo.  I spotted this equipment in a tiny room, quickly set up a light, sat him down, shot enough to get a good expression and he was gone.  I learned to work quickly from years of experience as a photojournalist shooting features for magazines.

Sky Harbor

This photo was taken in Phoenix, Arizona, where I currently live, the airport is called Sky Harbor International Airport, a great name for an airport in the Desert Southwest.  I was traveling for a commercial shoot in Boston, where I used to live, and was really looking forward to the seafood there, which I think is the best in the world, something about the cold waters of the North Atlantic.  I was not disappointed.

An example:

Grilled scallops prepared at Legal Seafoods Test Kitchen located in Logan International Airport. Wonderful.

Auto Body Paint

This photo was taken in a state of the art painting facility at a Mercedes Benz body shop.  For the life of me, I have no idea what that guy in the red helmut is doing, he is not even watching the other guy applying the paint to the bumper.  He was standing there like that, I passed by, took the picture and he walked away. Later, we set this space up for formal shots of the painting process, but this is my favorite from the session.  When I am on an assignment photographing corporate industrial facilities, I always keep an eye out for interesting places or scenes, even if they are not on the shot list.  I often get shots that the client never thought of and yet end up using.

Wires

There is always the sense of adventure when photographing the unknown.  These wires presented that challenge.  There is color going on here and by lighting this to suggest emergence, it transcends the literal and captures  the electronic message which, in this case, is your televison programs.

Architect

This is an environmental portrait of an architect standing in the foyer of his home which he designed.  I always feel very lucky when someone trusts me and allows me into their private space. One of the things I do is to watch someone in their space, how they fit,  and this foyer was the focal point for the entire house for this man. 

The architect in his home.

Lineman

This shot came about completely by chance.  I was doing extensive work for a CATV company.  They wanted everything shot: buildings, equipment, construction sites where cable was being installed, the corporate offices, the engineers' drafting room, and the administrative offices.  I had complete freedom to shoot whatever I found interesting, I even had a cherry picker at my disposal!

While shooting in the equipment garage, I noticed a pair of climbing spikes laying in the corner.  They looked like they hadn't been used in years.  I recognized them right away because I had an uncle who was a lineman for the telephone company (that's "the telephone company" when there was only one, aka Ma Bell).  I found someone who knew how to use them and we went out, found a pole and made this image.  A mural sized print now hangs in the company's corporate headquarters.

Flowers / Tattoo

This is a little different post.  I took this in New Orleans, in the French Quarter, Bourbon Street if I remember correctly.  I was walking behind the young couple and I was looking at her tattoo.  I liked it, to me if you are going to get a tattoo, go for it, go big.  Then the older couple in the Hawaiian shirts appeared and I just shot. There was only time for one shot, this one.

    This photo was recently included in the Chase Jarvis project in New York City,   Dasein at the Ace Hotel.

Steel

I feel very comfortable in this environment. I wish I could shoot in steel mills more often.  I worked in a steel mill, it was how I earned money to pay for undergraduate school.  I was a millwright and I worked at Bethlehem Steel, Lackawana, New York, Hot Strip #5.  My first day on the job, the foreman gave me my hard hat, it had a number on it, my number.   He said, "If something bad happens, this hat is not to protect your head.  It is to identify your body."

Big steel, long since closed down in Lackawana, except for one thing, the coke furnances are still on and Hot Strip #5 is always freshly painted on the outside when other buildings are left to rust.  I drive by when I am in town.

These images were taken in a smaller mill and are lit entirely from the glow of the molten steel, as hot as I remembered.

I am available for assignments in this environment, in fact, I keep a hard hat in the trunk of my car, just in case.

Skyfire

This is a photograph of the backyard patio of Skyfire, the home of architect Vernon Swabach.  Mr. Swabach studied under the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright who had an architecture school here in Arizona, Taliesin West, a school Mr. Swabach saved from extinction.  Shooting on assignment, I had permission to shoot whatever I wanted and had full access to the property.  The home was simply stunning and perfectly situated on it's lot to take full advantage of it's location in the McDowell Mountains northeast of Phoenix.  This shot was made at dusk using only the patio lights and the natural ambient light.  I was shooting a magazine feature on Mr. Swabach and this photo was used for the cover.

Microphone

This is an old shot, a favorite of mine.  I still show it in my portfolio.  I was shooting in a recording studio,  the assignment was for advertising images for the studio to use in magazines.  This was before the internet and magazine ads were crucial to getting your message out.  This was shot on film, of course.  I had gone through the clients shot list, Polaroids had been approved, and we were packed up and ready to leave.  Then I noticed this microphone set up on a stand in a corner.  I thought it looked great, I asked if it would be alright to shoot some more and the client agreed.  I set this up in front of the piano and lit it.  It turned out that this was a special microphone, expensive and unusual to have at the time.  This photo was the clients clear favorite and they used it in an ad campaign that ran for over a year.