If you’ve never been to Portland, you might not know of the copious amounts of houseboat communities. For this cover story for Oregon Home magazine, I got to visit three communites in the area. Each one was very different with it’s own set of character and charm. One common thread between them all, really nice people who love being on the water.

Oregon Home was one of those magazines I’ve always wanted to shoot for since moving to Portland. When Jon Taylor Carter (of Bend Living fame) took over as art director and called me in, I jumped at the opportunity. As my first shoot for them, I pulled out all the stops to make a summer story look bright and happy, even though we shot in typical overcast and drizzly March. With a little bit of luck, timing, lighting, and Photoshop,  we got some great shots that went into these spreads. Enjoy and pick up a copy today!

(*Couple shots are not mine: 2nd spread, 2nd from the left. Sidebar, 3rd spread (but man, do I want to shoot that place!))

What made the job really fun was eating little bits of it all along the way. And I can tell you, the Reggie Deluxe is everything you’d think it would be.

Here are the tearsheets from the magazine. Now go out and buy it! Better yet, subscribe to this great magazine and support an organization that’s really doing something unique in the world of city publications.

So far, it’s been featured in Portland Monthly (US), Home Beautiful (Australia), and now the photographs are running as a cover story for UK magazine Spaces. If you’re in the US, I think you can pick up a copy of this February 09 issue at Barnes & Noble.

I’m really happy to see Jessica’s work be featured in so many places. And it’s certainly nice to get my photos published all over the world, too

Spaces has also run my bio on their website and I’ve been interviewed for a Q&A that will be coming out in their April issue. Will post that when it comes out.

This was my biggest project to date with Portland Spaces. I shot nine locations over six days to fill twenty-three pages of the October/November 2008 issue. It was a really a great experience to shoot so many different types of work spaces, yet keep a consistent theme going throughout. Working closely with Jason Blackheart, Portland Spaces’ Art Director, really helped to pull it all together.

Making this cover shot happen was almost too easy. Linda’s home office pavilion provided a great backdrop for the type considerations of the cover layout. The day was pretty sunny, so I used a strobe inside her studio to match the outdoor light. I really wanted the shot to come out natural looking. The trick was to have the light source coming from the same angle of the sun.

Here are some behind the scenes photos shot by my trusty assistant, Dan McLaughlin.

We really didn’t have a lot of time to get this shot. The sun was creeping around an rising up the side wall. If it got to high, it would have been too hot for the shot.

I shot this with a Canon 5D, 45mm TSE, and tethered to a Windows machine. Jason Blackheart is on the left.

Shooting tethered outside? Make sure your laptop battery is charged.

We shot a lot of different versions of Linda’s son walking. Here, I want him to act like he was running and then start moving on my signal. That way I could position him exactly where I wanted him, yet still get the blurry effect. The end shot was actually a composite of three different frames.

It’s funny how a laptop has become the new Polaroid.

Here Jason and I are talking about options the shot for the cover.

When the Art Director smiles, you know you’ve got it in the bag.