Overlapping with the time spent with Kyle, I met a really great guy, Tim D. This eventually got me involved with a project shooting tabletop product shots for the trail-building tool company, TrailBoss USA. These lightweight trailbuilding tools collapse into sections and slip into a backpack. Their major market is the mountain bike trail building community.
I had already been drooling over the TrailBoss products for a few years (ever since a long hike into a trail build in the Allegany National Forest in upstate NY) and it was seriously cool checking out all the options and working with Tim.
I would have probably made a ritual sacrifice to get these tools if they were available back when I was working at the mountain bike center in London, waaay back in the day.
Through Tim, Lucy and I met the wonderful woman Suzy, his partner. She told us all about the ocean around here…she’s a marine biologist working on projects around the Salish Sea. (It was during this conversation that Tim and Suzy that tipped us off about the Community Boating Center that was mentioned in my previous post.)
I’m not charged with editing the shots, so what you see here is raw/untweaked straight from the camera. A couple of notes about the shoot: we shot this with no major photo studio gear! This is almost entirely naturally lit and there were no strobes, just one work light used only in a few pics. Highly reflective objects are the hardest assignment, so everything here was compounded in difficulty. I will not reveal all my secrets, but this was a super fun project for me, just based on the sheer amount of improvisation I got to tackle.
The shoot was booked in the Positive-Negative space, and the owner, Jason, gave me a thorough tour through his delightfully complete darkrooms.
It was great to dust off some studio skills and really fun to have such a challenge.