I woke up this morning to get a Twitter mention and early Christmas greeting from @Strobist that my portrait of Annie Leibovitz is on the new cover of Spanish Esquire. That’s an awesome Christmas present, and my first Esquire cover as well.

Big thank you’s go out to Redux Pictures (Lori Reese and Jesi Bevis, who tirelessly represent my stock archive and editorial assignments) and Esquire.

Esquire Spain
Editor in chief: Andrés Rodriguez
Creative director: Clara Montagut (her design department runs this great blog / found via CoverJunkie.com)
Photo Editor: Diego Martinez

Congratulations to Hope Solo, the U.S. Women’s goalkeeper and the entire U.S. Women’s team. I didn’t get to watch the match today, but I hear it was pretty incredible. They beat Brazil to move on to the Women’s World Cup Semifinals. It came down to Hope making some great saves including one in a penalty shootout. Here is a video recap with all of the action.

This image is from a shoot I did with Hope a few years back for Seattle Met.

This has been a big year for Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks. There has been a new company logo, the 40th anniversary of Starbucks, and Howard’s new #1 bestseller book Onward, which I shot the author portrait for as well as some pictures inside the book. I have been keeping pretty busy photographing Howard over the past few months with everything that is going on. Some of the images have not been released yet, but one of my favorite assignments which I can show was for The Sunday Times Magazine. I got some great shots from this one, including this 2-page spread, and the headshot outtake. You can click on the spread to get a closer look if you are interested. To get the expression, I sang several songs from The Tales of Hoffmann by Offenbach which I think everyone enjoyed quite a bit. It seemed to be going well at first, but then I got distracted somewhere around Act 2 while trying to adjust my camera focus and my pitch went slightly off. I will admit it was not my finest moment, and clearly some in the room were not impressed. Nonetheless, my off key falsetto created a nice expression which went along perfectly with what the magazine was looking for. Despite the successful outcome, that will most likely be the last time I ever sing at a photo shoot.

That’s my neighbor Mark Miller, reporter for ABC affiliate KOMO in Seattle, getting water thrown in his face. No, I am not waterboarding him. That wouldn’t be very neighborly at all. I am simply teaching him a lesson. Ok, I’m kidding. Mark sees some pretty interesting stuff at his job, but I would guess this is the last thing he expected he would be doing when he woke up today. “Hey neighbor, would you be up for getting water thrown in your face while I take a few pictures?” He did mention he expects nothing less when I call, though. Fair enough. Why did we throw 121 bowls of water in his face? I just finished shooting an ad campaign and it is in post production this week. Today we realized we needed a few more assets to really make this thing shine, so with Mark’s help, we made it happen. Mark won’t be in the final image, but I needed to capture water splashing on skin. It’s going to look great when it’s finished.

Thanks Mark! You are a true professional and a good friend.