In this economy, people do what they can to get noticed by potential employers.  For my friend Rachel Hill, she made her job search into a bicycle tour.

Rachel Hill hits the Pavement by Bicycle

Rachel bought a bike in Vancouver, BC and heading down the West Coast, riding her trusty used Shwinn from interview to interview.  She’s a talented person with experiecne in the Peace Corps (we trained together in Burkina Faso), a recent Fulbright scolarship, and a graduate degree in Landscape Architecture from the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Rachel and her Bicycle in SE Portland

Rachel is also an accomplished writer and working to get her story published.

Crazy right?

So I flew down to Oakland back in late January to photograph Merrill Garbus aka Tune-Yards for promo shots for her new album, Who-Kill.  And now she’s famous:

Here’s a link to a write up about Tune-Yards and the photo in the Rolling Stones in the SF Weekly.

The album will be released on April 19, 2011.  You can listen and download a free copy of her song “bizness” on the Tune-Yards website AND you can see her incredible video here.

You can also find this image on Page 34 of the March 17th, 2011 edition of the Rolling Stone.  Yes, it’s the one with Snookie on the cover.  No, I had no idea who she was until I bought my two copies of the magazine…

Tune-Yards is currently on tour.  April 28th she’s playing the Doug Fir in Portland and I will be there – let me know if you will too!

I recently was hired to shoot photos at the Portland Audubon Society Sanctuary.  They have a grant through Together Green, a partnership between National Audubon Society and Toyota that gets people out in their communities volunteering and working hard.  I had a lot of fun with the volunteers – we had a beautiful Oregon spring day (meaning it could have rained at any point, but it didn’t!) and the volunteers replaced a bridge that had been washed out, pulled heaps and heaps of invasive Ivy, and rehabilitated a muddy path.  Very cool to see how much they accomplished in one day!

See more of my images and learn more about Together Green here.

So some of you know that I’m in cahoots with Amy Cave and we are photographing weddings under the auspices of Swoon Imagery.  It’s interesting that I’m doing weddings, because I once assumed that I wouldn’t like the job for the not-so-very-good-reason that many other photographers don’t do weddings.

However, last summer I shot a wedding with Michael Jones, who I assist (and who doesn’t typically do weddings, but he does AMAZING product photography), at a wedding and I LOVED IT.  “Huh… Fast paced, lots of people, families, big party… Of Course!”  It was a blast, although the groom did make me cry by singing a ballad to his love during their first dance.  Drats!  My secret weakness for country music exposed!

So last Saturday, on New Years Day Amy Cave and I had our first wedding together as a team.  It was a grand success and we’re super happy with the images.  It helped that the bride and groom were just wonderful people, with extremely nice families.  Everyone was so cooperative that we finished the group photos early!  Which I think surprised everyone.  We’re off to a good start!Betsy with her bridesmaids

Sean with his groomsmen.

Betsy and Sean’s first look

I cry when beautiful art looks crummy on a website.  So I love working with artists so that their work looks stellar on Etsy or their website.  Above is a sampling of works I’ve photographed, from top left clockwise, work from Joe Mansfield, Ryah Radomski, Lisa Arquette, Mary Mac, Karl Ramentol and Ken Tomita.

I got interested in doing copy work for Artists when I was involved with Project Chaboo.  50 artists collaborated with Bamboo artist Ken Tomita to make a variety of benches made from bamboo, yes, but also from cement, recycled blinds, rosin, fabric…  I did all of the product photography for the project and some of the portraits.  Ken Tomita is now in cahoots with Joe Mansfield with a project they call Grove.  Especially interesting if you have an iphone…