Today I was in Cape Elizabeth photographing a bathroom that had just had it tile shower remodeled.  I was on assignment for the contractor.  After I had wrapped things up with the shoot, I was packing up my camera gear and noticed Sam was doing some work on a window in the master bedroom.   It was one of those perfect picture moments and I just snapped away until he was done.  

For as long as I have lived in Maine I have been fascinated by the building that houses the B&M Baked Bean factory.  Driving North or South along I-295 through Portland it is hard to miss the iconic smoke stack and large main building that sits right along the shore of Casco Bay in East Portland.  The building complex sits by itself and juts out into the water just across from the Eastern Prom Path and is often a awash with beautiful evening light at sunset.  It is one of those factory buildings from a bygone era that luckily has not had it's jobs shipped off to a foreign land.  The latest generation of workers still produce the famous B&M Baked Beans using the same recipe and techniques that have been in place for decades.  Two years ago I was fortunate enough to land an editorial assignment to photograph the factory for Port City Life Magazine, now Maine The Magazine.  I was elated to finally get a chance to view the factory and see a Portland landmark  that very few people outside of the workers have seen.  There is a quiet beauty inside these large factory buildings that I am attracted to and always speaks to my cameras.  I spent a good part of the day there and received the full top to bottom tour and had the pleasure of meeting the latest generation of workers.  Photographing the factory and seeing it as an industrial landscape was fantastic.  The faces of the workers, some third generation, really left the biggest and warmest impression on me.  Highlights from this shoot can be seen here.  

While the Mid Atlantic states have been getting pounded with feet of snow, up here in Maine we have seen very little snow this Winter.  It has been clear and cold and from a weather standpoint, very uneventful.  I know most of my community enjoys settling in for a number of big storms, digging out and then getting out to play in the snow.  I had planned on skiing at least one day at all of the major ski areas in the state this year.  But being a bit of a snow snob have only gotten one powder day in this season.  With little snow on the ground we have been blessed with bountiful sunshine.  The other night I was out and about and caught the Eastland Park Hotel facade lit up by the setting sun.  It was gorgeous and the first time I had seen that quality of light hitting the hotel. After a few minutes of shooting the sun had dropped from view and I was glad to be in the right place with some great images in the camera.

Eating healthy is pretty much a way of life around here.  My wife Kathrina refers to me as the "portion control king". I am fine with title because I am confident in my ways knowing that we really do not need to eat a ton to be nourished.  But some days it is perfectly normal to say... I need a donut or two, maybe even three and now! Thankfully one of the best donut shops in the state is located less then a mile from my home office. Today was definitely a Tony's donut kinda day!  

One of my clients in Portland, the law firm Friedman Gaythwaite Wolf & Leavitt hired me photograph all of their attorneys and to produce an audio slide show for their brand new website.  This is a small but incredibly busy firm and as usual time is always precious.  We were able to capture all of the photographs that we set out to get from the beginning.  The firm was considering the production of a video segment for the website but after presenting to them an audio slide show I had done for another client they decided that my product fit their needs better for both the ease of production and budget reasons.  The video production would have been much more intrusive on their time and much more expensive.  With the audio slide show we knew that all of the images I was already shooting could also be used in the final slide show.    In the schedule we had a few small windows to capture the 2 - 3 minutes of needed audio.  I interviewed the two most senior partners and it had been discussed that we would do our best to try and capture the audio in one take to minimize the editing and post production. These are passionate trial lawyers who would be well equipped to handle this task.  We did really well to achieve the necessary audio but in the end It became clear that my audio editing skills needed help for the final cut.  In a former life I had been on staff with two different TV production companies and it took one call to my old friend Jeff Griffiths who is an amazing editor to see if he could help me out.  Jeff runs the Griffiths Media Group in Portland and lives and works 3 minutes away.  He was more then happy to lend a hand and his editing skills.  We spent three hours on the piece this morning and were able to fine tune the piece to a point where my client should be really excited with the final product. There are a lot of fine creative people in Portland, ME and Jeff Griffiths is truly one of them.