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Annual report time again….
Chris and I shot out in Upstate NY all last week for Corning and had a blast. I cant resist sharing this quick pic shot whilst setting up for one of the Annual Report shots.
Last week after we wrapped up the first week with Corning, I split town to try to take (in my mind) some well deserved vacation. My dad and I took the motorbikes and headed out to the Oshkosh Airshow to veg on airplanes for a week.
I guess after the intense week at Corning and then rolling west from Boston, all the blog responsibility was driven from my mind. It’s hard sometimes to keep up with the blog, but I’ve realized that I never ended up finishing the story on the Corning Job
I can’t really talk about what we were shooting as the images have not been vetted yet by the client, so here’s the fun stuff…
I met Chris in Kentucky where we shot (in the blistering heat) in a manufacturing pant for two days. The days were challenging due to tons of technical limitations in the plant, but we made some really great images.
In KY, we went to a restaurant that was owned by some country singer. I was assured that the guy was famous, but none of us had ever heard of him… The only good thing about the experience was the steaks. Pretty damn good. Six of us went to dinner, and six steaks went into our respective bellies. The only casualty was Chris. We lost a good man that day…
Chris - B.S. (befor steak)
Chris - A.S. (after steak)
From KY, we flew to Elmira to the Corning HQ where we spent two days shooting in the studio.
To do this, we brought an entire studio set-up including a full size light table on location. For us, Corning has been a fantastic client. This is primarily because the images we are tasked with shooting run the full gamut from portraiture, to manufacturing, to lab, to microscopy, to product, to light table. We get to do it all.
location studio set (image from last year)
We finished up just around 5pm on Friday, loaded the truck, and headed east. After a classic wrong turn (wasting an hour of precious drive time) we finally made it home past midnight.
To see some past images we have made for Corning whilst on location, click here:
click to view past Corning location images
All in all, it was a great week.
Looks like we’ve made it to the big time! Well not me exactly…
Early Monday AM my iPhone gave out a little squeak with a text from my long time friend and assistant CB asking if I was listening to NPR. Of course I wasn’t but tried to call him back to ask why but got no answer.
CBK... no spelling B winner
Curious to see if Corning had changed their name, I picked up the phone to check in with a long time friend and Corning art director Craig K to see what was up. Turns out he had no idea either…
Off to the world wide super-web internet network I went and quickly found the source of the excitement.
Morning Edition had done a story on Corning’s Gorilla Glass, and there, smack dab in on the page was one our our photos from the 2009 Annual Report.
Yeah yeah… I have said this before, but I always get a kick when I randomly stumble across my images in places I didn’t expect to see them.
It’s funny that the story and then image was about Corning because this has happened quite often with the photography we do for Corning.
Rabbit, taking one (again) for the team
The most amusing experience we have had was on a shuttle flight back from NYC. Rabbit and I were exhausted, and had just barely made it on the last airplane out of the city. I stowed our cameras in the overhead, slumped down into the window seat, picked up the magazine in the seat back, and began to laugh… There, in all his scientific splendor was young Rabbit dressed in the clean room as a scientist.
Corning Photography on the Commercial Website
I like to joke, but the fact is that Corning is one of my longest time and best clients. Corning is one of those clients that as an artist, we feel just so fortunate to get a chance to work with. First meeting them in 2000 on an Annual Report shoot for Weymouth Design, it has been a long and most artistically productive relationship.
If you are interested in more of the images from our work with Corning… then click here.
Probably the most fun I have on the job is when I get to shoot a campaign for an annual report. This is because most of the annual reports we are fortunate enough to shoot really get to the root of what I love about photography.
When we’re lucky, they most always include travel, adventure, and in most cases really really really cool sh#t. AR’s have taken us around the globe, in the air, under the water, and in every climate on the earth. They are truly really very cool jobs to work on.
This said, and cool stuff aside…. the real nugget to shooting AR’s for us is the chance to shoot a wide range of styles of photographs. A typical annual that we shoot runs the gambit with respect to style and typically includes studio, table top, location, as well as environmental images.
When I first began making images, I was constantly finding myself being drawn seven ways from Sunday, and was generally accused of a “lack of focus.” For some reason, people have an issue with a diverse body of work. They seem to want to pin you down as an artist and put you in a neat little box. The funny story is the photographer who is being considered to shoot images of oranges. She doesn’t have specifically orange images in her portfolio, but has dynamite lime photos. She presents her alternate fruit at the meeting, and is shocked when the client says, “they are fantastic images of limes, but we need someone who can shoot oranges.”
Fortunately for us, having the ability to shoot a range of styles has been rewarded by being tasked with shooting some outstanding AR campaigns. This season, I think my favorite was the 2009 Corning book. There were no helicopters, or jet fighters on this job, but we had a chance to show our stuff shooting all sorts of different styles. We also got a chance to spend some time with our old friend and art director Craig Keefer. Criag has been very loyal to us over the past 8 or 9 years and we are always thankful.
Corning has generously given us permission to share some of the images we made from the winter, so we hope you enjoy.
To see more examples of a diverse shooting style on a single AR campaign, check out the “campaigns” link that is up on the greghren.com web site. Good examples of this are the Entegris AR, the US Shpping AR, the Dynagraf promo book, and if your interested, the 2008 Corning AR.
One of the most important aspects of what we try to do with our work is to bring value to the client.
Whenever, and wherever we shoot, we make a point to go above and beyond the clients needs and to shoot as much as possible. Often times, we end up shooting additional images that were not planned or had a specific use at the time, but came in handy down the line.
This past weekend I spent some time reflecting on the year we just left behind. Richard was finally taking a weekend off so I had some time alone in the studio.
What started at an attempt at cleaning and getting more organized ended up being a walk through memory lane in the drawers of the flat file. I began pulling out a lot of old printed pieces where our photography lived, and realized that more and more of our photos were ending up not on the printed page, but solely on the web.
It’s not like it’s a surprise. I realize that most of the things we shoot these days are ending up on the web, but there was something about physically thumbing through all the old annual reports that made me think a lot about where we are as photographers and more importantly the business is going.
Earlier in the day, I was spending some time with my sisters two twins (1.7 yrs) and sat with them watching some vintage Sesame Street clips. (yes, for those of you who don’t know, you can watch all the original clips on the web at SesameStreet.org. Suffice it to say, I was in heaven….)
Anyway, I watched one clip with Ernie and Bert where Ernie got all existential asking the question do I exist? Seriously! This is a real sketch.
This then got me to thinking about my own current body of work. Having less and less printed material to pull out of the flat file and touch, I started thinking about my own career and wondering the same question old Ernie was pondering. If my stuff was going to exist in the future only on the web, just how did that impact the larger philosophical questions about who I am and why am I here.
OK, maybe this is a stretch, but just put it into this context… Say from today forward photography exists only on the web. They are the same photographs, but only live on the web. Somewhere down the line I get hit by a bus, and they put me in the ground, burn me up, spread me on a tree, or whatever they are going to do….
They come in to the studio and clean out my stuff and what do they find????
Most likely it will be a bunch of computers and drives. Furthermore, most likely the computers will be password protected, and will not be able to be browsed.
Recently my Great Uncle Tom passed away. Before he was sick, we had shot a bunch of interview footage, and while he was in the hospital, we were able to go to his house and grab all his scrap books in order to cut a short documentary together about his life. What was profound to me was the ability to sit for hours and hours and revisit this mans life via his 80+ years of photographs. It was a real gift to me as I was able to grasp a complete and full picture of who the man really was…. which brings me back to the question today regarding our life/work existing only on the web.
What happens to this passion of ours once they unplug the computer? Stuff to think about eh…..
Below are a bunch of companies that we have shot photographs and video for. With the exception of US Shipping and Entegris, we don’t have any of these images represented in the physical form. I have only seen them live on the web…
Happy Tuesday!
Well the Annual Report season is again in full swing! Shooting AR work has to be some of my favorite work for one simple reason… Diversity!
From bio-tech, to defense, to industry, to publishing, to shipping, to who the hell knows what! We are so fortunate to be able to travel the planet and work with amazingly talented people solving the worlds most interesting and complex problems.
Craig Keefer and Elizabeth Costello
Greg Hren Photography 