Boise Branding Photographer | Adele Van Der Lecq

As Adele and I worked on planning out a location for her photoshoot she told me about her work helping people with emotional trauma (which is work that I so deeply believe in), we talked about wanting to make her photos very approachable. People come to her to do deep emotional work, so when she's marketing her business online her photos need to represent the presence and safety that she brings to that work.She also talked about loving neutral colors, and how she needs photos with room for copy for marketing her business. As she told me all of these things the first location that came to mind was Boise Urban Studio in downtown Boise, so I sent her the website and she loved it. She also told me she loved the interior of á cafe, so we decided to use that as a location as well (huge thank you to á cafe for letting us use their beautiful space).If you missed my last blog post about Spencer Marks photoshoot, take a look at it here. Spencer is her partner and we ended up combining their photoshoots together into a beautiful Saturday in May in Boise.Adele was so much fun to photograph, she was super easy to work with and had a very clear vision on what she wanted from her branding photos. Here are the results...

Boise Branding Photographer | Spencer Mark.

From the moment I saw Spencer's contact form from my website, I knew this was going to be an amazing photoshoot."Transform your life into a masterpiece of purpose, beauty, and authenticity." These are the words that Spencer uses to describe his coaching work with men. For more than a decade now, I've been focused on my own personal growth and health and mens work has been a huge part of that work, so this is why I was so excited when Spencer reached out, I knew working with him would align perfectly with what's meaningful and important to me.We worked together on a half day photoshoot on a beautiful Saturday in Boise, and we focused it around getting Spencer the images he needs for his website, and producing a large variation of content for him to use for marketing his business. As always I focus my work around authenticity, story telling, lighting and emotions, I always hope people feel things when they look at my photos.In our time together we visited eight different awesome locations in Boise that we had carefully planned out and focused around matching Spencer's brand and giving us tons of variation.  Thank you to all of our locations who allowed us to photograph in their spaces, Kate's Place, á cafe boise, Neckar Coffee (outdoor wall), The Gym Eighth and Main, and Boise Urban Studio, Downtown Boise, Camelsback Park plus a few more that don't have links.I truly enjoyed my time with Spencer and his partner Adele, it was so much more like spending time together with friends and creating artwork together than being some kind of "work" (which is a four letter word I just noticed). The light was spectacular for us and I was so grateful for the weather cooperating, in the spring time in Boise, you just never know. It was an inspiring day and I'm grateful to now know Spencer and Adele.I also took some photos for Adele which I'll share in another post too, and thanks to Adele on her help with styling and doing random stuff that helped me :).

Saltbrush Boise Greek Wine Producer Event | Boise Idaho Lifestyle Photographer

I felt a bit of my worlds colliding on this two day photoshoot in downtown Boise.Before we moved to Boise in 2017, we lived in the heart of Oregon Wine Country, just outside of Portland, Oregon. We spent a decade there in the Willamette Valley and when you live in Oregon Wine Country, the wine producers and industry is always swirling around you. Most prominently I remember harvest in the fall, when we could always smell the crushed grapes fermenting.This two day photoshoot was an event by Great Gatherings for Greek Wine Producers who are working on bringing their wines into the United States wine market and get their wines on tables and shelves here. The event took place at Saltbrush in downtown Boise and included two days of private dinners and a rooftop wine tasting PR event. I always love the challenge of photographing the feel of an event, capturing the people, the details, the food, the locations, the weather, the whatever else inspires me, that all combines together to make an event what it is. The event was put on by Predhomme Strategic Marketing out of Ontario Canada, and I can say they did an excellent job and were great for me to work with.Huge thank you to Natalie Plummer with Hello Meridian, Cait Montoya with Boise Socialite, Heidi Wight with Wight House Creative and Jesse Larsen with Jesse and Friends Real Estate, for saving me a place at their table and shared their meal with me when I had a few moments to sit down between photos. I love the community in Boise, if you follow along you'll hear me ramble about it all the time, and people like this are an example of why I love it.One other note on these photos, these are all done with natural light, the client requested this, and then the restaurant also had someone with epilepsy, so using bright flashing lights was not an option, but I personally love taking photos with natural light, and love using it in unique ways to tell stories and highlight certain things.Here's the photos, which will tell the story of the event, better than I ever could. Thank you to Predhomme Strategic Marketing for trusting me with this project.

Boise Bicycle Project | Boise Idaho Photographer

For as long as I can remember, I've loved bikes.I can remember pushing myself to learn to ride without training wheels when I was only four years old.I can remember begging my mom to let me ride my bike to elementary schoolI can remember spending every day after school riding bikes in the Western Colorado desert with my friends (a little "ghost riding" down some hills mixed in there iykyk :)).And still to this day I love riding bikes. Every year I set the goal to ride a minimum of 1000 miles and I typically ride more like 1500 miles (unless I shatter my collarbone of course, RIP 2024 goals 🤣). The majority of those miles are on my mountain bike in the Boise Foothills, ducking out of my work as a photographer to crank out some hard miles.Needless to say bikes have always been, and will always be a big part of my life. I've always said that I see the world better from a bike, and it's really true.I can't remember when or how I first heard about Boise Bicycle Project, but BBP, is this beautiful merging of so many things I love, and best of all it's all for a good cause. Boise Bicycle Project has given away over 35,000 bikes (yes three zeros) since 2007, and they teach people how to repair bikes and run programs to connect our beautiful community.BBP hired me in March to photograph their event Bike Prom, their annual fundraising gala. It was hosted at The Linen Building in downtown Boise, and I was honored to be the photographer for the event, and I even had my photobooth, Boothshakalaka, there for the evening as well. I left this photoshoot feeling really inspired about Boise Bicycle Project and the work they do in our community. BBP is a place that is truly working to do good, to be a safe place, and to bring the community of Boise together. I loved seeing all of the amazing outfits (look for the dumb and dumber dresses in these photos, and the bike shorts on the bottom and suit jacket on the top 🤣), loved seeing the bikes parked all around the Linen Building and loved seeing a group of people coming together to connect and support something beautiful.As a photographer I get a unique vantage point at any event, being an outsider who gets to show up present as a witness to all of the things, both big and small that happen. I'll let the photos tell the rest of the story, but what a fun and inspiring evening.

Stanley Idaho Photographer | Sun Valley Magazine Feature

I just received the latest issue of Sun Valley Magazine in the mail, and my client the Stanley Sawtooth Chamber of Commerce ran a beautiful full spread advertisement using one of the photographs I took last February for them of Lisa Granden, a Ski Doo ambassador riding her snowmobile with the beautiful Sawtooths in the background.I love seeing clients put the work I've done for them to good use. 

It's one thing to create some photo or video work that you think is beautiful, and it's another thing to see how it actually gets used and put into the world.I love that this image worked so well for this Ad. 

It was in a lot of ways a complicated shot to take, it was so cold out (I even had problems with my drone batteries), and the snow combined with the sun was SO BRIGHT!  It actually made my cameras live exposure simulation completely worthless, when I put my camera up to my eye to take this shot at first the viewfinder was nearly completely black and I could only make out faint moving shapes, the snow was so bright that the camera was reading the light incorrectly, so I had to turn that feature off, and go to work on making sure I pulled off this shot.

I'm very happy with the end result, and so happy that it ended up being a really useful image for the Stanley Sawtooth Chamber of Commerce. I've included the cover image of Sun Valley Magazine, as well as the original photo that I took for Stanley.  You can see that Sun Valley Magazine's editors did some photoshopping and photoshopped out the second rider to make the text pop, but they did a great job on it, I was very impressed.I'm headed back to Stanley again next month for another photoshoot and b-roll video shoot, it'll be my fourth shoot for them and it's such a fun project for me, already I cannot wait to get back.

Thank you Stanley for trusting me with these photoshoots, they have been so much fun for me to combine my love for adventure with my love for photography.

Bryan

My First Post From Boise | The Beginning

It's funny to start over again, after years and years of my last blog, posting multiple times per week for literally years, to start from nothing, is, well, a mixture of things. Mostly I'm excited about it, and also asking myself, "dear goodness why didn't I start this three years ago when we first moved to Boise and I started to transition my business?" There's lots of good answers for that, but the biggest one was because I was trying to arrive in a new place, and to understand what that meant. Of course I know that moving is a huge deal in life, but everytime I do it, I'm never prepared for how off things feel, or for how long they feel off.

By now I've certainly arrived in Boise, and I love it so much here. Mountain biking from my house, miles upon miles of dirt trails, and I love watching the dramatic light of the high desert as it spotlights it's way through the Treasure Valley. I've come to love the community, it's a beautiful mix of a city with so much to offer, and yet it's a small enough city that everyone knows each other.

The reason I'm writing this post is for it to be some sort of foundation or marker. I want to write out what I've learned and what my business is about, make a declaration about what I'm offering to the world through my business.

First and foremost, I believe business is simply about service. It is about how you show up in the world and serve others, and that's really it. Talking "business" can get really complicated, but at the end of the day, it just comes down to what are you offering to people, and is that something people need? If so, you've got yourself a business.

Here's one of my favorite images from my career so far, everything lined up perfectly for this. It was shot on assignment for Oregon Wine Press and was featured on the cover of one of their episodes about the transfer of ownership of Vista Balloon Adventures. I shot this when we lived in Oregon, but built a relationship with the new owner of Vista Balloon Adventures, who was an awesome and fun guy who left his successful corporate banking job for adventure businesses. once I moved to Boise I realized that he had moved to Oregon from here.

My next big commitment is to being myself in business, living with an open heart, and responding from that open heart. I've been in business since 2006, and the basis of me becoming self-employed was freedom. That's what I wanted, and what I still want more than anything else. However, I've been through phases, short and long, where my business defined and consumed me. I'm lucky to have an amazing family, that has helped to keep me balanced, but I still have lost and sacrificed myself for my business. It's not ever worth it. Here's a photo from Americana Pizza, locally owned and locally awesome. This was photographed for Rivershore Development for their Midtown project.

I want my business to offer something to this wonderful city and it's people, be an expression of the love and beauty that I experience in this life, and to take amazing care of my family. To me relationships are the best thing in this life, and that's part of why my work is full of people, being themselves and doing their thing. It has given me so much joy to document people in both photo and video and allow them to be seen and heard. I know from so many years of self-employment, it can be very lonely, people don't really know what you do all day everyday, and I love that my work can help people be seen, heard and understood. I still love being on shoots and having employees of my clients ask me how they can see the photos and videos, and I can see that they're excited about them, for them it means something to be documented. Here's a photo of Chef Jesse from Red Hills Market, using a baguette as a baseball bat and absolutely crushing a sandwich ball out of the park.

For me business is all about collaboration too. Due to the pandemic, I think it's been said even more than normal, but we are all in this together, and we're on the same team, even those of us who offer the same services and solve the same problems for our clients, we are stronger together.

Here's a few more of my favorite pictures from over the years of my career...

Welp, that's all for now, now I can start doing other posts on top of this. Here's to living with an open heart in this amazing, wild world. Much love.

Bryan