The Mercy Corps building in Portland, OR has once again won an award from the AIA Committee on the Environment, and was voted one of the top 10 projects for 2012. This article appears in the web version of Architectural Record. Photo of the Mercy Corps building made by yours truly.

The offices of Opsis Architecture in Portland, OR that I was hired to photograph.

Nothing like a rainy and cold day at the Oregon Coast. This beach was only walkable at low tide and was a completely rocky beach with no sand. I loved the way the stones looked wet. It made me think of the way my black and white darkroom prints looked when they were wet, and how I always felt they looked better before I dried them. It always made me want to have a show of wet prints. When we went down there later on in the afternoon before high tide came in, the stones had dried out and the beach had a completely different feel to it.

Willamette Urology Clinic in Salem, OR, photographed for CB|Two Architects and CD Redding Construction in late February

Kyle, surveying what’s left from his camping gear when this was his home in Washington Park, Portland, OR. The spot is located just on the edge and within clear earshot of the Sunset Highway near the Zoo. He finally had to leave his camping spot on December 2nd 2011 after the City of Portland served him with an eviction notice. The day I photographed him here was February 6th 2012. I volunteered to photograph Kyle as part of a project organized by a community outreach program called Transitional Youth. The name of the project itself is Through the Eyes of Street Youth. The idea was for a photographer to spend a half day or longer with a youth that had come through their doors seeking help, and to get to know and to photograph in essence, a day in their life. Then, the youth would get a point and shoot camera and spend a few days photographing their life through their own eyes. The goal is to raise awareness, and money for Transitional Youth by supplying them with new photographic marketing material to achieve that goal. Hopefully there will be a gallery showing as well to spread the word even more! To read Kyle’s full story, go to the OPB article written about him. You can also view the complete set of pictures I made during my afternoon with him.

Team photo of Bassetti Architecture’s  Portland, OR office. The photo was taken at Ankeny Plaza.

Formerly known as the Center Court Building and originally designed in 1927 by renowned Oregon architect, A.E. Doyle, the newly renovated and renamed Broadway Commerce Center in downtown Eugene, OR, now has Pivot Architecture as their first tenant. I was privileged to photograph their beautiful new office space for them just prior to the holiday season. The green wood panels shown in this picture, and which also surround the rest of the sides of the office, is a digital rendering of the Willamette Valley and was carved into recycled wood from Oregon.

Holophane LED manufactures commercial lighting systems. They hired me over the summer of 2011 to photograph the parking lot lights that were supplied to the Jones Farm Campus of Intel in Hillsboro, OR. In order to photograph the lights properly, they must be photographed from above, or at about the same level as the light source. If they’re photographed from below, you can get unappealing looking “flare bombs” coming off the lights and into the lens of the camera. Photographing from them above also allows a potential client to see how the light is dispersed, how much surface area is covered, and the color of the light.  So, in order to achieve all this, I had to rent a 26′ scissor lift to get me up that high. That night was particularly challenging because it was not only windy, but at almost full height, any movement by me made the whole platform shake. So, between the wind and my movements, I had to wait several minutes sometimes before each exposure until the platform stopped shaking. Earlier in the evening while I was waiting for the light to change a bit, I looked in the opposite direction that my camera was facing and saw this half moon and a perfectly clear sky as a backdrop to few light posts in another parking lot. I wasn’t focusing on that lot but it turned out to be one their favorite pictures from the shoot, and mine!

The Vancouver Public Library is a beautiful new building in downtown Vancouver, WA. Completed in the summer of 2011, I was hired by Livers-Bronze, the company that made the handrails of the staircase to photograph the space. Obviously with a specific focus on the staircase and the handrails. I had to shoot into the night in order to highlight the lighting underneath the handrails.

This is part of a large home in the West Hills of Portland, OR that I photographed for Realty Trust City over the summer. It took almost the better part of 3 days to shoot this house, as we were challenged a bit by weather conditions on the first day, and then just waiting for the right light to fill every room and to light all the different exterior angles of the home.