I’ve been getting a lot of messages, tweets, etc. about the shoot I did yesterday in front of the house that was burned down by Mission Township Fire Department, and wanted to address a few things and post a couple teasers. I’ll post more images and video from the whole shoot later this week.
First off though I want to thank the whole team that helped me put this together and make it happen. We’ve been planning this for months and it really took the combined efforts of everybody to get the results that we did! All the makeup was done by Amber O’Dell who besides being a great makeup artist is also a fellow photographer and a great friend. The awesome hairstyles were done by Lindsey Anderson, you can find her at Touch of Class Hair Salon in Topeka. These are my “go-to” girls who I work with almost exclusively for all my senior and other creative sessions including our Senior Road Trips. Next I’d like to thank Evert Nelson for coming along and assisting. Evert is a student photographer from Shawnee Heights and was featured at my studio on the First Fridays Art Walk a few months ago. From carrying equipment and setting up and adjusting lights to making sure the models had blankets to keep warm and even shooting some video for me, Evert was everywhere and a huge help yesterday! My dress supplier in New York did an awesome job of getting me about $4000 in designer dresses from Christian Cota, Tibi, the Robert Rodriguez Collection and Badgley Mischka on time and during New York Fashion Week no less! Of course thanks to the models Joanna, Emily and Morgan for doing a great job during less than ideal conditions. Also thanks to Emily’s mom Andrea for taking video on-site while Evert was occupied with other tasks. I think we all agree that by the time we got on site the temperature had dropped what felt like about 20 degrees and the wind picked up substantially from when we first met that morning, and of course it had to start snowing, but the girls were all troopers and didn’t complain at all!
I especially wanted to address and thank the fire departments who were involved in this and made it possible for me to do this shoot. This was a combination training exercise for the fire departments and a demolition for the owner of the house and they were very gracious to have allowed us to do what we did. I want it to be clear to any other photographers who might be contemplating something like this that I coordinated everything I did with the firefighters both in advance and once we got on site. This included things like what sides of the house we could shoot from to how close we could get and even the use of some of the firefighters in the photos. I also made it clear to my team that we were to follow all instructions and directions from the firefighters while on site and that no photo was worth compromising our safety over. That said, these guys were all super professional and everything went off smoothly without a hitch as far as I could tell. I am glad we did the shoot after the majority of their training was over as we were understandably a bit of a distraction for the guys 
And, as promised, a few more images from the session… these haven’t been fully enhanced in Photoshop, just a few basics done to them, but I’m buckling to the peer pressure and posting anyway!
