Please enter your email and website or LinkedIn to receive more information about our free and paid accounts.
Please enter your email address below and we’ll send you instructions on how to change your password.
As the resident “Michigan girl” here at WM, I can tell you that northern Michigan is definitely a beautiful place to enjoy an outdoor activity, explore nature or just relax. That might be why so many people jump at the chance to attend school in the famed “UP.” With six colleges on the peninsula and a combined enrollment of over 23,000 students last year (not bad for a place with a total population of just 311,000!), there are plenty of alumni across the country to attest to its positive attributes. So when one of those alum, Josh LeClair, was approached earlier this year by an ad agency to shoot a project for his alma mater, he jumped at the chance. It seemed like “the perfect fit.”
The campaign was for Northern Michigan University which is also the college that I graduated from, getting a BFA in Photography, so NMU wanted to hire me as well…
The agency noticed he was a local, commercial photographer and liked what they saw in his portfolio. His normal style uses a shallow depth of field and large light sources/rim light to really highlight his subject, which seemed perfect for the NMU campaign.
Josh spent some time talking with the creative director to discuss the style and how the photos would be used. The planning and preproduction also involved a full day with the producer and creative director, scouting locations and determining a shot list for the week.
Of course, no project comes without challenges. But Josh and his assistant found ways to work through them during the week of shooting.
The biggest challenges for this project was how quickly we could get set up on each location. I followed a video crew so I got to see how they were lighting their shots, and the creative director wanted me to do a similar style so the photo and video would match. Since I was using different lights my assistant and I waited until the video crew was done and then set up our shot – sometimes only leaving us with 15 minutes to make our photos and wrap and start moving to the next location.
Because of this, it was a great learning experience. Josh really enjoyed learning a new style of lighting from the video crew and seeing how they worked with a RED Epic.
The response to the new images has been positive so far, especially from the NMU community.
This is a really big deal for NMU, since they haven’t done an ad campaign like this in years – the overall reaction has been very positive from faculty and students. They’re still developing the many different places that they will use the photos, but so far I’ve seen an amazing new website as well as a view book that should be done soon.
To see more of Josh’s work, please visit his website.