by Gia Bonavilla
Last month, Elyse and I celebrated the first day of spring with a traffic-free and sunny trip to New York City in a Jeep full of portfolios.
Our first stop was at Deutsch. We took a breezy ride up on the freight elevator and wound our way through the back hallway and through the office space that is modern-industrial, open, and buzzing with creative energy. And a gorgeous view.
We were greeted by Caitlin Byrnes and Cheryl Masaitis, who we chatted with about upcoming projects, accounts they work on and how we can help them source photographers at Wonderful Machine. We let them know about our stock services and they told us they were moving away from using stock, which means they’re commissioning original work…great news! They were a pleasure to talk with and were eager to see what we had in store for them.
One photographer’s work that stood out to them was Roy Ritchie’s.
They both also were quite taken with the lovely, quiet style of Øivind Haug.
They also enjoyed the documented explorations of Matt Dutile.
We left them with a nice stack of leave-behinds for inspiration and set out for Niche Media, where we met with photo editors Seth Olenick and Briana Heard. They both took the time to really look through what we had for them and discuss each photographer’s specialties. They particularly enjoyed Ulf Svane’s portfolio which I had in PDF form on my laptop. The food images and interesting pairings that the artist does himself were a real show-stopper.
We ended the day with a happy hour in the financial district near our last stop. It was an interesting contrast to have a bunch of artists in a room full of white collars and suits, but great fun nonetheless. We were joined by our photographers Matt Dutile, Bill Bernstein, Brian Bloom, Donna Dotan and her husband Brian, with whom we enjoyed some refreshments and chattered on about everything from tattoos, to Guinness to the joys of life in Manhattan. A good time was had by all, capping off another successful New York adventure.
We continued our meetings in Philadelphia at Shooters Inc, where we met with senior account executive Tom Firchow who was a gracious host and spent time to take us through their space (including an endless supply of Starbucks coffee in-house) and show us what they do. Shooters is a creative production and post production house on the cutting edge of technology that nurtures exceptional talent. We had a chance to talk about working together and Tom spent some quality time going through the portfolios in one of their editing suites…queue the moody lighting.
The next day, Hong and I headed over to 20nine in Conshohocken! We were greeted by Cayla Wiener who led us to the conference room while she wrangled up the other creatives. Their offices are bright and upbeat and everyone enthusiastically gathered around to see what we had to offer.
Creative director Kevin Hammond was eager to talk about our photographers and see some of their work. One that stood out was Jon Roemer‘s portfolio of lush prints.
The group was pleasantly surprised that we offer a free stock sourcing service as we chatted about that and demonstrated how to navigate our website to find what you’re looking for. Portfolios made their way around the table and we answered numerous questions while sharing stories from recent shoots and productions. They were a great bunch of people to meet with and we look forward to working with them in the future.
March was a busy month for meetings and a great opportunity to show off some amazing talent!
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