January has been my time to organize, to catch up, and to reflect. No, I haven’t had the month OFF, but I have been ‘under the radar’… getting back in gear and planning for 2014 so I’m ready to roll when the next busy season hits.
So, to celebrate 2013 before it gets buried in the excitement of this NEW YEAR, here’s the annual year-in-review, for both my family and my business…. stuff that happened, in no particular order of time or importance.
In pictures. and a few words.
But mostly pictures…
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In 2013, my family & I bought a house. This was probably the coolest thing for us this year… buying our first home. God blessed us with a perfect house for our needs, walking us through a ridiculous number of obstacles to get it. it’s old (we love old) and it’s just a few blocks from downtown, where I work.
The kids ran through the empty space until they pretty much just collapsed the first time they were in it…
This is the sweet older couple who lived there before us. Took me a while to realize these two photos (which were left in the house on different floors before everything had been cleared out) were the same couple. Before you get teary eyed, they are both alive and well and now live in Louisiana.
And the house truly felt like home to me once I got my record player set up… yes, this completes my hipster self.
I had the honor of a photograph making it into the national photography competition ‘photospiva‘ at the beginning of the year, with this image of my assistant Michelle’s beautiful daughter.
I also had this photo of a young composer, earn best in the ‘seniors’ division (tied with an image by a local competitor and friend) for a print competition put on by the Missouri chapter of the Professional Photographers of American organization.
I drank a whole lot of coffee and enjoyed time in my favorite local coffeeshop, Joplin Ave Coffee Co, working alongside good friends. My studio can feel a little cavelike without windows, so I’m very happy to have such a great establishment to work out of downtown. The owners are kind to not charge me rent at this point, I’m there so often…
I also enjoyed homemade iced coffee at home and an occasional fancy cup at some sweet spots when I travelled, such as ‘coffee ethic’ and ‘the hub’ in springfield, and ‘Oddly Correct’ in Kansas City. That’s always my favorite thing to do in bigger cities… try out the snobby coffee. 🙂
I worked a LOT with the convention and visitors’ bureau to visually represent the city of Joplin, Missouri, showing the best of this town in photographs. I’ve enjoyed that challenge greatly, taking pictures of every attraction and local restaurant you can imagine.
What made it even more fun was working under the direction of my good friend Carrie and alongside the CVB’s new copywriter, my good friend Lance Schaubert.
(and yes, when I took pictures of food, sometimes I got to eat the leftovers. Just know that as delicious as they were, they were always cold by the time I got to them…)
This also gave me the opportunity to shoot really cool things like ‘the Grassroots’ (google em’. You’ll recognize most of their greatest hits, I promise) in concert and the route 66 festival. Backstage access, BOOM!
My kids got bigger for another year.
This is Maggie June. She just turned 3. She’s feisty & independent but also very sweet…. happy talking to herself in the corner with a collection of stuffed animals for an hour, or (if she’s in the mood, of course) snuggling with us on the couch.
This is Harry Louis. He just turned 5. He thrives on people and interaction and laughter and is very expressive. No idea who that reminds me of.
*ahem*.
Harry tried a lot of new things… like his first sport, his first reveal of Darth Vader’s identity, and his first tire change.
Harry has also become a budding photographer. I decided to hand him my camera more this year (I can hear folks gasping that I’d let my 5 year old hold my bread n’ butter), and he acts like a veteran… holds it perfect, takes time to compose, and even directs his subjects. He took the picture on the right of my wife Autumn and I…
Maggie, meanwhile, has just worked on being generally cute and putting not just words or sentences together, but perfectly phrased paragraphs.
I started curling my mustache. No really, that’s big news.
I shot the biggest project of my career (*so far)… and the dearest to me.
I’ve talked enough lately about ‘Cold Brewed’. The only new thing I’ll add is that it’s currently available for download as an iBook. You can download it
here, or find out more about it first by visiting my
last blog post on it.
With the momentum of this personal project behind me, I also began an ongoing series late in the year that will extend into 2014 and I am VERY excited about… because it’s a personal concept series that your own kids can be a part of. You can find out more about that, here.
This was also a big year for the 9art photobooth. I’ve never run this event for the purpose of drumming up business to get hired to do more photo booths… but rather, to connect to the community, take part in ‘third thursday’ and show our support for downtown. And of course to have fun and just let people know that 9art is here!
We had our usual run with it, but also new opportunities… including:
Taking pictures of folks with Lightning & Mater themselves at the route 66 festival. The life-size cars were sent in directly from Pixar in August… it was pretty sweet. The first shot is Michelle & I, posing with Lightning. (shot by our friends at Whitney Scott photography).
Attendance was huge in 2013 for our monthly third thursday photobooth events…
And even better, I had the opportunity to run a couple of photo booths that went beyond fun (not that they weren’t still fun) and into deeper meaning.
After taking this photo during a ‘thankful’ photobooth for my church, this gentleman came up to me afterward and told me I’d ‘helped an old man stop hurting’. That was an unexpectedly powerful moment for me as a photographer.
Oh yeah. And we even had a MARRIAGE PROPOSAL at one of our photobooths this year. No, this was not staged. 🙂
I met and worked with fellow creatives- some old friends, some new. Hugely inspiring and exciting. One my favorite experiences was getting to know Jorge Leyva, a Peruvian painter/sculpter with an amazing talent and a humble heart. He is probably one of the most fun (and goofy) subjects I’ve ever had the pleasure of photographing. I plan to continue taking portraits of artists as an ongoing series.
I also worked with an eccentric writer named
Lance Schaubert so much that we almost finish each-others’ sentences these days. We both worked for the CVB, (he’s their copywriter as of 2013), directed & promoted ‘cold brewed’ together, worked on a project in which HE was the actor during some studio sessions, and bounced ideas & debates back and forth as we worked across the table from each other at the local coffeeshop. Lance and his wife Tara… who are great friends to my family… are moving to Brooklyn this year. You can find out more about their mission and how to support it
here.
(that’s Lance holding the first copy of the ‘cold brewed’ script on our first day of shooting…)
I challenged my fear of heights, often.
I stood precariously on so many iffy chairs, ladders, rooftops, etc this past year… that Carrie from the CVB started saying ‘it’s not a real shoot if Mark doesn’t stand on something.’
by doing so, I got shots like this…
so of course, it was always worth it.
In a very exciting development, I had my first photo ‘miemed’. I realize that 2013 is a little late to have a photo become a miem, But I don’t care. I’m still proud.
I got MY face on a mural (along with dozens of other locals for an Art Feeds downtown project) and landed one of my photographs of downtown Joplin as the cover to the ‘Names & Numbers’ phonebook this year.
Here’s the full shot:
Expanded 9art’s commercial side even more, doing work for organizations like CIY…
and regularly doing covers for the freshly re-designed ‘Joplin Business Journal‘. Also started a new ad campaign that premiered in the ‘biz journal.
And last but not least, I gained some fantastic new family and wedding clients… and watched kids grow within families that were already beloved 9art ‘regulars’.
