Selected projects
The work.
Key art, brand identities, photography, film and motion. Grouped by discipline — the range is the point.
Art direction
Where the photography and the identity meet — imagery composed to carry a mark.
Shot for the open field above the horizon, then the wordmark knocked out in ink so the sun and the gradient read straight through the letterforms. Dark mass above, dark water below, the light held between them.
May 2022, Plaza Mayor, Medellín, Colombia. BizCann Expo Colombia — an international alternative-products show with established regional players on the floor. I went for Ethnomedica with one brand, Colombian Gold Extracts, as its only representative. Twelve exhibitors. Nobody in the hall had heard of us.
The brand is American and it is called Colombian Gold Extracts. The name borrows the country’s reputation, and in Medellín, Colombia it has to stand in front of the people it borrowed it from. That reframed the job. Not awareness — earning the name in the one room where it could be called.
So the identity doesn’t reference Colombia as somewhere you source from. It references Colombia before Columbus. The mark is a pre-Columbian Colombian gold piece, the goldwork that was already here in the 1400s, and the backdrop carries the geometric ornament of the same tradition. Gold is in the name, so gold does the work — elegant, restrained, nearer to luxury than to a trade show stand. A tribute rather than a borrowing, which is the only version of that name that survives being read in Medellín, Colombia.
The coin is the entire back wall. At that size it reads from across the hall, and that is the only test a mark like this has to pass at a show.
I built every part of it. Positioning and visual identity, the exhibit, the full collateral suite, cast and directed the on-site talent, and worked the floor for three days — selling and translating at the same time, in Spanish I was still learning.
Yahoo Finance’s pre-show announcement named the brand first of twelve exhibitors, ahead of established regional competitors.
Graphic design & identity
Marks, wordmarks and brand systems — built to survive shelf, screen and a printed shirt.
Extracts brand — logotype
Logotype & lettering
Extracts brand — seal
Secondary mark
Skincare brand — identity
Mark & wordmark
Botanical wellness — monogram
Monogram
Video production co. — identity
Logo & badge
Todo Sueño — brand design
Mark & wordmark
Photography
Shot on 35mm, developed and printed by hand. I work in the darkroom when I want the decision made twice — once in the camera, once under the enlarger — instead of once in a slider.
Against the Light
35mm · hand-printed silver gelatin
I metered for the window, not for her. That one choice does all the work: the figure collapses to solid black and a single thread of light survives along the profile — brow, lip, jaw, the break of the shoulder, then the hair coming apart at the edge.
The picture is that line and the paper it sits against. Nothing else is lit, nothing is filled, nothing competes. A third of the frame carries no information at all, and that’s deliberate — in an image built on one edge, every tone you add is a tone that softens it.
Printed hard, so the blacks stay black and the paper stays clean. Where black meets white is where the subject actually lives.
The Regular
35mm · hand-printed silver gelatin
The opposite problem to the silhouette. Overcast light over water is one enormous soft highlight, and his coat is close to black — so this print has to hold both ends at once, without the sky going blank or the coat closing up.
I shot it from a few feet away, not from across the sand. He’s looking straight down the lens and the birds still didn’t move, which only happens if you’ve stood there a while first. It isn’t a candid stolen at distance — it’s someone who agreed to be photographed and then went back to what he was doing.
In the print the sky and water are held down so the horizon stays, and his face and hands are kept up so the skin and the birds separate from the coat. The grain is left alone.
Where the Wild Things Are
Ventura, California · September 2013
Exposed for the sky and let him go black. The whole picture is one edge — the line of the profile, the few wisps of hair the sun gets through, and the stick. Holding any detail in him would have cost the glow behind his head, and the glow is what makes it.
Shot from low and level with him rather than down at him. At a child’s eye line he reads as someone going somewhere; from adult height he would have read as a small boy in a field.
The space on the right is left open on purpose. He is walking into it and the stick is already there — the frame is about where he is going, not where he is.
The Neighbours
Ventura coast · October 2013
Shot long and low from the sand. The compression is the whole picture — it stacks a bird a few inches tall against a generating station miles down the coast and puts them on the same plane, so they read as neighbours rather than subject and backdrop.
Focus stays on the bird and the foam; the station is left soft. It doesn’t need to be sharp to be read, and sharpening it would turn the frame into an argument. Soft, it stays what it is — a fact on the horizon that nobody on this beach is looking at.
It only works with the wave up. The foam separates the bird from the water and gives the bottom of the frame something to push against. Flat sea and it’s a bird on a beach.
Schoolhouse
Ventura coast · January 2014
Shot from inside the playground rather than from the sand. The chains do the composition — four verticals cutting the view into bays, with the wave landing in one of them. Two feet either way and it is just a picture of a wave.
Exposed for the water and let the foreground fall away. The swings go to silhouette because that is what they are at half past eight in January; holding detail in them would have cost the green in the face of the wave, and the wave is the thing worth keeping.
The seats are the point. A clean line breaking and an empty park on a weekday morning — the picture is about who is not there.
On set
Frames from live and studio production — the work behind the finished pieces.
No Second Take
Live concert production · Robby Krieger, The Doors
Downstage edge, inside the rig, shooting across the front line. There is no second take at a show — the song happens once, and the camera has to already be where the moment is going to be.
The lighting is the problem and the material at the same time. Beams that read beautifully to the eye blow out flat white on a sensor, so you expose for the faces and let the beams go, then bring the wash back in the grade rather than fighting it in the room.
Robby Krieger of The Doors is on this stage. He is one of the forty-odd names on the credits list, and this is what that list looks like from the camera position.
Take the Laugh
Location shoot · December 2012
Two on camera, one boom, one operator. The framing is the easy part — the job is the room. People only give you this once they have stopped being aware of the lens, and getting them there is the work.
Everything in the foreground is a decision: the fruit, the cinnamon, the glass. A kitchen dressed to the lens is what stops a kitchen reading like somebody’s kitchen.
Stills and Sound, Same Set
Location shoot · January 2013
The counter is built, not found. Lavender, jars and board are placed to hold a product and a pair of hands inside one frame, with the depth falling away behind them.
There is a microphone in shot, which means stills and video were running on the same set on the same day. One light has to serve both, and the shot list has to survive being shot twice.
Film & motion
A running branded series for Ethnomedica on intelligence in living systems — cellular, plant, human. One fact per entry, numbered, built as a typographic system that holds across strands and formats.
The piece of work here is the system, not any single entry: the same lockup, type scale and pacing carry the whole run without collapsing into a template. Six of those entries are below.
Art direction, typography, colour and edit — Jonas Woods · footage licensed
Octopus
Cellular Intelligence
Macro texture held against a near-black ground. The best-performing entry in the run.
Sauna
Human Intelligence
Opens on type alone, then dissolves through — so the fact lands before the picture does.
Jellyfish
Cellular Intelligence
Slow motion, cold blue grade. Built as the quiet one, to sit between the warmer entries.
Mimosa pudica
Plant Intelligence
Sped up so the leaf closure reads inside a ten-second frame. Real time is too slow to hold.
Blackwater River
Cellular Intelligence
Aerial, graded to golden hour. The only wide in the set, placed to break the macro run.
Water lily
Plant Intelligence
Clean wide, minimal grade, almost no movement. Every set needs one that does nothing.