Jess LeClair Photography Blog

Happy New Year Everyone! I can’t believe it is 2008! This is going to be a big year for me. There is so much going on, so many fun things to do, so many new adventures to have! I can’t wait! And one of the things I’ve decided to take on is to commit myself to a “One-a-Day” project. Each day I will post at least one new photograph. Now there will be several weeks where I won’t have access to a computer so I’ll have to update a few days or even a week all at once. But that doesn’t mean I won’t still be taking new pictures!

So here is my photo for today:

We have just been slammed with snow this month. So much so that we had to cancel our New Year’s Eve plans because the roads were too bad! This morning the icicles coming off the roof were a bit more than just scary! They were downright terrifying! We are already totally sick of this winter. I want it to be spring!!! I hope everyone is snuggled up some place warm and safe today (yes, it is snowing here AGAIN) and that you are enjoying the last days of vacation!

AMENDMENT - Upon reflection, I’ve decided I’ll just update this site once a week with my One-a-Day photos.  I’ll still post them on my flickr page everyday, but I don’t want to overload this blog.  So Tuesdays are now One-A-Day Weekly Updates.  And the theme for this week is snow (seeing as we got another foot of it last night…)

Some of you may be wondering why on earth I would be posting a photo of a Barbie doll. Well, there is actually a very good reason. You see, it is one of my photographs that adorns the outside of the box!!

This is the original photo. I’d posted it on flickr back in 2005. And then about a year ago, out of the blue, this lovely woman from Matel emailed me and said she’d seen the image online and would I be willing to sell it to her? And that, as they say, was that. She bought the image and used it on the box! This is the photo she sent me of the box while they were still working on it. But its very close to how it came out! You can see more images of both the Barbie and the box over at amazon (watch the little movie!). Its just amazing the way things work out sometimes, isn’t it? Yay for flickr.com!

On August 11, I was honored to be the photographer for Maggie and Steve’s wedding reception in South Portland, Maine. Having been officially married exactly one week prior on the island of Samoa, this was the big party for friends and family back home who weren’t there for the real thing. It was a great party!

To see the full set of photos from this wonderful event, please visit my flickr site.

For about as long as I can remember, I’ve loved photographing people. When I was in High School, one of my favorite things to do was to take some friends, grab my camera and have an adventure. I’d find someplace interesting, plonk the friend down in the middle of it and somehow together we would tell a story through the pictures. Very often, we had no idea what the heck we were saying, but that was beside the point. The photos were what mattered.

In college, I was the same way. Most of the time, shortly after making a new friend, I’d pop the question: “Can I photograph you some time?” Even developed a few full blown narratives with pictures. Duane Michals was (is) my hero.

But I always enjoy returning to the single portrait. There is something about catching that moment - that fraction of a second - when the person you are photographing drops their pretense and just is. Even make-up-ed and in costume, that moment is still there. You just have to be patient. I love that moment. Its another one of those things that makes what I do so very worth it.

People have so many different reasons for asking for head shots. I’ve done my fair share of actors just getting into the biz, but lately it seems I’ve been working with people with very different agendas. For example, Gary here is a piano player and radio DJ.

And Billi is a personal chef and baker. I did an extensive set of portraits of her and her farm last summer as she was setting up her website.

She loved having images of herself outside in her garden instead of the very stuffy studio shots one often sees of professional chefs. She wanted a variety of images for lots of different purposes and was very happy with what we ended up with.

For more images of Billi and Firefly Farm, please visit my flickr site.

The red couch, originally uploaded by jess_leclair.

This photo was taken of my brother Dan and me at our step-cousin Jackie’s wedding, September 9, 2006. Though I wasn’t the official photographer on this particular wedding, I did take a fair number of photos (you can head on over to my flickr site to see more). I have to give props to the women who were officially responsible for the photography that night for one very specific thing. This red couch. It was a small touch of brilliance. They set up this very inviting couch with a camera facing it. On the couch was the remote for the camera. Anyone could just come up, sit down and take their own photo! It was better than a photo booth! Though I must say, they should have made more people aware of it. We just sort of stumbled drunkenly over and started fiddling with things. At which point the photographer’s assistant came over and told us what it was. We got to see some of the images later and they were a total riot. By the end of the evening people were getting REALLY stupid.

Good times, good times.