Spent the weekend photographing a wide range of Crossfitters at San Francisco CrossFit. As a competitive endurance athlete and a two-year devotee to CrossFit, I’ve realized that one of the most motivating factors in my training is the people I have met and the community that naturally develops as a result of a shared goal. The goal (lose weight, get back in shape, complete a certain race) is what gets you into training, but it is the people you meet along the way that keep you going back.
It was fun to put a lot of people I’ve admired for a long time in front of the camera. More to come soon. Can’t wait to get the final images back from the retoucher. Thank you to my great team: digitech and on-set retoucher Daryn LaBier, photo assistant Clifford Grodin and producer Alison McCreery.
The Disa Primary School is the first school of its kind in South Africa. Combining the resources of a private foundation and a well-established but poorly funded S. African school system, Disa provides economically disadvantaged children from one of the largest townships in Cape Town with the same educational opportunities as children from wealthy families. The hope that access to the latest technology and high quality teachers will give these children a chance to compete at the middle school, high school and college levels.
Images just back from re-toucher Eric Powasser for the second of a three-part series for Helming Athletics. For this installment we headed over the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County and took advantage of some epic landscapes located a few miles from SF. Thanks to: Nathan Helming, Ashley Relf, Eileen Labarca. To see more from this series go to: Helming Athletics 2
It is amazing what color grading, motion design animation and 3D modeling can do to vastly improve the quality of your online brand film or commercial. This is a trailer we created for the founder of mobilityWOD.com and CrossFit Guru, Dr. Kelly Starret’s upcoming book Becoming A Supple Leopard. So far the trailer has been viewed 40,000 times on youtube and vimeo. (Official Trailer https://vimeo.com/45718136)
Becoming A Supple Leopard Trailer: Before & After from Vance Jacobs on Vimeo.
I spent a day following a group of researchers who are tagging Black and White rhinos in South Africa. The rhinos are tagged so that scientists can keep track of the population inside the Phinda Game Reserve. While a rhino is under sedation, a computer chip is also carefully inserted into their horn, so that in the future, if poachers do kill that rhino, the horn can be traced back to a specific animal if the horn happens to be confiscated by the authorities.
It was amazing to be able to touch such a massive animal that under different circumstances would be extremely dangerous to be around. This young male was re-united with his mom who was snorting impatiently in the bushes nearby.
Just back from South Africa shooting for one corporate client and two non-profits. I photographed students with mental and physical handicaps in a small community outside the Phinda Game Reserve in South Africa for the Jacobs Foundation (no relation). In South Africa’s rural communities, there is a stigma associated with having disabled children, so they are often abandoned by their families. In the case of this rural school, many of the students not only study, but also sleep at the school because they have been abandoned.
Just received a new portfolio of sports images from the retoucher. Looks like 2013 will be the year of the endurance athlete with multiple commercial and personal projects on the books.
To see the full portfolio, which was shot for Helming Athletics, visit the Sports section of my site.
A very fun day collaborating with good friend and Esquire Contributing Editor, Luke Dittrich, for a Bicycling Magazine article about using commuter bikes to show out-of-town friends your city.
Best part of the assignment: biking up and down and up again, the steepest streets in San Francisco with a non-cyclist.
Worst part of the assignment: constantly worrying that the $10,000 Moot Comooter loaner bike might not be there after each stop on the tour.
Luuk magazine is a travel, leisure and lifestyle publication and they did a nice article about moi written by Umberta Beretta.
Spent day one of a three-day shoot photographing Helming Athletic triathletes in the frigid 55-degree water at Aquatic Park in San Francisco. So many assignments involve me photographing people I don’t have much in common with. It was really fun spending time shooting my fellow triathletes.
