When I left NYC two years ago, part of that decision making was that I mostly traveled for work, so I didn’t need to be paying all my income in rent, but I think I underestimated how much I would miss shooting in New York. Post pandemic didn’t work a ton in NYC but I was always there for the big moments even if I was just shooting stuff for myself. For example, I would be at the Knicks parade right now taking photos instead of updating my website. Since moving to Wilmington, NC I have taken plenty of photos, but they obviously aren’t as exciting as the stuff I was shooting locally in New York, so other than a photo here and there on social media, I don’t often share that work. Today I figured I would change that.
Recently I did three quick photoshoots for Wilmington Biz Magazine which is, believe it or not, a local business magazine. Two of the photo shoots were for an article about the Cape Fear River, yes the one from the movies, and one of them was just a quick one page story at the front of the issue.
The one page story was about a new Lego resale store called Bricks & Minifigs that had just opened up in a building right across the way from my old apartment. For decades it was a frame shop that I have frequented several times. (I was just recently at their new location getting the original 1962 blueprints to my home framed.) We moved before the Lego store opened but I watched them set up the shop over the last few months I lived there so I was excited to check it out. I loved Lego as a kid and I have built a few of the botanical sets over the last few years. Anyway, when I went there I met the owner and looked around and took a few photos and didn’t think much of it, but between then and now a huge controversy surrounding the franchise has taken place. It is way too complicated to explain fully, but basically Bricks & Minifigs corporate took over a franchise in Oregon and in the process stole a bunch of Lego sets that they were supposed to be consigning from someone. A YouTuber made a video about it and the whole thing went super viral and instead of making it right, the company just doubled down and made one bad PR decision after another, sued everyone and got the YouTuber arrested. This video has a pretty good breakdown of where the situation is now if you want to know more. All that being said, none of this has anything to do with the local Bricks & Minifigs and I went in there the other day and it was packed, so glad to see they are doing well despite the negative PR.
The other two shoots were for a larger story about a day on the life of the Cape Fear River. Despite being a small city, Wilmington is famous for a surprising amount of stuff. We are the home of Michael Jordan, the only place in the world with native Venus fly traps and home to a once thriving film industry. Dawson’s Creek, Blue Velvet and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were all filmed here. Kenny Powers mounted his comeback and Brandon Lee died filming The Crow here. But you know what wasn’t filmed here? Either of the Cape Fear movies, despite them taking place in Southeast NC. Sorry, these photos aren’t my normal level of exciting, so you get some tangents.
Anyway, the first shoot I did was to take photos of a tugboat company called McAllister Towing. I was particularly psyched about this because in my mind I was going to take photos of a grizzly tugboat captain, but I ended up photographing a young guy who was a fourth generation tugboatist. I am positive that isn’t a word, but it should be. Three notes about the shoot: 1) While photographing the tugboatist, I kept thinking it felt like I was shooting band photos, and when I went home and googled him, he is actually a drummer. 2) While I was climbing between two boats I dropped my point and shoot 35mm camera out of my bag, and when I bent over the rail to grab it, I dropped my other two film cameras. In the process I: a) broke the flash on the point and shoot, b) chipped the lens on my Nikon and c) badly damaged my Lecia M6, which reminds me I need to file an insurance claim. 3) My mother’s middle name is McAlister so I was psyched to show her the photos.
Lastly I photographed a Riverkeeper, which is a job I didn’t know existed. He’s part of an organization that works to protect the water quality in the Cape Fear River basin. The Cape Fear has an enormous amount of PFAS in it because DuPont basically poisoned the water source for hundreds of thousands of people and instead of paying for a cleanup, just created a separate company to keep them protected and everything is tied up in massive litigation, meanwhile everyone I know who grew up here has some sort of autoimmune disease and Trump’s FDA has rolled back Biden era clean water protections so that’s fun. Anyway, it was real cool to briefly talk to Kemp about his incredibly interesting job and I loved taking photos of him canoeing in some beautiful nature, despite how many bug bites I got in the process.
Can I tell you that when I started writing this I thought it was going to be three short paragraphs? Here we are nearly 1000 words in and I am still going. I need to write more, and maybe use less run on sentences when I do. I just gotta stop abusing commas. There will be zero commas in this paragraph — I swear.
Okay, this was fun and I hope you dig looking at something different from me. I still got a bunch of NSFW stuff to get up, and I need to start getting up more Vintage DBB stuff, as promised, but I also think I might have to share with you guys some of my wildlife photography. I don’t really know what I am doing but I got all sorts of wildlife in my backyard so I bought a long lens and it’s been a lot of fun, so maybe you guys will get to see that soon. In the meantime, enjoy this quick gallery with ten photos from each shoot. And shout out to my friend Suzi, the art director who hired me for this, it was fun, let’s do it again.
