Miami Photographer Joshua Prezant

A recent magazine cover shoot with the Miami Heat’s James Jones didn’t go as planned…But came out red hot instead!

When the magazine Headwise called  Joshua Prezant Photography and said they lined up the Miami Heat’s forward James Jones to be on the cover of their magazine I knew the shoot would have to be quick and squeezed into the very busy schedule of the basketball team.  When the team is in season the players have very little time for anything but basketball.  So having worked with many professional athletes over the years I knew things have to be ready to go and in place well in advance of the actual shoot.

As usual with shoots like this the first step is to start coordinating with the teams PR representative to come up with a date, time, and place for the shoot.  After finding a day that worked for the team and my crew the next step was to scout the location.  The magazine ideally wanted him overlooking the water with something that screamed said Miami. A few days before the shoot we scouted the location at the American Airlines Arena in Downtown Miami.  We would have to shoot at the Arena where the team played and practiced because right after practice  was the only time James Jones had free.

A perfect spot was picked on an outside balcony and a platform to raise James Jones safely above the rails were ordered up and electrical outlets double checked. And as any good photographer knows, you have to plan for backups just in case of anything.  So we scouted some backups and have a plan B and place C ready.

The day of the shoot my team and I arrived three hours ahead of the shoot time given to us by the team to get set up and ready to go.  As these things generally go, the shoot time kept being pushed further and further back because team practice was going longer then expected ( and no.  You can’t just have the PR guy tell the coach we need one of his players now!) And sure enough with this being in South Florida and all right as the player arrived for the shoot fresh out of the shower a sudden heavy rain band went right over our outside set up.  We had no time to wait out the rain as the player had to get his kids in 10 minutes.  We thought we had 20 minutes with him!

But we were prepared for anything and my team and I kicked into gear and got everything ready to go inside and made some great shots.

It was not what we all were expecting, but the client loved the pictures and so did the subject.

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I was honored to have one of my images from the Middle East chosen to be part of a wonderful gallery show, called THE BIG PICTURE,  put together by friend and photojouralist Carl Juste.  The images are being displayed at about 10 feet wide by 8 feet high. The opening night was a huge succsess and gave me a chance to catch up with a lot of old photojournalist friends.

Image by Joshua Prezant: Left

If you are in the Miami area I highly recomend checking out the exhibit and seeing these incrediable images brought to life in a giagantic way.  The images will be up through October.

The exhibition displays sixteen colossal images by sixteen extraordinary photojournalists. The work is featured in high- resolution quality and size that will make viewers feel like they are part of the scene, allowing them to experience the event first hand.  Each image is a physical manifestation of the expansion of meaning.  The truth and relativity of the facts are the ingredients that expand the comprehension of the image.  The viewer sees the larger context because they are drawn into the expanding frame, hence made to see the Big Picture.

Big Picture will opened August 17, 2012, 7pm at The Little Haiti Cultural Center in Miami, Florida.  It will be open until October.  The gallery is approximately 2,100 square feet with high vaulted ceilings—a perfect venue with ample space for an exhibition of this magnitude.

My image, along with the others are available for purchase in sizes of 30×40, 40×60, and 20×30 through Lena Sendik, Iris PhotoCollective, Director of Sales and Marketing, Phone: 504-756-1492, lena@irisphotocollective.com

A packed gallery!

Click here to see some of the other images and here audio from the photographers about their images

It is not even March and the March clips are pouring in.  Last month found miami based Joshua Prezant Photography photographing lots of high powered movers and shakers in the financial world for different financial magazine. Next clip will be of Ron Stone ( keep a look out).

Each subject that sits before my camera is a another person whom I could learn something from. And when the person sitting in front of you manages over a BILLION dollars with a superb track record of great returns over the last 30 years one pays extra attention to any tidbit of advice for making and investing money that they are willing to share with you.

Bill Dunn, of Dunn Capital was no exception.  If you invested $100,000 with his WMA program (his longest running program) would be worth more than $4 million today!  Dunn created a computer program that helped with long-term-following commodity trading back in the day when the computer program lived not on a hard drive or thumb drive, but on hundreds of IBM punch cards ( see picture in clip).

Bill Dunn was extremely patient and a easy subject to photograph. Despite some rain clouds that moved in on us, we were still able to capture the wonderful view from the back of Dunn’s Stuart, FL headquarters.   It also did not hurt that I thought he was a spitting image of Artist Chuck Close.

Opener in magazine

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cover

Miami based photographer Joshua Prezant was recetly contracted to photograph art collectors and hoteliers Donald and Mera Rubell at their 45,000 square-foot museum and home.  The Miami art powerhouse couple are opening a new museum in Washington, DC. and we were brought in to photograph them with some of their vast art collection in the background.  The couple was great to work with and in the small window of time we had with them we were able to make an assortment of images that ended up being used by both the Miami Herald and The Washington Post.

Each paper had access to the same images and each chose different images and produced vastly different layouts.  It is great to see the different approaches that the two papers took with the picture selections and the layouts. Not sure  their is a favorite, but just happy that a bunch of teh images got used and that each publication did a great job displaying the images.

See if you have a favorite:

Washington Post

Miami Herald front

Miami Herald inside

Today I got a e-mail letting me know that a child I photographed for the Heart Gallery was recently permanently adopted.

The e-mail:

Dear Joshua, last September you too a Heart Gallery picture of Trenton, one of our children who is so medically complex the only placement we had for him was a nursing home a thousand miles from his home.  You took a beautiful picture and thanks to your help, Trenton was placed with his forever family last week.  Below are some pictures his new mom sent.  The pictures are not as good as yours but I am sure you will agree, the quality of his life has certainly improved!!!!   Thank you again for your help. Peggy

For several year now I have photographed children for the Heart Gallery in Miami and around South Florida.  It is something I look forward to every year.  Most of the time the children I photograph are older children that are normally harder to adopt.  But with Trenton, he was what many consider to be the “unadoptable” because of his severe medical conditions.

Having a photo make it to the cover of a magzine or seeing your advertising photo on a bus bench or billboard is great…. But nothing beats hearing the great news that one of the kids you photographed for the heart gallery has been placed with a loving family!  G-d bless the family that adopted Trenton.

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Photographing professional dancers during a show is both a blessing and curse.  On one hand you have these top athletes performing amazing dance moves with the agility of a leopard. On the other hand they are doing this under less then ideal lighting and they are moving very very fast.  The lighting on a production is great for viewing as an audience member, but not great for freezing the peak action of the dancers’ moves in a camera.  This even becomes more difficult when it is a large number of dancers dancing at once.

Joshua Prezant Photography is no stranger to the wings and the orchestra pits of theater houses.  So when the call came in to do Production stills for the Doug Varone and Dancers dance company we were equally excited and up for the challenge. The client did not want to pose and of the shots so we shot well they were doing a full dress rehearsal.

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