Charles City Library Website Goes Live!

The website promoting the Charles City Library Campaign has been officially launched! All photography featured on the site was shot on location by Winton-Stahle Photography. For those of you who haven't been following us (get the full scoop here), the Charles City Library Campaign is a community effort to provide a library for the only county in Virginia without a public library.
Please take the time to support the wonderful cause, and of course check out the delightful photographs, at www.charlescitylibrary.org

June Photography

We've been out and about this month, keeping busy behind the camera! Check out Allie: She's getting ready to head to Florida and needed new images for her portfolio. We approached her head shots with a little extra creativity. It's great as a photographer to be able work as expressively as we do here at Winton-Stahle Photography. Be sure to check back soon for more updates; there's plenty of exciting work to come!

Book Release & VPLC 30th Anniversary: "Through Different Eyes: The Faces of Poverty in Virginia"

On the evening of May 28th, The Virginia Poverty Law Center will release an anniversary publication featuring the photography of Christopher Winton-Stahle's photographic series "The Folk of the Blue Ridge" in a coffee table style book titled "Through Different Eyes: The Faces of Poverty in Virginia". The publication is a compilation of many of the pieces that were featured in the original exhibit "Through Different Eyes: The Faces of Poverty in Virginia"that has been on tour with the Virginia Museum of Fine Art since 2006 and includes the work of Christopher Winton-Stahle, Susi Lawson, Scott Neville, and Scott Elmquist..

The Virginia Poverty Law Center (VPLC), an organization based in Richmond dedicated to advocating on behalf of low-income residents of the Commonwealth, will celebrate more than 30 years of dedicated service to Virginians at a reception at 6:30 p.m. on May 28, 2009 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Governor of the Commonwealth Timothy M. Kaine will speak at the event as will First Lady of the Commonwealth, Anne Holton, who will honor Jill A. Hanken, who has been an attorney with VPLC since its creation and Jack L. Harris, VPLC's first executive director. Jeffrey W. Allison, Curator of the exhibit and the Paul Mellon Collections at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, will also speak at the event.

Here's a little bit about the "Folk of the Blue Ridge" - a series by Christopher Winton-Stahle

The American heritage of the farming community is quickly disappearing and in its wake many folks in Southwestern Virginia struggle to support their families and carry on their way of life. Commercial Photographer, Christopher Winton-Stahle was raised in Carroll County, one of the poorest counties in the southwestern region of Virginia. In 2004 he began a personal photographic documentary about his family and the people of his hometown. What began as a personal journey for him to understand his own life there has grown into a cultural documentary of this small farming community and the beauty of both its people and their culture.

"As a native of this community, I have come to know nearly all the folks there. They nurture a strong faith that God will carry them through the hard times of life and that their family will be there for them when they slip and fall. They take care of their own and have few wants and needs beyond what God, their family, and the land can provide for them. This body of work has always been about the great strength and pride of these people. They are the working class poor of rural America. Their strong devotion to family, the importance of their faith in God, tradition, interdependence, and their connection to the land is engrained into their way of life and is representative of who they are. Monetarily they do not have much however, from what I have seen having been raised there, they know of wealth that transcends that of modern ideas of what wealth actually means. They are the "Folk of the Blue Ridge" and I am proud to say that I am a part of them."

*Christopher Winton-Stahle

Campaign "A New Library for Charles City County."

One of the greatest joys that I have as a photographer is to be a part of a project such as this that truly does make a difference in people's lives in the end. This is an ongoing campaign done for Charles City County for the purpose of raising the necessary funds needed to build a library for its residents. From the books and furniture to the residents eager to learn, Charles City County has everything that it needs for a fully functioning library except for a building to call home. It's up to us all to help them to make that happen.

We arrived at the location at around 6:30am and by 7 the sun was coming up. Despite our first scheduled photo I felt that the light was just too perfect to pass up the opportunity to get our hero shot that was actually scheduled for the end of the day instead of the beginning. Turns out it was a good call. This was our cover shot for the campaign's book.


The idea was to present a visual representation, with a somewhat surreal and playful twist, of what the Charles City County Library would look like without a building to house it.


We wanted to create real scenarios with spontaneity that could easily take place in this proposed library and show our viewers what that might look like without the necessary monetary contributions.


Every great library has storytime for the kids. This one was no exception. In all honesty, the more I look at this shot the more I wish I could have experienced storytime in the middle of a field in kindergarden.

We did eight portraits such as this one of different residents of the area that would be directly impacted by a library. They were all asked to write down a couple of sentences about "what a library in Charles City County" would mean to them.



Here are a few "behind the scenes" shots of our production for the Charles City County Library Campaign.

This Campaign was conceived and art directed by Morgan Porter
www.morganporter.com

Product Catalog for a National Polymer Company

Since the opening of our studio in 2007 we have been shooting much more catalog photography for companies directly and/or through advertising agencies or design firms. In September we had a great project shooting very large chemical storage tanks and product accessory for a 2009-10 company catalog. These tanks were between 15 and 30 feet tall and were quite tricky to photograph. In addition to there size the tanks had many surface imperfections that could be clearly seen in a photograph that made them very tricky to photograph. To efficiently create images worthy of a catalog it required a combination of shooting multiple images and merging them together and then using some pretty heavy graphic design techniques to graphically recreate many features of these products. Here are a few samples of the final images as well as a few production stills from our location shoot at the factory.

September 2008: Housetrends Cover and Feature

In September 2008 we photographed the cover and feature for Housetrends Magazine. This was an article about "Green Living" at Rocket's Landing which is one of Richmond, Virginia's newest luxury communities. This home was entirely propped by Crate & Barrel and we worked with a wonderful interior designer that really came through for us in putting the right furniture and props together.

August 2008: Feature for Housetrends Magazine

In August 2008 we had a nice 3 page article published in Housetrends Magazine that featured a very talented artist named Wayne Cain that specializes in stain glass design for upscale homes and businesses. Wayne had the greatest little studio nestled in the country about an hour outside of Richmond, Virginia that he and his assistant, Nancy, work from making stain glass windows using 19th and early 20th century processes. We were very grateful for their hospitality and enjoyed spending the our day with them shooting this article.