I love the low intensity light over Puget Sound outside the office window of Dean Bennion, an executive at the Wells Fargo Bank with the Olympic Mountains off hidden in the clouds. Rain was falling over most of the distant mountain skyline except for off in the southern end of the Olympics, the sun was trying to get through under the clouds. A grand vista from 40 floors over Elliot Bay.

Editorial writer Todd Shelton asked me to make a protrait of him for his publications website recently and the weather was great so we shot it outside his Seattle office.

Although the plant is illuminated partly by florescent lighting which gives everything a green cast, I corrected for that. The green cast on the body of the 777 is a protective coat and is removed before it completed and painted. Boeing doubled the size of the Everett factory which is one of the largest buildings in the world, to accommodate production of the 777.

Every time I fly on a Boeing 777, I remember how they look as I saw them on my tour to watch them come together here in Washington State.

Photography by Seattle photographer Daniel Sheehan creates photography for editorial publications and corporations and available for commercial photography assignments.

Graphic artist and designer Michael Strassburger co-founder of Seattle Design Studio Modern Dog needed a new head shot and I was tapped for the task. How do you impress a modern dog designer? Not sure but he liked this look made 100% of natural light. It was a little intimidating since Strassburger is one of the powerhouse designers behind Seattle based Modern Dog. “Their heady mix of intuitive design, cheeky humor and punk rock aesthetics has made them unique among design firms, and a hell of a lot of fun. Their work is often seen in the rock poster arena, but they cover a much larger social terrain and their clients include K2 Snowboards, Blue Q, Coca-Cola, Swatch and Nordstrom.

Portrait Photography by Seattle photographer Daniel Sheehan creating portraits for publications and a Seattle Wedding Photographer with an artistic photojournalist style.

Monday night the poet Jorn Ake was in town giving a reading from his latest book at The Elliott Bay Book Company in their new Capital Hill location. it was the first time I had visited Seattle’s legendary independent bookstore new location and was impressed that they very much kept the spirit of the old bookstore in the translation to Capital Hill. I first met Jorn in Prague where he and his wife Claudia were living and I was visiting with my wife Jana. It was good to see them again.
The New York City-based poet Jorn Ake read from his Blue Lynx Prize-winning new collection, Boys Whistling Like Canaries (Eastern Washington University Press). “Boys Whistling Like Canaries is a collection haunted by the grim history of the 20th century, and by how its legacy continues to so troublesomely endure. Ake tackles the most vexing subjects—among them our current wars, the Holocaust, and Cold War totalitarianism—yet he reckons with them without resorting to bromides, polemics, or the benumbing timidity with so often afflicts the work of American poets when they seek to confront injustice. In his rangy and querulous approach, Ake recalled the work of two of our finest poets of social justice, George Oppen and Thomas McGrath. To be linked with them is no small accomplishment.” – David Wojahn. Jorn Ake’s 2001 debut, Asleep in the Lightning Fields, received the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize.
Photograph by Seattle Portrait Photographer Daniel Sheehan specializing in photojournalism, portraits and photography for publications and corporations.

Recently I was working on my archive and I stumbled upon this executive portrait of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer which I shot on assignment for Yahoo Business Magazine. Although he did not give me a ton of time Ballmer was very gracious with me despite what I had heard from others. Coincidently Mocrosoft today announced that driven by Windows 7 sales, their profits grew 35 percent in the 3rd quarter beating all industry analysts estimates. Microsoft had $4.01 billion in profit, or 45 cents a share, on $14.5 billion in sales in the third quarter, which ended March 31. This was an increase of 6 percent compared with the same quarter a year ago, when the company made a profit of $2.98 billion, or 33 cents a share on $13.65 billion in sales.
Ballmer has a long history with the company and joined Microsoft in 1980 and became Microsoft’s 24th employee, the first business manager hired by Bill Gates and was named CEO in January of 2000. Photograph by Seattle Photographer Daniel Sheehan specializing in photojournalism, portraits and photography for publications and corporations, and a wedding photographer, with a candid photojournalist style.

Here are some more pictures from last weeks Tomasz Stanko and his New Quintet performing music from their CD release Dark Eyes

Tomasz Stanko and his quartet, featuring pianist Alexi Tuomarila, drummer Olavi Louhivuori, Anders Christensen on bass, and Jakob Bro, on guitar, put on a cool, mesmerizing and memorable performance. Playing smouldering Slavic soul music with a grainy-toned trumpet, the tunes were from his newest album Dark Eyes including the title track, The Dark Eyes Of Martha Hirsch.

From the Earshot program notes “Ullmann is a follow-up guy in a world of intermittency. We hear sounds in snippets, music in simple, single song structures, see acts come and go with astonishing speed. Yes, improvisers come up with different ideas constantly, never uttering the same exact thing twice, but the extended suite on Ullmann’s new Ballads and Related Objects comes back again and again to a series of firefly-like blinks, woody auras with sonic embers around the core combustion, as on “Variations on a Theme by Claude Debussy.” But the blinks go to yelps and clarinet shouts, barking that front-ends a chatter of clarinet/alto clarinet/bass clarinet, a recurring intensity.

Ullmann sees his follow-ups more concretely, too: “However I may seem to go in different directions at the same time, I follow up most of the formats for many years. Mostly more than a decade.” He’s right, too, bringing bands back time and again to explore the platform, to survey how the ensemble has grown as individuals. Ballads is the third session from Ullmann, Jurgen Kupke (clarinet), and Michael Thieke (alto clarinet), and as it’s released, Ullmann is also putting out another date with trombone madman, Steve Swell. The simply named Ullmann/Swell 4 spills out News? No News!, a rambunctious blurt of energetic action that records no distance or creative tension between Ullmann, a Berlin transplant who spends most of his time in Europe, and the New Yorker. One could imagine the difference in scenes, Europe more friendly to the avant-garde, North America more occupied by its love for the mainstream, its measuring of art by the yardstick of commerce. But Ullmann resists the characterization: “We are all trying to move forward musically and be able to survive. There is no difference,” he replies when questioned on how we differ on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

As for the Clarinet Trio, Ullmann infuses the music with what qualities he sees in Thieke and Kupke: “They bring in contemporary music, performance, jokes.” He’s emphatic about their musical potency, too: “You never heard a trio like this. It is at times more than a trio almost an orchestra. It is all of my woodwind music.” Like ROVA and the WSQ before them, the Trio does indeed encompass Ullmann’s many interests, his core. “Be it bands like Henry Cow or Can, be it the classical music I grew up with or the contemporary composed music I listened to as a teenager, composers like Lutoslawski, Henze or Stockhausen,” he comments, the woodwind elements didn’t exist. And even as some of Ullmann’s impetus was to “transpose to wind instruments” what he heard in music that did not feature them, he also knows that “minimalistic techniques and techniques using overtones, multiphonics and such [can] give the impression of more than 3 players,” enabling the ensemble to move beyond some of the limitations of the source material. Continue reading here. Jazz Photographer and Seattle photographer Daniel Sheehan covers jazz performances, creates portrait photography for publications and corporations and is a Seattle Wedding Photographer,  wedding photography with an artistic photojournalist style.