James Brosher Photography
Portfolio website for James Brosher, a Bloomington, Indiana based editorial and wedding photographer specializing in action, documentary, and portrait images.
This is a quick portrait I shot recently of the mother-daughter duo – and Indiana University alumnae – who star in HGTV’s, “Good Bones”, a home renovation show filmed in Indianapolis’ resurgent Fountain Square neighborhood.
Back in August, I photographed a few of Indiana University’s Olympic swimmers after they returned home from the Rio games. I had the opportunity to shoot their portraits for IU social media after a media day availability. Our social media folks were looking for standard shots of each of them holding their medals. After I got that specific shot with each swimmer, I quickly shifted and shot these portraits. I don’t believe they’ve been used before, but it’s an example of shooting something for yourself after you’ve got “the shot” at a shoot. For better or worse, I use a very similar lighting setup on most of my portraits. This setup was an attempt to break out of that. I hung an octabox directly above the subjects and lit them primarily while standing in front of a mostly-collapsed umbrella to try to mimic a ring flash look.
Earlier this week I had the opportunity to make portraits of a few Indiana University Bloomington employees who will be honored with staff merit awards next week. For the past several weeks, the only portraits I’ve shot have been lit and in the studio. It was refreshing to grab a 50 mm f/1.2 lens and challenge myself to find clean backgrounds in the environments where these staffers work on campus.
I spent a few hours back in June shadowing Dr. S. Michael Keller, the emergency room director at Marion General Hospital in Marion, Ind. The photos were for a story in The New York Times about patient satisfaction surveys and their effect on the opioid epidemic. Under the Affordable Care Act, hospitals’ Medicare reimbursements were tied to patient satisfaction surveys. The idea of this was to encourage quality care, but many health care professionals argue the surveys incentivized doctors to prescribe powerful and potentially addictive painkillers such as opioids to patients in order to score well on the surveys. Marion General bucked the trend by cutting opioid prescriptions, leading to a drastic drop in the patient satisfaction surveys.
Jackie Young is arguably the best basketball player – boys or girls – in the state of Indiana. I had the opportunity to photograph her for an ALL USA TODAY basketball player of the year candidate feature last week. It became clear how good she is as soon as I walked into the high school and saw her game jerseys framed on the wall outside of the gym. She doesn’t graduate until the end of May. In January, she broke Indiana’s all-time high school scoring record previously held by Damon Bailey. Next season she will play at Notre Dame.
I had not shot a “sportrait” (sports portrait) in a while. This assignment reminded me of a weekly feature we would shoot in Wyoming featuring high school athletes called “Prep Athlete of the Week” where we would conceptualize and photograph a sportrait on the fly. A special thanks to Princeton athletics director Jason Engelbrecht and girls basketball coach Charles Mair who were awesome and went out of their way to help me get everything set up for the shoot.
