"Apple Takes Mainer’s Photography Global”

-Portland Press Herald

In fall of 2019, I was in New York on 167 W 12th Street on assignment at the James Beard House. Between photographing the activity in the kitchen and the dining room I did a habitual email check on my phone. One subject line stuck out: Apple iPhone request. My first thought was that it was fake (of course), but I googled the sender and found that it was a California PR firm for Apple. The first line of the email required me to sign a non-disclosure agreement and asked me to call the firm. The polite women on the other line told me I had been selected to submit 6 images (they had already chosen the images) for Apple’s Myshot billboard campaign. After my assignment ended I skipped the “shift drink” and immediately went back to the hotel to prepare the images.

The NDA prohibits me from discussing most information about the campaign but I can say that the image that was finally chosen was shot on an iPhone 5 of my daughter being tossed up into the air at the Valley Ho hotel in Arizona. She. Was. Thrilled. And so was I.

People often ask me two questions about the campaign: 

1. Did I get paid? [I can’t tell you.] 

2. How did they find me? I never asked but I’m assuming it was from the Mobile Photography Awards, where I had earned an honorable mention landing me on the front page of their website. That’s my best guess.

Exposure has a few meanings in photography. The Apple campaign gave my daughter an extremely exciting second grade “show and tell”— she was on 13 billboards across the globe, from Monterrey, Mexico to Mumbai and Bangalore in India to New York. A reporter called us after the billboards launched and told our story in the local newspaper, the Portland Press Herald. (We made A1!!) But my favorite part of the whole experience—of this new level of exposure—was having friends (and strangers) from all over the world send me snaps of themselves in front of my photographs.