Oh, The Places This Camera Will Take Me!

Oh, The Places This Camera Will Take Me!

If any of you know my family, you know we truly "Run on Dunkin." I'm sure we aren't the only ones, but we are pretty obsessed. We frequent or favorite location in  Walpole, MA  so much that we have become friends with several of the employees. We even exchange Christmas gifts .

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This is Andrea, she is so nice, we just love her.

 My Brother and sister in-law's dog is named Dunkin. He gets to go to Dunkin every day to get his Munchkin.

We have a favorite "Dunks" in Manteo, NC. , where we like to Vacation.

I created this image for an assignment at New England School of Photography. The assignment was to select an iconic image and put your own twist on it. I did  Breakfast at Tiffany's Iconic Audrey Hepburn image, giving it a Dunkin twist. 

Here is another image I created for my NESOP class. I love when my family gets in on my silly ideas.
There are so many more Dunkin images I could share that would illustrate my obsession with Dunkin Donuts, or Dunkin as it is now called, but let's get to the real reason for the Blog. I want to share the unbelievable opportunity that I had  this last summer.

It all started when I met Tony Weisman, the CMO for Dunkin when I was photographing a conference he was speaking at in Boston. We got talking about my obsession with Dunkin and my love for the company. We chatted for a bit, great guy, by the way. He told me about an idea he had to recreate an old photo of the original Dunkin Donuts in Quincy, but he needed a photographer. He asked if would I be interested in working on the project?  WHAT?????   Would I be interested? I had to remain professional. Was I really hearing this? It has been a dream of mine to work for Dunkin Donuts since I started my photography Business. 

He didn't have to show me the picture, I knew it well.

The project was underway. I contacted my neighbor, Jimmy Keating, who owns several old cars and has lots of friends who also have cool old cars. I knew he would be able to help me identify the cars in the original picture and who might own similar ones that we could use for the shoot. I was right, he was a huge help. He put me in touch with Billy, who brought this car to my house to let me look at it. He also gave me leads to where I might find the other cars. For the next few months I visited car shows and scanned the internet for possible cars.  The cars we settled on  were not exact matches, but were in the same era.

After several postponements due to bad weather, the day of the shoot finally arrived. It was over 90 degrees, but the sky was clear. I thought I was early, but when I arrived at the first location we were shooting, but the guys with the cars were already there. I think they were as excited as I was.

I was warmly greeted by bothers, Victor and Octavio Carvalho, the franchise owners of the two stores we were photographing.  They own both the  the Next Generation Dunkin in Quincy, and the original Dunkin Donuts, also in Quincy. Their father owned the original shop before them. They also own many other Dunkin Donuts franchises in the area.

These guys were awesome!

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So this is one of the original images.

Here is the edited version.

We moved about a mile away to the original Dunkin location. This store was more challenging. As you can see, the pavement was uneven, the mid-day  light was harsh,  there wasn't much room to get the right perspective, unless I was to stand in the middle of the busy Southern Artery. There were wires, cars, and other building to contend with. The old cars in front of the old Dunkin Donuts, caused people to gather. Cars on the road started slowing down and people were taking pictures. At one point, I had to politely ask people to step back and wait until I had captured my images. It was all very exciting to see the commotion we caused.

Here are some more images from the shoot.

I will leave you with the final image of the original location. Thanks you everyone from Dunkin Brands. You were all a pleasure to work with! Thanks to all of you who stopped by to read my blog.