Cassandra Zampini Photography

Shoot for Sun Magazine, also printed in Lowell Sun today

2011-10-14T07:50:00.000-07:00

W. L. French named top among top snow removers

By Dan O'Brien, dobrien@lowellsun.com

Updated: 10/13/2011 09:58:14 AM EDT

William L. French Jr., president of W. L. French Excavating Corp. in Billerica, was recognized by GIE Media's Snow Magazine for leadership. The company was named among the top snow-removal firms in North America. COURTESY / Cassandra Zampini photography

Sun staff photos can be ordered by visiting our MyCapture site.

BILLERICA -- W. L. French Excavating Corp., which has done site remediation at the new Lowell Trial Court and the Edward Early Jr. Garage on Middlesex Street in Lowell, was recently recognized as a top North American snow contractor, according to GIE Media's Snow Magazine.

The top 100 companies were recognized during an awards ceremony on Aug. 29 at the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland, Ohio. French Excavating ranked No. 35. The complete 2011 Top 100 list is included in the October issue of Snow Magazine.

Each year Snow Magazine ranks the top-performing companies in the snow-removal industry based on revenue from the previous winter season.

According to Lisa French Kelley, director of business development at W. L. French, the private, family-run company had to file a formal application, including revealing its year-over-year increase in snow-removal sales. Its snow-removal sales were more than $5 million last winter.

Separately, President William L. French Jr. was selected as a recipient for one of Snow Magazine's five Leadership Awards. Criteria for the award include industry growth, community relations and "his individual commitment to strengthening and legitimizing this industry and his devotion to giving back to the community he lives and works in," Snow Magazine Editor Mike Zawacki said in a statement.

French Jr. was named president in 2005, but has been diversifying the company for the past 14 years, Kelley said of her brother.

W. L French offers site-development, environmental-management and trucking-contract services. It was founded by CEO William L. French Sr. and employs about 100 people. It has two Billerica locations, a headquarters at 3 Survey Circle and a maintenance facility on Nashua Road.

Just this week, W. L. French won the contract to provide excavation services for UMass Lowell's new parking garage.

Snow Magazine, a GIE Media publication, is a business-management publication serving the professional snow- and ice-management industry. It publishes eight times a year and reaches nearly 30,000 industry professionals.

"If their market experiences another sizable winter, and based on their pattern for growth, I expect to see W. L. French on many more of our Top 100 lists," Zawacki said.

Last year, W. L. French was recognized by Inc. magazine for being among the top 5,000 growing private companies.

Interview: Beyond Success Online

2011-10-14T07:41:00.000-07:00

Cassandra Zampini, Founder of Cassandra Zampini Photography

Written by BeyondSuccessOnline on July 21, 2011 in Art & Literature, Boston, Culture - No comments

What prompted you to start your business?
I started my first photographic job in high school shooting portraits of graduating seniors. As a junior at Boston University, I got a summer internship with NewWorld Outlook Magazine in New York City as a staff photographer and writer. At one point, I went on a weeklong assignment to cover the economic situation in South America. The magazine was excited about the images and I soon became the parent company’s principle photographer. I did everything from shooting corporate events to ad campaign shoots. After the internship, I continued to work with the company as a freelance reporter and photographer while I started in a position with a local newspaper. Eventually, as I grew out of the newspaper business and as my freelance contracts grew, I was able pursue my passion for photography full time and begin the photography business.

For most successful entrepreneurs, there is no typical day so give us a sample of your schedule from start to finish.
It is true that everyday is different, especially if there is a photo shoot. Preparations for large production shoots can take up to a month to organize,including finding the location, booking talent, crew, and any special equipment needs and set design for the shoot. A typical shoot day always starts early, usually rising around 6AM, getting to the shoot early to make sure the location is prepped and equipment is set up properly. Depending on the shoot, we begin with hair and make up for the talent, then begin shooting as soon as possible and go through the entire day, breaking briefly for lunch. It is always amazing to me how fast the day goes during a shoot. We usually wrap up around 6pm, and if it is a multi-day shoot, we begin it all again in the morning. Part of the difficulty of being on your own as a photographer is the chaos of your schedule. You may have long shoot days filled with all the excitement and stress that comes with it, and then the next week you’re back at your desk working on marketing and sales.

What are your “can’t live without” apps on your desktop/cell phone?
For any photographer, Adobe Photoshop CS5 is the most needed application,along with Aperture 3.0 for organizing and sometimes editing images. I also likethe iPad app called Portfolio that lets you import images from Dropbox directly into the iPad so you can show off your images.

What are your tricks for time management?
I will schedule tasks around times I know when I work best. I tend to work better in the afternoon or evenings, so I will save more challenging tasks for later in the day and the more mundane tasks for the morning.

Best advice received when you started your career?
My husband, Tom Zampini, who is also an entrepreneur of a lighting company called i2Systems, Inc, told me once that I needed to love the process and not just the end result. I use that advice both in my photographic work as well as the business side of things.

Given the current economic climate, how has your strategy for building awareness of your work changed for the short-term and long-term?
I am currently reaching out to new avenues in photography, and looking to diversify my portfolio as well as align myself with a videographer and CGI artist to provide more options for my clients.

What’s been your proudest achievement as such an immensely accomplished Entrepreneur?
Pulling off successful images, thanks to all the key players involved including all the crew, talent, artists, and creative directors that help bring the production together.

What are some of the ways that you achieve balance in your life?
Having a studio and working away from home, helps keep the work separate from home life. It can be easy to be obsessed with work when you work on your own, so I try to let go of it in the evenings and weekends. I also race sailboats, which helps because you can’t think of anything else in that moment but the race!

Your top 3 book recommendations for our readers (and why?)
“Secrets of Self-Employment” by Sarah and Paul Edwards.
For photographers, the book “Light, Science, Magic: An introduction to Photographic Lighting,” for learning the technical aspects of shooting products and understanding studio lighting as well as “Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers.”

If you had an exceptional month and earned double of your average month, what (if anything) would you spend it on?
More equipment and more cameras! Photographers can’t help but buy the latest and greatest.

What are some of your most rewarding charitable involvements and why?
I love using photography for organizations that I feel are making a difference in the world. Also, I try to use my personal work to show the viewer a different perspective and to hopefully open their eyes to people and places that they would not have understood before.

Who has been the most influential person to you as you’ve advanced in yourcareer?
I would have to say my husband, Tom Zampini, who is a very successful entrepreneur and owner of a family owned business, i2Systems. As a photographer/artist with an academic family, I really had no knowledge of business starting out. He really taught me everything on the business side, from managing accounts to sales and negotiations.

What’s your advice to my someone interested in entrepreneurship ?
You have to be completely sure that you can handle the ups and downs, the uncertainties, and the very long hours that come with starting a business. Most young artists don’t realize how competitive and strenuous the business aspects can be. Especially in this economy, starting a business is brutal hard work, but it can be worth it to the right person.

To learn more about Cassandra’s work, visit her website by clicking the link below:

Vote for my photo!

2011-09-15T09:54:00.000-07:00

http://1x.com/photoawards/vote/3d318f69773894dda52f4a698edbdb90

You cannot vote on your own photos

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Photographers Capture Evolving Face of Poverty

2011-09-15T07:40:00.000-07:00

Photographers Capture Evolving Face Of Poverty

by NPR STAFF

Listen to the Story

All Things Considered

[4 min 28 sec]

EnlargeJohn Partipilo/The Tennessean

People line up in the early morning for food at Edgehill United Methodist Church.

text size A A A

September 13, 2011

Photographers have long played a special role in capturing what it means to be poor in America. People like Dorothea Lang, Walker Evans and Gordon Parks helped illustrate what it was like to live in hunger and face material hardships.

But as the country has changed, so too has the face of poverty.

Steve Liss, the project director for AmericanPoverty.org — an organization of photojournalists looking to alleviate poverty in the U.S. — tells NPR's Michele Norris that he and fellow photographers are seeing "how thin the line is between middle class, working poor and poverty."

EnlargeBrenda Ann Kenneally/AmericanPoverty.org

New Orleans, La.

Liss and a group of photographers started the project "In Our Own Backyard" about five years ago. Liss says they have seen change in that time.

"We're seeing a tremendous increase in families who are seeking services," he says. "We're seeing a tremendous increase in people would not normally have considered themselves vulnerable."

Liss says the poverty is in places you wouldn't expect.

"You see abject poverty 100 miles south of Chicago in Hopkins Park, Ill., you see people living in huts with mud floors in Third World conditions," he says. "If you go up to rural Maine, you see children living in trailers with holes in the floor and no heat in the wintertime. These are things that people don't see, and that's largely because I think the mainstream media hasn't really fulfilled its obligation to provide that kind of imagery, to provide those kinds of stories so that people can engage."

That's his and his fellow photographers' goal — to "take invisible poverty and make it visible once again," Liss says.

"I don't think people really understand or have had the opportunity to see the new face of poverty and that's something that we're endeavoring to do."

2011-09-07T08:08:00.000-07:00

9/11: Finding Objects Through A Filter

Categories: Editor's Pick

10:52 am

September 7, 2011

by CLAIRE O'NEILL

There are objects currently on display at Smithsonian that, without much context, might look a lot like trash. But what makes these melted calculators and soggy notebooks special is that they were recovered from the three sites attacked on Sept. 11: New York, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pa. Many of them are personal effects.

For something as monumental as Sept. 11 — for something so difficult to process — maybe focusing in on the details is one way to make sense of it. There's an obvious significance to these seemingly banal objects, but how do you get at it?

NPR photographer John Poole was inspired by Tomatsu Shomei's stark photos of objects found after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan. His tool of choice, a cell phone. In his words, though 10 years have passed, it somehow doesn't seem that long ago; in many ways, we're still living in the direct aftermath of 9/11. Perhaps the grainy haze of a phone app suggests an indefinite passage of time, and allows us a necessary distance for understanding.

Tags: Smithsonian, September 11

Hildebrand Charity Shoot

2011-06-24T15:56:00.000-07:00

Doing a charity shoot this weekend for the Hildebrand Family Self-Help Center, Inc. - http://www.hild-selfhelp.org

Its a great cause helping families on the fringe of homelessness, check them out. Will post pics after the event!

Get your carrot on.

2011-06-08T16:11:00.000-07:00

Catalog shoot for underwear company

2011-06-01T08:34:00.000-07:00

Photographer: Cassandra Zampini

Videographer: Benjamin Eckstein

Make-up/Hair: Janeen Jones

Art Director: Liz Smith

Breaking into Morning

2011-05-10T10:50:00.000-07:00

Black & White

2011-05-03T08:58:00.001-07:00

2011-03-29T14:03:00.000-07:00

Photography for Advertising on the go!

2011-02-23T15:18:00.000-08:00

Advertising photography for a chocolate company.

Artist Izzo: Check out Izzo's website: all CZ's Photography promoting the artist

2011-02-17T08:02:00.000-08:00

http://www.arthurizzo.com

Latest Architectural Shoot: On-location lighting and set-up to showcase LED lighting, creating the perfect light.

2011-02-09T15:10:00.000-08:00

Immersive video & still for telepresence project

2011-02-02T09:35:00.000-08:00

Spotlight on Manufacturing: On-Location photography part of CZ's repertoire

2010-09-27T07:05:00.000-07:00

The Elegant Machine: On-Location photography part of CZ's repertoire

Liquid Photography: Custom photography designing any kind of lighting you want

2010-09-10T15:37:00.000-07:00

Playing with light in the studio, capturing light on bottles. More from Liquid Photography.

Commercial Advertising Shoot

2010-06-09T07:32:00.001-07:00

Cassandra Zampini photographer and a great crew: wardrobe, hair, make-up, a videographer and assistants wrapped up a three-day advertising shoot with 12 models from local agencies.

Images by Cassandra Zampini included product photography, product application and a few 360 degree tours.

Cassandra M. Zampini's work featured in new Book:

2010-01-04T12:18:00.000-08:00

Professional Commercial Photography: Techniques

and Images from Master Digital Photographers

The book includes a full color 15-page spread and back cover images of Cassandra M. Zampini's commercial photography work as well as her own insights on every aspect of commercial photography.

Buy the book today at Amazon.com or your local Barnes & Noble Bookstore.

Cassandra Zampini featured in Professional Commercial Photography: Techniques and Images from Master Digital Photographers

2010-01-04T12:15:00.000-08:00

Artist Izzo

2009-12-13T12:15:00.000-08:00

Shoot with upcoming rapper, Izzo, for his new signing with LL Cool J

Cassandra Zampini shoots at the United Nations, New York, NY

2009-12-13T11:53:00.001-08:00

2-day shoot in NYC at UNICEF and the United Nations