Chris McDowell

The Redwoods in Yosemite

Because of my background in real estate photography, I was asked to work on a photo library for The Redwoods in Yosemite. The Redwoods is a network of rental cabins in Yosemite National Park. They needed exterior photographs taken of all 130 homes, plus interior spreads of some of their best cabins. Afterwards, I began the rebuild of their old resort map into a vector-based illustration which they could edit.

Have A Ball

I was asked to create a multitude of marketing items for Have A Ball, an indoor event center (and family business). I designed the logo, a tri-fold brochure, newspaper ads, payroll stuffers, business cards and I also took the marketing photographs.

Central California Home and Ranch

For my 3 years at Wild Pete Publishing, Inc., I played a large role in the growth of the Central California Home and Ranch real estate magazine. I was in charge of real estate photography for each issue, including the cover photos. As well, I rebuilt the companion website from humble beginnings to a fully-functional tool - including an interactive advertiser section, mobile-based property searching, a site adminstration section and property mapping.

Run for the Gold Classic Car Show

I was part of a large marketing push for the annual Run for the Gold Classic Car show in Oakhurst, CA. Starting with the 2006 show, I designed a logo, the show poster and the website. As well, I redesigned the website for the 2007 & 2008 shows, as well as being the official photographer of the 2008 show. Unfortunately, this website was not updated for the shows past 2008 due to financial issues.

Yosemite Insider From scratch, I built an interactive website containing travel information for the Yosemite Area. Using a basic CMS allowed administrators to manage the site themselves. Visit Site	Subway Catering The owner of 11 Subway franchises located around Visalia, CA asked me to produce a website for customers to submit their catering and sandwich orders online. Visit Site	Grace Notes I became webmaster of Grace Note Wind Chimes in 2008. In 2009, I upgraded the site to a new shopping cart, host, and focused on SEO. The result was a large increase in sales within 4 months. Visit Site
Paradise Sportfishing For this fishing outfit in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, I built an attractive interface for company information and a blog about the latest conditions! Visit Site	Donna Pride, REALTOR Donna Pride, one of the Yosemite area's star REALTORS, asked me to design a site to display her latest listings. She gave me one requirement: "It's gotta be red!" Visit Site	Regency Property Management For this Fresno property management company, dynamically displaying their current rental properties and providing renter info made their jobs much easier! Visit Site
Bass Lake Triathlon This historic and popular sporting event needed a site that looked good and would be easily editable. They got both! Visit Site	TRK Playground Safety TRK is one of California's best choices for playground inspection. This site provides an overview of their service. Visit Site	Shasky Farms Shasky Farms produces a variety of nuts in Central California. Purchase some online today! Visit Site

Blue Heron Wedding Brochure

This tri-fold brochure was built and printed for The Blue Heron Restaurant and Event Center, promoting their wedding packages. It made use of some stock and some location photography, a new logo, and edited text to give a much classier look to their much classier product.

Photography

Below are samples from some of my various photography jobs and achievements.
Click the images to view larger.

The Pines Resort - Photos In 2004, I was hired to do a series of photographs of The Pines Resort in Bass Lake, CA. These photographs were for use by their marketing dept.

Stock Photos I sold a small library of travel-related photographs to BUNAC Travel Services, for inclusion in their working holiday marketing materials.

Photo Contest 2 London photographs that I took in 2003 won TNT magazine's weekly 'Hot Shots' photography award. Got a trip to Wales for it!

Personal Work

The great thing about having graphic design experience is the ability to create works not only for a business but also for my own interests. I have used Corel Draw, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to create a number of posters. My current projects are 2 huge aviation posters (with airliner side-views created in Illustrator and decorated with airline color schemes), and a Photo Mosaic poster project which involves using my photos taken during a year and creating a mosaic poster from it.