By now Jason Lee is used to going viral. Last week, Lee's quirky and inventive pictures of his two young daughters made their third large showing on the internet, driving enough traffic to his website to crash it several times. His mailbox is full of new client requests and he's been inundated with media requests.
"Every time the photos pop up it's nice exposure, but at the same time it causes a lot of headaches," says Lee, a Bay Area photographer.
Lee says he's flattered by the attention he got after the photos went up on sites including Bored Panda and Yahoo. But he already has a booming wedding business and not much time to squeeze any new work into his schedule.
"I'm looking at my inbox and just shaking my head," he says.
It's easy to see why the project has enjoyed so much success. Lee's photos mix well-executed photography with creative concepts and inventive Photoshop work.
He's been shooting the portraits since 2006 and says he never intended for them to get so much public play. They were initially thought up when Lee's mother started getting chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and couldn't be around germ-ladened young kids. He says he wanted his mom to be able to see her granddaughters but didn't want to send the same old boring photos.
"I really wanted to be able to show my mom what was going on with the kids but I also wanted to cheer her up a little bit," he says. "I wanted to make her laugh."
Today Lee says his mom is still sick but holding on. She can be around the kids and even babysat them just a couple of weeks ago.
The project itself, however, has taken on a life of its own and Lee continues to find new ways to creatively capture the personalities of his two daughters.
The best inspiration, he says, always comes from the girls themselves. The other day, for example, Lee says he was thinking about how to get his kids to sit still so he could get some work done at the house.
The idea of taping them to the wall came to mind and within a day he had the picture set up and shot.
To make the photo, Lee took one frame of his younger daughter Kayla standing on a table with one piece of tape on each arm and one across her mid section. He then took another picture of his older daughter Kristin by herself that made it look like she was applying tape to the wall.
In Photoshop Lee removed the table from under Kayla's feet, tilted her slightly, cloned the tape so there were multiple pieces and added Kristin into the frame to make it look like it was her handiwork.
"The ideas just pop into my head sometimes," he says.
It hasn't always been the easiest thing to get two small kids to sit still through a photo shoot even if they are quite cooperative. Lee says the secret has always been some kind of payoff.
"I figured out early on that bribery really works," he says. "Any time I'm like, 'Let's go take a picture' the first thing that comes to their mind is treats."
Over the years the lighting and complexity of the photos has gotten more sophisticated, but the soul of the work has always come from the girls themselves.
Kristin, 8, is more reserved, and Kayla, 5, more outgoing. Together, however, their dynamic is surprisingly symbiotic.
"My older daughter is very calm and my younger daughter is like the wild child," says Lee.
Nowadays Lee and the girls have been doing the project for so long that he says his daughters have started submitting their own pitches. They don't always come to fruition, Lee says, but he enjoys the enthusiasm.
"As they have gotten older it’s nice to see them giving their own ideas and not just being in the photos," he says. "I'm glad they are still enthusiastic."
