Catching up with Frank Bevans—the PCB Industry’s Premier Photographer

Estimated reading time: 17 minutes

• Tin man—“Getting to the Heart of Alternative Surface Finishes” — This was a fun cover. I built this Tin man out of cardboard and silver paint. This was our nod to The Wizard of Oz.

The timeless and universal concepts that we artistically portrayed on the covers of CircuiTree are also available as stock photography. So companies can purchase these (and many other) stock images from Frank Bevans Photography for their marketing needs, company posters/website and trade show booth artwork. I have a page on my website that one can go to and see if any of the themes work for their needs. The public is always welcome to call and asked about a particular theme I may have. And, I should point out, as an artist I am always eager to have the opportunity to create custom images.

Dan: I know that your work was not limited to the PCB industry; what is some of the other work you’ve been involved in over the years?

Frank: Some of the other commercial industries I’ve photographed include cars and trucks for Ford Motor Company; video games and gear for Sony Entertainment; computers and printers for Hewlett Packard; kitchen appliances for KitchenAid. I’ve also done editorial and ads for Forbes, Sunset Magazine, Guitar Player Magazine, and others.

Dan: Can you share with us some of the more memorable experiences you’ve had over the course of your career?

Frank:  Well, this is an interesting story. I was sent to photograph a coal-burning power station out of Somerset on Lake Ontario in New York. I was working for a company called Electrical Power Research Institute. They sent me there to the power station to photograph the giant scrubbers that were on top of these coal-burning smokestacks. The scrubbers were scrubbing the sulfur dioxide out of the burning of coal. The scrubbers would trap the particulate matter; in fact these scrubbers would scrub 97% of the sulfur dioxide out of the emissions of burning coal. So this happened on a very chilly winter day and I was there chatting with my representative and we were walking outside from one building to another when a large tank of sulfur dioxide ruptured nearby. A plume of gas nearly knocked us down. We spent the next several hours inside a nearby building, coughing to get the gas out of our lungs and eyes. As soon as I had recovered enough, I went out to get the shots that I had come to get. When I called the client that afternoon, I told him what had happened and he was pleasantly surprised that I had completed the job for the day and was not calling a lawyer. The next day, at that same facility, I needed to get photographs of the grounds of the entire power station. I rode up on the outside service elevator to the top of one of the smokestacks with my client. He rode it back down to take care of some business on the ground and left me there to photograph the area from on top of the stack. It had to have been at least 500 feet up. It wasn’t long before I learned that the outside service elevator had frozen up and, basically, I was stuck on the top of the smokestack with the sun going down. They said the only way I would be able to get down now was to hook myself onto a harness that would lower me to the ground. Well, I was out there, dangling, blowing around in the icy wind and the only thing that kept me calm as I rode the 500 feet to the ground, was my unbending intent to get great photos.  

Another time I was sent by Millennia Media, a manufacturer of high-end pre-amplifiers, to Nashville, TN. My job was to photograph Grammy Award winner Chuck Ainlay, holding one of Millennia’s pre-amps while waterskiing. At the time, Chuck was world renowned for his audio engineering, but he was also known to compete in waterskiing competitions. He agreed to star in the shoot for Millennia to demonstrate the portability of one of their new products. So I went out on the speedboat with Chuck and his crew. For this water skiing shoot, I strapped myself to the side of the boat and leaned out over the water to get the shots and it was a blast!  Chuck is a very talented music producer and truly a wonderful human being.Page 3 of 4

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