MegaBots Founder Matt Oehrlein: Editorial Portrait for Minnesota Alumni Magazine

I recently had the opportunity to shoot the cover of Minnesota Alumni’s Winter issue. The magazine featured robot-builder, Matt Oehrlein. He is the co-founder of Megabots inc. His company wants to create the sports league of the future – giant fighting robots. In a nutshell, It’s real-life Pacific Rim. Editorial Environmental Portrait Photographer

Last year, they presented Mark I at the New York Comic Con Festival. While the robot was not fully built, he still towered over his human companions at a height of 15 feet and weighed around 15,000 lbs.

It was an honor to meet this gentleman and can’t wait to see how their company evolves. I’m excited to add these images to my portfolio.

Every so often an assignment arrives that makes you reconsider what 'interesting subject' means. Matt Oehrlein — co-founder of MegaBots Inc. and the man trying to turn giant fighting robots into a professional sports league — qualifies.

Photographing the Mind Behind MegaBots

I had the opportunity to shoot the cover of Minnesota Alumni Magazine's Winter issue featuring Matt Oehrlein. MegaBots is his company's attempt to build the sports league of the future — real-world versions of the kind of mechanized combat you might recognize from Pacific Rim or BattleBots, but at a dramatically larger scale. Their Mark I robot stands 15 feet tall and weighs around 15,000 pounds.

Shooting the Cover of Minnesota Alumni Magazine

A magazine cover is one of the most demanding formats in editorial photography. The image needs to work as a standalone portrait, hold up at print size, and function as a visual anchor for a masthead and coverlines you often won't see until publication. Shooting with cover use in mind means building in headroom, considering how light falls across the face at the scale it will be printed, and creating something that earns a second look at a newsstand.

Environmental Portrait Photography at Scale

Matt Oehrlein and his robot presented a compositional challenge that's fairly unusual: how do you make a human subject feel present and important next to an object that is genuinely enormous? The answer is usually to use the scale differential deliberately — leaning into the contrast rather than trying to minimize it.

Magazine Cover Photography in San Francisco

I've shot magazine covers for regional and national publications throughout my career. If you're commissioning a cover portrait in the Bay Area, I'd be glad to discuss the brief.Editorial Environmental Portrait Photographer

Commissioning a magazine cover or editorial portrait in the Bay Area? [Contact Marc] to discuss the assignment.