About
Bill Howard is a commercial, sports, landscape, and corporate photographer, and filmmaker based in North Carolina. Bill considers commercial photography his 'day job' and boasts clients as large as Fortune 50 companies as well as small one person operations.
In 2019 Bill began working more with videography and cinematography as an addition to his photography. From 2019 thru 2022, the videography portion of his business had produced and filmed over 80 commercials and 10 short films. He also has over 1000 stock clips in a large variety of subjects. The filmmaking portion of his work blossomed into Whirligig Pictures LLC, named after both his first short film, Whirligigs at Night, and one of the identity of the city he lives in, Wilson, NC, where the late Vollis Simpson created the whirligigs and became a folk art icon. In 2021, Bill wrote his first feature screenplay, The Great Dismal, winning the Toronto Film and Script Awards, which he began filming in 2022. Bill completed The Great Dismal in 2023. Other films include The Incredulous Case of Aliens, the US Govt, and Arnie Smith (2023), Something Walks in the Woods (2023), and Urbex (2026).
Bill also branched into documentaries after the success of the mockumentary Something Walks in the Woods. Two seasons of Encounters: the complete interviews (2023) have been released with a third season in post-production which shares the stories of people, often known as ‘experiencers’, who have personally encountered possible alien and ufo/uap experiences. Another four-part series spun off with Encounters: Round Table Special (2023) with several of the interviewees from the first two seasons coming together to answer questions and share their experiences with each other.
The latest documentary, Breathe Freedom: the John McNeil story, is currently in distribution and has garnered acclaim in its way of story telling from a completely talking head style. It tells the story of John McNeil and his plight with the judicial system in Georgia, in which he was convicted of murder and sentenced for life in a self-defense case that was eventually overturned. Interviews included Ben Jealous and Edward Dubose, former heads of the national chapter of the NAACP and Georgia chapter of the NAACP respectively, Janet Conner-Knox, the lead reporter covering the case, as well as others.
Bill has covered events such as the NFC Championship, the PGA Championship, the ACC Basketball Tournament, March Madness, international soccer, and countless professional and collegiate competitions. For the 2017-2018 men's basketball season, Bill began shooting for his alma mater's men's basketball team, the NC State Wolfpack, which continued until the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, Bill shoots for various agencies and media, including but not limited to USA Today Sports/Imagn Sports, as well as having shot for various collegiate and professional teams such as NC State, Yale, Kansas State, Marquette, Miami, NCFC, NC Courage, and the Carolina Hurricanes.
Bill began focusing on landscape and nature photography in 2017, and his work quickly garnered acclaim. His first trip in March, 2017, Bill composed a photo of the Everglades National Park that won several photography competitions including Outdoor Photographer magazine and a top 100 image that made it as high as #11 on the front page of reddit.com, a social news sharing and discussion website.
Having developed a hobby in fossil hunting, Bill also has quickly become known for his fossil photography with outstanding images showing both the details of ancient life and presenting them in an artistic composition. Along with the fossil photography project, he has several other ongoing photo projects including lighthouses, the aforementioned landscape project, ‘We are Wilson’ and ‘the North Carolina project’, both of which are portrait projects, and the ‘Signs’ project.
Bill has thousands of published images in media such as Sports Illustrated, Golf Digest, ABC, NBC, CBS and ESPN as well as several magazine covers.
Bill can be reached at WJHowardPhotography@gmail.com with questions and/or comments.