Category: Curiosity

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Business Curiosity Exposure Making Art Making Pictures Marketing Philosophy Richard Kelly Experience

Thinking Ahead

Last week in two separate conversations, I used the words “thinking ahead.” Conceptually we like to think we do this well, but most of us fail even with our best new ideas. Big thinkers take a small concept that exponentially expands. They gather interest, investors, partners, and collaborators to take that small idea to an extravagant completion. I hear from big thinkers almost every day asking me to help them create imagery. Though, some of them wait too long even after their project is already underway or practically completed.  

These conversations with filmmakers, real estate developers, technology entrepreneurs, and other innovative businesses making transformational changes all have stories that I want to help them tell if they had just thought ahead. They want photographs that they can now use to tell the story of their big idea. But there is no way to re-visualize their process measuring what they have accomplished because no photographs were made with that intention—not thinking ahead what images they will need in the end to tell the story. 

While living in New York City in the early ’90s, I thought I might want to make motion pictures. Not knowing that much about filmmaking, I offered to work on small indie films. I was working with many talented individuals. I learned that one of the many required “assets” film festivals ask for are publicity stills to assist in “promoting” the movies. As a photographer, I was a valuable asset on these indie productions and taught myself how to package these with other materials for festivals. One evening at a wrap party, a young filmmaker approached me. He had heard through a colleague that I created festival packets. And he needed some help with his festival proposal. So we went through my mental checklist – script, application, list of cast and crew, synopsis, check, check, and check he said – still photos? (cue the sound of film breaking in a projector). Ahhh! He said someone did make some snapshots with their camera, but no one was responsible for making those still photos. He asked if I could help. I shook my head and said, look, we could recreate a scene or two if you have access to the location and the actors, but it is not the same. 

I was preparing, before the pandemic, to deliver a “lunch and learn” session about documenting your startup story. I planned to say that good visual storytelling is critical to rising above the startup competition. Thinking ahead for visual stories requires commitment, discipline, and money. Yes, money! A business school leader reminded me that seed money is for the core purpose of startup culture. My reply, without planning for storytelling (READ marketing) images, no one will visualize the value you are building. Indeed, I am sure that some early-stage funders will disagree with me and point to examples of startups that prove themselves without marketing imagery. But in a global conversation of visual media, pictures and videos matter. Without visual images, you are only as good as your best textual metaphors with bullet points on a pitch deck. 

Once in a conversation with a client over a project launch. I told the story of being commissioned by a financial institution to create artwork for their new office. Their ask was for images of the city from their skyscraper point of view – not postcard-style photos but images that reflected their unique worldview. He loved this idea, and then I revealed that often the “process photographs” that I make for long-term projects also end up as artwork on the walls of their company Headquarters. These images can rise above the initial purpose and can be aesthetically beautiful as well. We closed the deal on the spot.

Learning about future-forward projects and the people who put these into action is my favorite part of my storytelling. Thinking ahead to craft a visual story for publicity, fundraising, and memorializing history is what I do. 

If your organization has an emerging story to tell and wants my visual point of view, email me at richard@richardkelly.com.

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Business Curiosity Marketing Philosophy Photography Richard Kelly Experience

Humans with cameras.

The camera allows us to see things we otherwise could never see as humans. However, the camera alone is not very useful. Ansel Adams, the famous American Landscape photographer, once quipped, “The single most important component of a camera is the 12 inches behind it.” without a human purpose, the camera is of no use.

Suppose you are a visionary chief executive wanting to illustrate to your potential investors that your leadership team is polishing the antique industrial company into a shiny new modern technology brand—the most efficient method is to contract with a professional photographer creating those transformational stories. Otherwise, you risk not telling this critical story because the cameras are still sitting in the box.

A professional photographer’s job is to make photographs that inform, educate, or emotionally connect with the viewer. Whether journalistically, for marketing, or advertising, a photographer with intention, skill and focus will use their camera to communicate the essence effectively to create compelling visual storytelling.

I love using photography to tell stories. I get to combine my curiosity and lifelong learning and translate those experiences into visual compositions that, when combined with crafted words and elegant design, moves someone to feel something, take action, or stay informed.

I create visual experiences. 

My team and I are available to produce your organization’s unique story and share it with the world. 

Richard Kelly is the President of the Richard Kelly Experience based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He and his team create visual stories for organizations just like yours.

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Curiosity Family Making Pictures Nostalgia Origin Story Philosophy Richard Kelly Experience

The People Collector

My wife, Jennifer, says I collect people. Through “collecting people,” I have made some great connections and, more importantly, built exciting relationships. In my experience, relationships are why people work with me as a photographer and image strategist. It is the chemistry of connections that builds a continuing trust.
I’ve realized that I am really connecting people beyond collecting people (which I enjoy even more). Introducing so and so to you know who, so that they aren’t just names in a Rolodex on my desk anymore, new relationships built on previous connections lead to something even better. I tell my students that the person who may help you the most in your career maybe someone who you hardly know. I know this because it happens all the time to me.
My grandmother once told me that I always asked people what they did and why as a child. “Hey, who are you, and what do you do?”
I want to add you to my collection, maybe even make your picture. I would really like to know you and what you do and even why?

Lets connect. https://sendfox.com/richardkellyexperience

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ASMP Business Curiosity Origin Story Richard Kelly Experience

Always be Reinventing

Plotting my career in the early ’80s, I never imagined my photography career today. Photography industry insider Stephen Mayes describes my current lifestyle as having a “portfolio career,” one that includes multiple income streams from various services over a range of industry sectors. What my mother calls having “a lot of irons in different fires.” Although not what I envisioned, my portfolio career is right for me.

My single most valuable character trait is my curiosity; it has fueled all aspects of my creative life and continues to lead me to new opportunities for creative expression and commercial exploitation.

Just the other day, a longtime client and friend from my New York City days introduced me as one of the most interesting people she knows. She mentioned that I was someone who is always reinventing his work and life.

I learned in that conversation that all my work has a common core, which is storytelling. In essence, I like to learn, I want to experience things, and then I share my enthusiasm. My activities vary from day to day. I read, I write; I make pictures, I do interviews, I capture video, I splice images together, I teach a class, I consult with a client, maybe moderate a panel discussion, watch a classic film with my teenage daughter, I push a few buttons, just another day in my life.

A few years ago, I learned I needed to rethink my business. This process included a fair amount of self-evaluation. Reworking my brand – the promise to my clients. To some degree, I need to rephrase how I described myself to others—ultimately changing the perception of what I am selling. A colleague last evening over dinner said you are no longer a “photographer,” sure you take photographs. Still, you bring more to the marketing and board room – you build a vision and a strategy a visual experience for organizations. 

I continue to fuel my insatiable curiosity. I learn something new every day. I have tons of new experiences and stories to share. Best of all I get to illustrate them all with pictures – some moving and some still. I live in a state of ‘always be reinventing.’

Updated and adapted from The ASMP Strictly Business Blog , June 25, 2015

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Curiosity Making Pictures Origin Story Richard Kelly Experience

Artifacts

I miss random conversations with strangers. With masks, no one seems that approachable. Personal encounters are challenging. Even with people I know.
My wife and I did meet a new couple just before the pandemic; my daughter introduced us. They are new to the city, smart, fun, and socially available. Over this past weekend, we met up with them for drinks overlooking the skyline at sunset. One of the great things about conversations with new friends is asking questions that allow you to see yourself through a new set of eyes. I learned that the “real fruits of my labor” as a photographer were not the photograph, but rather the conversations with the subjects I coveted. The picture was an artifact that helped me to remember that interaction.
My wife, in a variation of this concept, referred to me once as a people collector. I even toyed with the idea as a title for a book and often used it as a hashtag (#Peoplecollector) for the smartphone portraits I capture of people I encounter daily. “My product” is the moment, the engagement, the conversation: the photograph, just the excuse to being there.
One of my interns keeps a running journal of people she meets through our daily interactions, during a walk down the street, waiting for the elevator, or on a photo assignment. Until she started keeping score, I never saw these interactions as my thing. Or maybe I did, perhaps subconsciously these Richard Kelly Experiences, as she calls them, are my fuel, my purpose, my creative accelerant that keeps me on my quest for the next new person to add to the people collection.
The pandemic hits. I have no interactions, no new artifacts. There are no new experiences. I am on a pause. `

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Curiosity Making Pictures Nostalgia Philosophy Photography

The Gateway, part 1

Photography is a gateway to many things; I am not sure how else to say it. No matter when you first pick up a camera, the instinct is there. I joke that my daughter was introduced to the act of photography before she met her parents. Within a few hundred microseconds, I had made photographs as my daughter flew through the air from the doctor’s hands to my wife’s, ready to receive her.

I had decided to make black and white film photographs earlier that day.I liked the idea of having a physical object of that moment. The film receives light particles that leave a mark on the emulsion. With a digital sensor, photographers capture a binary representation of that light particle.

I know it is a little nostalgic to consider that on the negatives and slides in my archive, each piece of film was there when I made the picture. For a brief fraction of time, the shutter opened, and light from that place entered the lens and touched it. Not only was I was present at that exact moment, but the film was there too.

I can’t say for sure why I like my film photographs and have more emotional connections to them than my hundreds of thousands of digital images. It is not because the film images are of a higher quality or render the subject better than digital capture because I can say with certainty that they are not better, but they are different.

It is interesting that when photography enthusiasts, who’s gateway to photography was a digital camera, discover film they see every frame as beautiful. A magical quality draws them in to love look of film. They often confuse that magical feeling with quality.

I remember during a conversation with a professional wedding photographer who had recently discovered medium format film photography and was thrilled at how beautiful every frame was – they weren’t. Because they were using film, they were all the better in their eyes – they weren’t. Photographs captured on film are in and of themselves not always great. I can testify to the hundreds of thousands of poorly executed photographs I made on film. But I do understand emotionally what they were reacting too.

Film photographers experience two truly magical moments different from watching your images download from a silicon chip to another digital device. The universal reason many of us fell in love with photography, and that is observing a black and white latent image turn to a developed image in a tray of Dektol under the glow of an amber safelight. Another is the sensory experience of opening a freshly packed box of 35mm slides and holding them up at a time to a light to see what you captured, like opening a gift on your birthday. Then load them into carousel trays and turn on the projector with the whirring fan and the light projecting the color dyes on the film that was in the camera receiving the light from the space you were in when you pressed a shutter for a fraction of time. No LED Projector no matter how good can replace the brilliant colors from the film emulsion emitting from the screen.

I suppose this doesn’t reveal any of the reasons I like my film photographs better than the digital ones. But I do.

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Business Curiosity Family Origin Story Photography

My New Next Thing

I am a photographer, have been my entire life. That may be an overstatement, but roaming the Ellwood City Public Library at age ten searching for something new to read, stumbling upon the photography books on the shelves was not overstated; Photography was what I needed to discover that day.
As a teenager, I continued to make both art and music. Still, photography offered me a perfect balance of technology with the camera and what I could capture with that little light grabbing machine.
“Photography is for rich people,” my father would tell me. He was a working-class steelworker, high school educated but never a book guy. Later I realized he had an innate sense to visualize entire mechanical processes in his mind’s eye, essentially seeing a process like an x-ray. I don’t think he ever understood his gift. But that visual balance he passed to me. And his passion for tools and processes. Photography is the perfect expression for a young boy who loves tools, techniques and learning how things work. My curiosity has served me well in my pursuit of photography.
My parents insisted that they would not buy me a 35mm camera; they did buy me for my 11th birthday a Kodak 110 Instamatic, not precisely what I was hoping for as a future photographer.
I wanted to make pictures like W. Eugene Smith, not family photos at my sisters’ birthday party. I guess I was entrepreneurial at the outset. Even before this time, I sold gardening seeds, magazines, and rocks even before the pet rock craze. I had a paper route for the News Tribune – still have the road slag in my knee when I had a tumble with my heavy newspaper delivery bag.
Those dollars and cents allowed me to enter the Caputo’s Department store to buy my first camera. One hundred fifty dollars might buy you a Minolta 202 with a 50 mm 1.8 lens, but it won’t buy much 35mm film even in 1979, let alone the processing. Although a bit skeptical, my father encouraged me to do my first professional assignment, the grand opening of the new Big Beaver Municipal building; my father was vice president of the council.
Off I went with my camera and some black and white film to document the new building and celebrate it. I still remember these men and women looking to me as professional photographers to make them and their buildings look good. I even recall the new carpet smell that day.
It was the beginning of many assignments to offset the film I needed to learn photography. My father was impressed with my commitment, offered to buy me an enlarger, and build a darkroom in the basement off from our laundry room.
Making money and making photographs is a complicated formula for a simple equation for me. I couldn’t have one without the other. Forty years later, I am still working on that equalizing that equation. However, the ever-changing world values these two factors differently. In the year 2020, I am evaluating my “new next thing” to see how I can keep my simple equation in balance.