RGB Photography Studio is owned by Kevin Ulrich. Kevin is also the owner of Achilles Interactive, an interactive marketing & web production studio. Below he shares his thoughts about how and why he added photographer to his hat rack. I always had an interest in photography. I owned numerous film and digital cameras throughout the years, but never a nice SLR. My dad owned one that he lugged around on family vacations. To me that thing always seemed like a big pain to carry around, so the cameras I owned were always just the pocket sized kind. For example, I had a disc camera in the eighties. When I got older and was working for the corporate world, I bought a nice portable digital camera for vacation to Lake Tahoe. It took nice pictures, but it could not do the effects with depth or stop-motion that I could see in so many photos. I did some research where I discovered that is what those settings on the dial are for. After starting Achilles Interactive, I found an excuse to purchase my first SLR. I made it my goal to take product and environmental photos for my clients so I could save them money on professional photography costs. Now all I thought I had to do was figure out how to use the camera. To gain a better understanding of the usage of all the buttons and dials on an SLR camera, I actually read the owner’s manual from cover to cover. Unfortunately that only got me so far. Shortly after purchasing the camera, I went on vacation with my family. On the way to meet them, I drove through some small Texas towns and shot all kinds of things: buildings, flowers, landscapes, statues, etc. I took hundreds of photos. What I could not figure out was: why was almost all of the photos from the trip complete garbage. Out of the hundreds of pictures I took, there was only one that stood out to me (seen here). Why did I like this photo so much? What made it better than all the rest? I am not saying this is an award winning photograph or anything. It was just better than all the other ones, but I did not know why it was better. I wanted to know why. My solution was to enroll myself into a photography course to try and understand why. I discovered it was my composition that made that photo better than the rest. Instead of putting everything in the center of the viewing area, I had accidentally followed the visual arts rule of thirds. That is what made the difference I could see. I continued to further my education by reading numerous books and manuals. I took a couple more photography courses. Towards the end of one of the courses, the class was tasked with building a portfolio website. I had a slight advantage on this one since I built websites for a living. The site I built ended up getting featured in the course’s magazine as an example of “how to” effectively showcase your photographic work. It also has a little technical automation to it because it automatically pulls the images out of my Google Picasa account. Photography is an ever evolving hobby/profession to me. My normal view of the world is different now. I look at everyday things like I am envisioning how that could make a good photograph. I look everywhere seeking beauty in otherwise boring places. I hope you enjoyed reading a little about me. My sample portfolio features photographs of people, places and things. The tagline, “capturing life, one moment at a time”, is inspired by my work with people. Check it out.
