© Blue Wesley

Today we feature work from photographer, Blue Wesley, for our Meet a Member interview. Blue is a commercial, lifestyle, aerial, and water photographer who won ‘Best of Show’ for the 2023 APA Awards.

Do you have a favorite podcast? 
Radiolab: from tree to shining tree

What 3 words describe your photography style? 
Vibrant, natural, exploratory

What inspires you? 
Travel in general, islands, cities, people overcoming obstacles, wildlife, art, and music.

What’s your favorite thing about being a photographic artist?
It doesn’t really feel like a job, even though I’ve made it my career. I just can’t (picture) doing anything else. I like how you can dream up an image before you even touch the camera. IT’s all about what you want to create inside the mind and using the elements that inspire you to create it in real life.

When you aren’t making photographs, what other pastimes do you have?
Surfing, fishing, hanging with orange cats, hunting for a stellar açai bowl, or just cruising around town checking out beaches in San Diego.

What was the best piece of advice you were given starting out?
As long as you do it everyday, you will be good. -Jim Daly

What are the current challenges that you face as a photographer?
Curation. I’m always trying to slim down my archive of old shoots. My body of work is tapping out at about 20 terabytes of RAW files or 2-300,000 images that I keep on hard drives. Could I ever even slim this down to just 1000 photos? No way. I’ve found that if you don’t look at a shoot for a few years, the images you favorited then are not the ones you would select again, and the ones you kind of passed over may grab your attention. As we develop as creators, our visual taste changes, so I try to hold onto a good amount of raw files from each shoot in case I wasn’t to do a new curation and re-edit. Try it!

What have been the highlights and challenges of your career so far?
Highlights: I got to shoot a magazine cover with surf legend Rob Machado in the water at his home break at Swamis, Encinitas, California. 

Challenges: The ebbs and flows of freelance life can be interesting to navigate. When you don’t have many projects certain times of the year, the mind can wander, but you have to stay on the path and find ways to forward your momentum with the time you have not shooting. When you are slammed with projects, it’s nice to have a break. So who knows? 

What were you doing before you became a photographer?
I got a Bachelor in Arts in Geography from UC Santa Barbara, which I never used, and my wife jokes that she’s never seen my diploma. Not sure where that is. In college, I worked at Four Seasons Hotels and then was a busser and waiter at fine-dining steakhouse until I made my move!

If you weren’t a Photographer, what would you be doing?
Musician, I played guitar with some of my best friends in a blues reggae band at UCSB. We were pretty sick. 

What do you do when you get stuck?
Get off the computer, get outside, move, breath, exercise, travel, take a road trip, get into nature, surf, I always come back feeling rejuvenated, inspired, and ready to take on a new project with a fresh sense creative energy.

What is your best advice for your peers?
Stick with it, there’s a lot of pressure out there to be the best, to create something EPIC, post something VIRAL, and EVERYDAY. It’s a lot. Try to put horse blinders on and stay focused on being grateful for your own epic experiences, whatever they may be, instead of being worried about what others are doing. 

If you don’t hit the milestones you set for yourself, it’s all good, we aren’t meant to always do everything exactly to plan, so keep your head down and keep on plugging away, whatever your goals are.

What advice would you give to yourself if you could go back 10 years? 20 years?
1. WHO you know is important. Foster relationships. Any day you could meet someone that could change your career life in a massive way. Keep your eyes and ears open and if there’s a person that can open some doors for you, introduce yourself and let them know what you are all about. If people don’t know what your goals are, they can’t help you. 

2. There are times when doing free work is necessary. If it builds value in your portfolio, do it for free, 9 out of 10 times, they’ll book you later on paid work or refer you to someone for something bigger!

3. Team up with others. Clients will trust you more if it seems like you work on a team. And the other team members will propel you to strive to grow together. It’s a synergistic energy that is really hard to have by yourself. 

What is a photographer’s role now that technology has made it so much more accessible to the masses?
I read that more digital images are captured every single day than the entire collection of analog film photographs in its 150 year history. In One day. Think about that. Pretty wild. But it goes one step further, now that AI has entered the picture, it’s important that we keep our images as authentic as possible because at one point there maybe more artificial images than real photographs, and then the history record of how things looked and actually were will be skewed for future generations. 

Check out more work from Blue Wesley.