We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Micah Harris a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Micah thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Alright – so having the idea is one thing, but going from idea to execution is where countless people drop the ball. Can you talk to us about your journey from idea to execution?

I got in to a “We Need to Talk Tour” event thanks to my friend Justin, who you all interviewed a few months ago, and I felt like God was telling me to bring my camera in, so I did. That’s was the beginning of everything. With my Sony ZV-E10 that I got for $500 a few months earlier, I was able to take a photo of Preston Perry that he would almost immediately repost to his 300k+ followers. My wife told me I had a gift in photography (I was solely focused on making movies and YouTube videos at that point), and God told me to focus on photography in my private time with Him, and that’s immediately what I did, I went to a few street photography meetups in DC, took a lighting course in my hometown, and have been working the craft ever since.

Micah, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I have always been attracted to movies, particularly beautiful movies. I want to bring different narratives to movies about the black community, inspired by the creativity of a director like Christopher Nolan, creating “1 of 1” styles and concepts. As I build up to that, I have been taking that same mindset to photography while embracing diverse art forms from James Tissot and Pablo Picasso in the 19th and 20th century to even seemingly impossible AI generated art concepts today. I believe people of color are beautiful and want to highlight people of color in my art in the way so many others have been beautifully highlighted for the last 400 years before a lot of brown skinned folks were deemed beautiful.

I want people to know that my company, Servant Studios, LLC, is designed to empower the people that stand in front of my lens and capture their essence in full. It is also meant to experiment and model this idea that anything really is possible with consistency and discipline in following God’s plan for your life. Our YouTube page, Servant Studios, will be covering my journey as a professional photographer while also providing tutorials and ideas on everything about cameras that I know, with an emphasis on encouraging and equipping people to just start.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I used to believe that hard work was all it took. I aspired to be a division 1 basketball player, even with engineering as my major. There was this one kid that was alright during our first year in college, but I was way better than him. Over the next few years, I would always see him in the gym – I literally remember thinking he was wasting his time practicing so much. But by the time we were seniors, I started training seriously for basketball again, but found he was already on the team. Though I likely trained harder than him in spurts, I was nowhere near is consistency. While he was steady and focusing on the boring for 4 years, I’d be at it for months at a team and then take a break, creating a lot of issues I had to fix in a short period at the end. He taught me that it’s the boring and consistent that leads to accomplishing those unimaginable dreams, not the loud, flashy or even super difficult and strenuous. That mentality, consistency and discipline, is what has changed the way I approach my life.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective people has been a book that reshaped how I viewed personal accountability. I used to make excuses for why I wasn’t where I wanted to be in life. This book annihilates all of that by being clear and concise on what I now know to be true: that everyday we make a ton of choices and if we realize that and start intentionally choosing differently, we will unlock so many things that are closed off to us because of our own limited minds. Most people don’t have the time to do a lot of things because things because in their minds, they “have to” attend to this or that and there isn’t anytime left in the day to work on the business or listen to God or take your wife on a date. The idea that you can put your job or society its place and that it doesn’t have to be the number one priority in your life is a fairy tale to many, only for the wealthy few. I have learned that we just accept a lot of things in life and don’t push back or challenge even ourself to think outside of the box and audit how we spend our time.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://ServantStudios.com/portfolio
• Instagram: @srvntstudios
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@servantstudios?si=rZ3SUvyKu1QrXAWO

Image Credits

All photos shot by Servant Studios

Portrait of poet Jasmine Sims (back turned)
Portrait of model Aisjah Washington (on motorcycle)
Portrait of model Tiffany Tsai (white circle)