We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Scott Williams. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Scott below.

Hi Scott, thanks for joining us today. Do you wish you had started sooner?

I didn’t come to photography until later in life. Up to that point I was kind of a free spirit, trying different jobs, starting a few various businesses and going to college. It took me 10 years to graduate college because I would take time off and I kept changing my major. After graduating, I talked myself into going back to school to be a doctor, once again, starting along a new path. When I was getting overwhelmed with science classes, I decided to take a few photography classes to break things up. One thing led to another and I was spending more time taking photos and working in the darkroom, which also meant that the science end was suffering. Then one of my models asked if I would take some photos of buildings for her boss and she uttered those 5 magic words that changed my life, “and we will pay you”! That led to my commercial photography career, which while successful, because of my timing meant that I had missed the “golden age” of the business by about 10 years. When I married my wife, Niki Gulley, she was an established painter exhibiting at art shows and in galleries. So I switched gears yet again and started doing art shows along side her. Once more I had missed that early window where it was easier to get into art shows, there was less competition and money rained down from the heavens! Long story short, had I found my passion earlier, it would have been much easier to break into the commercial and artistic ends of the business, as well as more lucrative. I don’t think that I would have traded any of my experiences, because it got me to where I am, but it would have been nice to not have had to struggled as much.

Scott, 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?

As a studio photographer, I saw the changing landscape of photography when we bought a $72,000 digital 4×5 camera that paid for itself in the first 6 months of cost savings. Then as a commercial architectural photographer, I was on the forefront of digital photography. One of the things that brought me most of my clients was the ability to go on location, many times in different states and provide scouting images via email in realtime. This meant that the client no longer had to travel with me, thereby saving them money and they could look at the scouting images as a group and tell me what they wanted. On the art end of things, out of college I was sponsored by Kodak to travel to Europe for 3 months to shoot. This is what started me on my art path of European location photography and produced my love of travel. After returning from that trip to Europe, I was hired to work in the photography department at the college where I had been a student, bringing my adventure full circle. This also showed me that I loved teaching.
Finally, pulling everything together, my wife and I combined our love of art, teaching, food and travel into our own business, Art Treks. With our business, we take painters, photographers and tourists to locations within the US and Europe on art and food excursions. As far as I know, we are the only company that offers trips catering to both painters and photographers, with the option for tourists to go along. We had heard from a number of our students over the years that they would love to travel, but their significant other was always bored when they did their art. So we decided to fill a need that hadn’t been addressed. Since starting our Art Treks business 15 years ago we have taken around 250 people to over 15 different locations throughout Europe and the US. We have now incorporated Foodie Treks into our schedule, where it is a week of eating, wine tasting and cooking classes from the region we are visiting.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I guess the main resilience story is like everyone else, Covid. We went 18 months without any art shows and definitely no travel income. So we discovered that if we managed our business differently, we could cut back on non-essential things and eliminate the art shows that weren’t living up to expectations. Luckily we had all of the people who had paid for Art Treks pre-Covid, roll their money over into a future trip. We also realized that we were much happier working less, (who knew!) and decided to start spending more time doing the things that we loved.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

I guess the biggest issue are the things centered around art shows. Most people think that whichever artist wants to do the festival, just shows up to do the event. They don’t realize that we have had to apply, which includes paying for the opportunity to do so. At the larger more prestigious shows, there can be up to 3,000 artists apply for around 300 positions. Which means you have less than a 1 in 10 chance of getting in depending on your medium. Then the jurors looking at your work typically have about 15 seconds to look at 4 of your images and score it. If they have taken a little longer on the work before yours, you may only get about 10 seconds of their time. So those 15 seconds decide if you are going to be able to eat or not. That is the first hurdle. Next is your placement in the show – there are bad areas. Next is how much advertising the show has done to get people out, if there is something else going on that weekend, what the weather is like or if there is another artist with similar work selling for less. We also have people think that the show provides the tent and all of the displays. The event provides the 10′ square space that we have set up on, and everything in our booth is ours. We set everything up the day before, which for our display, can take us up to 8 hours. After the show it takes us around 3-4 hours to tear down as long as we don’t have to dolly out. Don’t even get me started on the havoc that weather causes.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.blind-squirrel.org/
• Instagram: photoguyscott
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ScottWilliamsPhotography

Image Credits
Pam DeCamp