We were lucky to catch up with Russell Klimas recently and have shared our conversation below.

Russell, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s talk about innovation. What’s the most innovative thing you’ve done in your career?

Honestly, when AI started to become a hot topic I immediately switched gears because while I love photography and light painting ad while I was socially successful I wasn’t financially successful. In embracing AI I’ve found a way to carve our a niche for myself and be a pioneer at the forefront.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

With most things in my life if something piques my curiosity and continues to keep my interest I tend to want to become the best person in that field. Is this case it has currently been light painting photography and creating images and animations with AI. Being proud of something has generally been pretty foreign to me as I just want to set out to accomplish things because I can. The coolest accomplishments I’ve achieved thus far is setting the Guinness World Record for the largest light drawing by UAV and have a TedxTalk.

The most important thing to me in my work is keeping myself excited by pushing my capabilities and seeing what new techniques there are to learn. I fully believe you should always be doing art for yourself first and foremost and that is what continues to drive me.

Have you ever had to pivot?

At the point that AI became popular in September/August of 2022 I had been doing light painting for around 5-6 years at that point and while I loved it, it was mainly a hobby. I would get the opportunity to speak at photo conventions and create closer relationships with photographers that I’ve always admired but financially light painting is not a stable way to make money. So when Stable Diffusion came out I saw it has an opportunity to be a pioneer in the space and push myself and the possibilities as much as possible. The space is continuing to grow and I’m learning as much as I can, and trying to fill the void in the education portion of it where I can.

How did you build your audience on social media?

This honestly changes depending on the social media, however you are almost always just one post away from going viral. I recently had a friend who didn’t have any social media but has fantastic work. He started to post on tiktok and surpassed me in followers in a week and has over 100k now. On that same token he hasn’t gotten near the same amount of following on instagram. So the most important thing I think is continue to do your art for you and continue to post, there are of course certain strategies to go viral but I find those are hit or miss.

Contact Info:

• Website: lightandlense.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lightnlense/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LightandLense
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/russell-klimas/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/russell-klimas