We were lucky to catch up with Jeff Ross recently and have shared our conversation below.

Jeff, appreciate you joining us today. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?

I actually don’t, believe it or not! My full time job is in finance. That allows me to be able to pick and choose the creative outlets I want to pursue. When it comes to my creative work, I only choose the jobs or gigs that seem interesting or fun to me – and sometimes they can be few and far between.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Currently I’m in two fields of creative work, and sometimes they go hand-in-hand. My wife Jessie and I are musicians and we have been performing together since 2010. We are from the The Pacific Northwest, and it is home to some of the best and greatest independent original artists in the country, which made it a very fun and exciting musical community for us to be a part of. It’s a very inclusive community; for example, on many occasions if an artist performing noticed another artist friend at the venue, they would be asked to join in. It’s always a fantastic feeling when audiences and artists know the words or original songs, and would request original songs, as opposed to covers. Together, my wife and I have had the opportunity to record three original albums, and my wife is currently working on a solo record, which should be complete by the end of the year. Our musical style is more laid-back and easy-listening acoustic music. I like to think of it as a Fleetwood Mac-meets-James Taylor style, with a lot of raw acoustic instrumentation and full of story-telling.

When we weren’t performing, we would be out listening to other artists. One day I brought my camera to a friend’s set and started taking photos – which is where my photography career began, and to this day my favorite thing to shoot is live music and concerts. Though, I do prefer photographing local independent musicians. It allowed for more of a nature or event photographer situation – I could stand back and shoot what was unfolding in front of me, And because of that, and being a musician myself, I like to think I know what other musicians would look for in their social media marketing photography. I’ll shoot anything, and have over a decade of experience in photography, but I will always come back to what leans closer to music. I’ve really been enjoying shooting for other creatives lately – especially ones that are trying to sell a unique and special product. Not only do I get to learn about their process, but I also get to put that photography out into the world to drive other people to these small businesses.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

I think the best thing to do is to share awareness. If you have a friend that is an artist, or even a small business owner, it costs you nothing to share their work and information on social media – which is really at the very least. Anyone can do that! Having that kind of visibility actually helps these creatives tremendously. And if you want to support them further, then you can invest in them by buying their work. Buy an album from a musician (streaming basically does nothing). Buy a dozen cookies from a local baker or caterer. Hire a photographer for a mini-session to get some new social media headshots or a Christmas card. Go down to a local farmer’s market and see all the small businesses down there (spoiler alert: they aren’t all farmers!).

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

The best thing I did was to post that I like, get it out into the world, and connect with other people who have similar interests. Since I share both music and photography on social media, I have two different accounts. For my photography, I post quite frequently, with a variety of shots for each post. One day it could be an artists I was listening to recently, the following day could be from a local coffee shop that I regularly shoot for, or a cocktail I had created and decided to shoot on my bar. Hashtags are a great way to get those photos out into the social media ecosystem, so I need a catalogue of a series of hashtags for whatever subject I’m posting about.

For the music social media, it’s strictly music-based. My wife and I share that account since we both perform, so we will both post photos of instruments, set lists, or where we will be performing on any given weekend. She’s currently working on an album so she may post clips from that process. The way we grow that audience is to give our website and instagram a shout-out once or twice during our sets, so anyone listening can choose to follow. We’ve gained the most going that route!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.jeffrossphotography.com and www.jeffandjessie.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/jeffrossphotography and www.instagram.com/jeffandjessie
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@jeffandjessie

Image Credits
Tyler Sayre (Photo of Jeff and Jessie in the desert) Sophie Magill (Photo of Jeff and Jessie performing at Louie G’s in Fife, WA) All others were shot by me