We were lucky to catch up with Jason McElweenie recently and have shared our conversation below.

Jason, appreciate you joining us today. Do you wish you had started sooner?

I really do but the stars didn’t align for me at a younger age. I’ve always had a creative mind but I didn’t have the tools back then that I have now. I can’t draw to save my life, music is a very complex thing for mind, and I was afraid of film photography due to all the variables. That doesn’t mean I didn’t understand the end result. In fact, I felt them very deeply. I knew what emotion I was feeling because of it. I’d always dreamt of being able to design an album cover or creating photos that impressed people but I had to wait until the advent of digital design and digital photography. Having that unlimited access to learn these tools on my own timeline finally opened up that cavern of creative thoughts I had inside of me. Sure, I wish I’d gone there sooner but I’m glad it actually happened at all.

Jason, 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 was born in Galt, Ontario just west of Toronto. After high school I traveled a lot throughout Canada, living places like Banff, Vancouver, and Montreal. I cherish that moment of my life for a variety of reasons. It gave me access to people from all cultures and walks of life. It helped center my internal personal beliefs that we should all just be nice to each other.

In that time I tried my hand at a couple of different careers but nothing really clicked for me. I decided to go back to school for digital design with a website design focus. This course taught us graphic design and website coding. I was invigorated. I finally had the tools to do something creative and I knew what I was going to do with my life.

I ended up moving to Houston a few years after that and got on with a digital marketing company. While there I found a whole new world of things to learn. Now fully a designer and a website coder I added search engine marketing and optimization to my list of capabilities. My other side of the brain, the one that spent countless hours in my life trying to find patterns in things like music or bricks on a wall found a center. From there it went into higher levels of marketing and design like hyper-target and/or persona. with my team we would study markets and the people that make decisions and then build campaigns around that persona.

Outside of my day to day I was learning as much as I could about photography. After learning about the psychology of graphic design and how to lead the eye I worked that into my picture making. This led to some side hustles like concert/event and real estate photography. I’ve also had a solo show and another one coming up in November.

The past 18 months or so I’ve been generating AI images via MidJourney. I spent a lot of time generating a wide variety of different images that a look like a lot of other images. I never liked it but I was learning the tool. I’ve finally found a way to harness it to give me images I’ve had in my head all my life.

I’ve always been fascinated by the fallacy of the American Dream and all of its trappings. The images I generate tend to have a loneliness to them. I’ll work on a theme and go from there. A lot of the images I generate tend to have one person, usually a man, because who needs more creepy AI images of pretty women. They will usually involve a classic car, not a flashy muscle car but the mundane ones. The American car originally represented freedom. Freedom to explore the country from coast to coast to coast. That car has ended up becoming a weight that ties us down. I love the contrast of that.

I’m constantly trying to learn new things and they end up benefiting my life and career in a myriad of ways.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

First and foremost it’s the ability to see what’s in my head. That’s the simple answer. The long answer is more complicated. If it’s stuff for clients it’s rewarding to design/build/deploy something that works the way it was intended. When it comes to my artistic work, it’s even more complicated. I found out a bunch of years ago that my personal work allows me to be connected to what I do on a level I never knew existed. I spent years learning the tools and how to create things that looked compositionally correct, which can take a long time for people like me. Once I learned those tools I was finally able to be confident in my work and stand by it. It also instilled a confidence I never really had.

I am eternally thankful to have found outlets like design, photography, videography, improv and now AI image generation. I can’t wait to see what I’ll try next.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I have 2,

First is: be a better person than you were last year. No matter how many steps back you take keep moving forward. Be someone that the person you were 5 years ago would be proud of.

Second: never stop learning. Never ever think you know everything. I am constantly learning new things whether I seek them out or they bash me over the head with that. I read a lot about creative things. I watch a lot of movies and study the composition, lighting and blocking to see why they did it that way. I’ll deconstruct songs in my head to find other patterns outside of the tempo. I’ve always wanted to see what’s behind the curtain with any creative thing I was around. The thirst for knowledge for anything creative still fuels me today and will continue until I’m gone. Never ever stop learning.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.jaymacphoto.com/
• Instagram: @deneyterrio, @budtherepoman, @leicaqfotos, @streetfotos
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jaymacphotography
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonmcelweenie/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@randomrulesstudios
• Other: I review some of my records on TikTok. https://www.tiktok.com/@seeyoushuggy

Image Credits
All images are my own.