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

Bob, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Being a business owner can be really hard sometimes. It’s rewarding, but most business owners we’ve spoken sometimes think about what it would have been like to have had a regular job instead. Have you ever wondered that yourself? Maybe you can talk to us about a time when you felt this way?

I am grateful everyday to be a business owner, particularly with a job that offers quite a bit of flexibility and autonomy. Working with my wife, while also raising two young kids, I literally say at least once a week “thank goodness we don’t have regular jobs”, whether that’s because we can make time to chaperone a field trip for our kids, or we’re running a bit late getting out the door in the morning, or our kids end up sick, and they have to spend the day with us. More often than not, our job can provide enough flexibility to work around all those things.

We’re fortunate that most of our projects allow us a fair bit of autonomy. We will receive a project, go over details with the client, make sure we’re all on the same page, and when it comes time to do the photography, it’s just my wife and I, and we don’t typically have clients on location during the shoot. This allows us to schedule things in when it fits, and if we need to shift things around with other projects, we’re able to as long as we’re still hitting our deadlines.

We are very fortunate to have structured our business around the kind of life we want to live, and although we are generally quite busy, we operate out of a studio on our acreage about 300 feet from our house. We wait with our kids to get on the bus to school every morning, and take a break at about 3:30 to greet them when they get off the bus, and they come hang out in our studio while we finish the rest of our work day.

In the summer time, we’ll walk to work, then head back to the house to eat lunch, then pop down to our garden for 20 minutes to do some watering, or just pick some fruits and vegetables, before heading back to work for the afternoon. It’s small things like that, which truly make a big difference in the quality of life we have.

There are just so many things that make me grateful to be a business owner, and be able to work in a business that works for our life.

Bob, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is Bob Deutscher, I have been operating my own Food Photography business since 2014, my wife joined the business in 2020, and has been working with me doing photography, food styling, and prop styling as well. We work out of our recently completed studio on our acreage in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.

I got into food photography just as I was completing my finance degree. I was writing my last exams in 2010, when my sister and I thought it would be fun to start a food blog. We were just starting to get more into cooking, and thought it would be a great way to document it. I bought a DSLR shortly after that to take better pictures, and the rest is history! I had always loved other peoples photography, but starting the food blog gave me a subject to finally take the leap into learning it myself, so food and photography have always gone hand in hand for me. I always wanted to start my own business, and thankfully food photography allowed me to do that!

I would say our business is unique in that we operate as a very small team, but deliver work that is typically done by much larger crews. My wife and I do all of our own photography, food styling, prop styling, editing, retouching, etc. We have a very large library of props and backdrops in our studio, and we love doing everything from sewing our own kitchen linens, painting backdrops, to building sets like fake pools or backyards for summer photoshoots in the winter!

I am so proud of the studio we finished building in 2023 – it is a 2100 square foot space, equipped with a full kitchen, prop library, area for clients to work/lounge, and plenty of shooting space. It’s been a dream to work out of, and after working out of my basement for nearly 10 years, it has truly helped legitimize the work we do. We’ve always felt the work we produced was very high quality, but now being able to do that same work, out of a space that matches that quality feels really special for us and our clients.

One of the best things we offer clients, aside from a high quality of work, is being very easy to work with. Operating as a husband/wife team doing all aspects of food photography, it allows us to deliver work in a very timely manner, since we don’t need to secure a team of people before booking a shoot. This also helps keep costs down on photoshoots. We’ve had many of our clients who have worked for us for years, and also done work with larger agencies in that time, express how grateful they are to be able to work with us, for the quality of work we do, and how easy it is to work with us.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

The biggest thing i’ve done to help build my reputation, is being reliable. Starting out as a self-taught photographer/food stylist/prop stylist, I had LOTS to learn, and I’ve been fortunate to grow along with so many of my clients. The one thing that helped me in the beginning (and still helps today) is reliability. Even if you’re not the best, if clients can trust that you will finish the job and do good work, that’s the best thing you can do to maintain those relationships and get more work.

Early in my career, there were numerous times clients were so impressed with how quickly I turned projects around, after they had worked with other photographers/creative types, where they didn’t deliver, or it was very difficult trying to get a project finished with them.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

When it comes down to it, one of the most important things for me in life is being able to create things, and to be able to get paid to be creative is an even better bonus. I can get a bit disappointed when I see creative people working in jobs that don’t stimulate them, and do their creative projects on the side for a bit of money, but not wanting to take the leap to try and make a living off of it, as they feel the pressure to turn it into a living would ruin the joy. I definitely understand that, but when you can push through that feeling, and create things you love, while also making a living from it, is no better feeling!

I will often tell people, if you wanted to make me depressed, you would just force me to spend my free time only consuming things, whether that’s scrolling social media, or binge watching netflix. While everybody needs some of that in their life, the more time that I spend consuming versus creating, the less happy I feel.

So whether that’s making art, taking photos, or even building things, planning a garden, renovating a house, all those things require creativity and make life so much more rewarding!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://bobdeutscher.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/bobdeutscher

Image Credits

All images are my own – Bob Deutscher