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

Alright, Caleb thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

Well I think for most photographers it was getting out of shooting just jpeg images with automatic settings and start getting into shooting RAW with manual controls. Jpegs were and are still great, they look good straight out of camera and it was really fun to not have to think about editing my work. But I think getting out of the jpeg workflow and actually getting hands on with the RAW files helped me understand exposure and the importance of manually exposing.

Knowing what I know now, Firstly, I think I could have benefited from switching to fully manual lens sooner. Shooting with exclusively manual lens has slowed my photo making process and has kept me from spending large amounts of money on gear. Secondly, I think moving over to a more complex and more powerful RAW image editor has helped me producer better photos. I think if I used the editior I used now “Darkable” sooner it would have saved me a lot of money and would have improved my editing skills.

What obstacles stood in the way of learning more? Well that would be me! When I was starting photography I had places I wanted to go and things I wanted to photograph. But I couldn’t get anyone to come along with me. I think that’s what kept me from going out getting hours of practice and learning more about photography. But eventually I decided to go the lone wolf approach and really haven’t turned back since.

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

For those who know nothing about me my name is Caleb Lee Turner and I have been a photographer since 2021. It has been my goal to capture the beauty of my city and state in the medium of photography. I got into photography back when I was in high school, when I got my first smart phone. This dinky little phone took terrible images… but my early high school brain loved taking pictures with it. Prior to this device I never had a personal camera so I became hooked. Throughout high school I switched between trying to make photographs to short videos with friends.

This passion for cameras grew to a point where I bought myself my first camera. My first camera was a Sony NEX camera. About a 10 to 12 year old camera. I loved this camera and had so much fun adapting different lenses to it and making little short films with my buddies. Eventually this love for video dwindled and morphed into a love for photography!

What type of products, services, or creative works do you provide? Well I am an aspiring fine art photographer, So I hope to sell my work in print form! I have thought about trying portrait photography as a service but haven’t really given it much thought. I am absolutely open to the idea if a client reached out requesting portrait work! I think my work will attract clients because of the gear that I use. unlike most photographers I use a plethora of of manual focus lenses, most of switch are from the 1980’s! I believe the characters of these optics and the scarcity of them compared to modern lenses will attract clients to my work.

I’d say I am most proud of having the privileged to be interviews for the Nashville voyager. Past me would have never thought I would be interviewed for photography! What do you want potential clients or followers to know about you? Well be keep your eye out on my Instagram and on my website! I have several projects that I am pouring most of my photography time to completing. The project that I think folks should gravitate to is my “Quite hours” project. A photographic series that is fascinated with the emptiness of dusk and the lack of change to things when humans aren’t around.

Another project to keep an eye out for is my “Crying man” project. In this project I use rain to distort the world around me and find beauty in the ordinary. This project will invoke a since of curiosity, nostalgia, loneliness, and hope for a better future.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

Don’t like em. Art isn’t just to make money. NFT exist purely to just make money. I know some artist use NFT as a legitimate way to make money… but those people are few and far between.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The most rewarding aspect of being an artist is making terrible work. I don’t mean this in the since that one needs to purposely create garbage art to feel rewarded, what I am saying is to be very critical of your work realized when you’ve made something not great, moved pass it and create something even better. I feel like this is were alot of young artist, including myself, fall off on our creative pursuits.

We create work that we believe is unique and is complete, nothing to improve on and doesn’t need to be redone. At this stage we are kind of in denial and aren’t willing to take a step back and compare our work to others and listen to critics. I believe moving past this and accepting that, Yeah sometimes I take really crappy photos, helped me become who I am as photographer and has made the photographic process more rewarding!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.calebturnerphotography.com/
• Instagram: @caleblturner_photography

Image Credits
All photographs in this article belong to its copyright holder “Caleb Lee Turner” and his alias caleblturner_photography and calebturnerphotography,com