We caught up with the brilliant and insightful DENNIS DUNBAR a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

DENNIS, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What do you think it takes to be successful?

Over the course of having my own business for 30 some years the most important lesson I have learned is never become complacent. This means always working to sharpen your skills, to grow, and to keep reaching out to find new clients. Especially for Creatives, it’s easy to feel comfortable with your current client list, especially if you have one or two who you rely on for the bulk of your business.
But we need to remember that it just takes one small thing, usually out of our control, for those clients to go elsewhere. That’s why no matter how busy one is, or how satisfied with your client base it’s always necessary to keep networking, marketing, and reaching out to new clients.
And the drive to keep improving, to keep learning and building new skills will keep you excited and engaged over the long run leading you to greater satisfaction with you career and what you do.

DENNIS, 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?

Back in the early 90’s I worked with advertising photographers as an assistant, trying to figure out how to strike out on my own. Then I started to hear more and more about this coming technology that would enable you to manipulate photos on a computer. Soon I felt compelled to learn as much as I could about this, and in February of 1991 I found myself signing a lease for an expensive “Wicked Fast Mac IIfx”. This meant I had to figure out how to build a business around this new technology.
So I reached out to the photographers I knew and worked with offering to retouch images for them. One of those photographers was JP Morgan who also shot the images Roger Corman, the King of B-grade Movies, used in his movie posters. When Roger wanted to find someone who could build these posters on a computer instead of the old cut and paste production JP introduced me.
And that was how I built a career retouching movie posters. A

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

I love working with Creatives helping to bring their vision to life. As a digital artist/retoucher my job is to listen to my clients so I can clearly understand what their vision for the images they send me is, and then do all I can to bring that to life.

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

Over the years I’ve always worked to expand my skills to become the best I can at what I do. And a big part of this has meant being willing to share my knowledge and experience with others. Teaching workshops, helping others learn how good retouching techniques has gone a long way in helping me build a reputation as a knowledgeable and skillful artist. The most amazing thing about teaching too is that the more you share what’s in your bag of ‘tricks’ the more that bag grows. In sharing you learn to look at things from a different perspective, or are prompted to look at something in a different way due to a question or comment someone else shares.
And in these days of Social Media building a reputation as a generous and supportive person pays off great dividends.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.dunbardigital.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dennisdunbar/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ddunbar
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dedunbar/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/DennisDunbar