We were lucky to catch up with Ellis Vener recently and have shared our conversation below.

Ellis, appreciate you joining us today. Getting that first client is always an exciting milestone. Can you talk to us about how you got your first customer who wasn’t a friend, family, or acquaintance?

My first client who wasn’t a friend or a family member, and who paid me a fee for my photography, was a small magazine in called “Texas Business.” This was 1981 and I had recently graduated from UT with B.A. in liberal arts. The assignment the art director hired me for was a story about business travel hiring small, privately owned aircraft, instead of relying on an airline to get you where you wanted to go. The aviation service being profiled knew I was coming but I had to schedule the shoot around their schedule and hire a model. The model was the easy : I used my brother-in-law, who was a small business owner.

There were a couple of conditions: the plane was only available in mid afternoon and the hanger was really busy so I needed to shoot outside and it was the middle of summer. which meant to things: it was really hot and the light was really harsh. I didn’t own any lights.

I arrived early and scouted the location and decided where I wanted the plane and picked a very low angle so the only things in the photo were my model, walking towards the plane, the plane, and behind that was just the cloudless scalded blue sky. Looking through the viewfinder I could se the photo needed something so I convinced the company owner to get the airport to send over a water truck to hose down the concrete so the asphalt in front of the model and plane would not be something more than just sun burnt asphalt. However it was so hot that they had to refill the truck to hose down the hot asphalt three times. The first two times the water just evaporated immediately.

To make a very dramatic photo so I used an old 20mm lens, recently acquired, and my only camera, an old, worn Nikon F I had bought from a friend. I shot a couple of rolls as I directed my BiL to walk to the plane like he was in a hurry. The most difficult problem I had was figuring out the language needed to direct my brother-in-law to get him to exaggerate his stride so it looked right in the camera.

The picture was originally supposed to be run very small, but the art director liked it so much she gave it a spread across two pages.

And then she hired me to shoot the cover for the next issue.

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

My father was an amateur photographer and I enjoyed helping him print in the darkroom he’d occasionally set up in our kitchen. That was my introduction to photography.

With my parents’s encouragement I was a photographer for my high school newspaper and kind of hated it. So when it was time for college, even though I was a terrible student, my plan was to become a lawyer. It wasn’t until my last year at UT that I took a photography course. I couldn’t get into the photojournalism program but the guy teaching the photo-illustration courses in the advertising program (which was then part of the Art Department at UT) let me in. As soon as he realized I really didn’t know anything – I mean I didn’t even know how to read the LunaPro meter I had “borrowed” from my dad – but had some mechanical aptitude, he did a very smart thing: he made the assistant for all of the other students. Almost all of them were graphic designers who were required to take the class. After I graduated I decided to try working for an established photographer. I assisted for three years and then thought okay I’m 27, I’ll give this a year. It took me six months to land my first big gig: Continental Airlines 1984 annual report.

What I think I do for my clients is help them solve visual communications problems with photographs. The goal of advertising and marketing is get clients and customers interested in the product or services being offered. With editorial photography, its words + pictures with the objective of telling the subject’s story in an interesting way.

The secret of my success is that I strive to make photos which I find interesting, photos that I want to look at for more than a half-second. As I learned for my mentor, the great Jay Maisel, “if you aren’t interested in what you’re doing, what makes you think anyone else will be interested?”

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

Word of mouth from existing clients and having a portfolio I don’t have to make excuses for.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I was based in Houston from 1981 to 2002. The first three years I spent as a staff assistant for an advertising photographer and learning the craft and business. In the summer of 2002 I moved to Atlanta, a city where I only knew two people and they were high school friends of my wife. The reason I moved was love. I had recently ( much to the relief of parents) married and my wife was taking a job in Atlanta so we moved. Atlanta is a very different town has a mindset from Houston so I had to learn how to fit in.

What I did not expect was that by moving I was leaving behind the networks of business contacts and resources I had spent twenty-one years establishing. I immediately had to re-start my business. Outside of my portfolio, my experience, and a little savings, I was starting from scratch at a time when most photographers I knew were really be expanding their business. It was also at the same time that photography was transitioning from film to digital.

All of this made for some challenging times and I found out in many ways that what I thought I knew, I either had no clue about or was rapidly becoming irrelevant.

Twenty years I think I’m doing okay.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://ellisvener.com
• Instagram: ellisvenerstudio
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EllisVenerPhotography
• Linkedin: Ellis Vener
• Youtube: Ellis Vener

Image Credits
All Photos: ©Ellis Vener, 2022