We recently connected with Stefan Glazer and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Stefan, thanks for joining us today. Do you feel you or your work has ever been misunderstood or mischaracterized? If so, tell us the story and how/why it happened and if there are any interesting learnings or insights you took from the experience?

The hardest part about doing something niche like Pet Photography or something like Fine Art Photography is that no one seems to understand that being a professional photographer can be anything but “Weddings and Portraits”. The story is always the same in most networking situations;

“So, I heard you’re a photographer? How do you find the time when you’re doing all those weddings?”
“Photography eh? Seasonal work must get crazy when people want photos of their kids for Christmas!”
“Photography is so saturated, everyone on social media always posting the engagement and wedding photos people do, how do you stand out?”

And my answers fall in line to these questions like this;

“Oh no, I’m a Pet Photographer” which normally returns nothing but silence and blank stares.
“I do a lot of fine art photography working with long exposure, night, and macro photography” which, also, returns nothing but silence and blank stares.

I tend to find myself breaking down what I do, explaining the intricacies of the different aspects of those photography genres, and then, most importantly, how I make a living from it all.

That always changes their perspective on what it is to be my lane of photography. When I can tell or even show someone that photography isn’t all just weddings and portraits, I feel a bit more understood and validated.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

Some stories start when people were kids and picked up the tool of their trade and instantly fell in love. So, being a professional photographer seems like something I’ve been doing or pursuing all of my life right?

Well, not exactly. I first picked up a film camera in high school and enjoyed the idea of taking photos and getting into the darkroom to process them.

That was the 90s. However, the next time I picked up a camera to purposefully do something with it, I was 35 years old. I’ve always been into art of all kinds, painting, drawing, writing, music, and admired photos that had some sort of visual impact. So, when I had a chance to start capturing the world as I saw it around me, I just went for it.

The camera I had wasn’t even a fancy one, it wasn’t even a DSLR, it was a point and shoot digital camera that cost all of 80 dollars. But I had the freedom to go out and start photographing all I saw, and it wasn’t even the usual suspects of someone who gets a camera. I was focusing on the grain in a wood plank, the rust along a barbed wire fence, the lines in the brick wall, and other odd clashes of movement and color.

So, my wife had decided to get me my first DSLR, a Canon t5. A basic DSLR with kit lenses and most importantly, Manual Mode.

I could start experimenting with different settings, longer exposure shots, and understanding how movement and light worked in those shots. I was loving experimenting and exploring with this much more powerful camera. We were living in NJ and there was a lot of great things to shoot and capture. We had gotten our first pet and I started to try and take some more stylized and almost human-esque portraits of Philomena, our pug. To which we started an instagram account for. People loved the shots, and it was a seed of something that we thought would be a fun little plant to tend, which ended up being an entire forest of content and growth for me as a photographer.

However, it was a trip to the Grand Canyon in 2016 that changed my life forever.

While there, I had taken a fair amount of photos during the day of grand views and wide landscape shots. Then, nightfall came and I had decided to head back up to the South Rim around Midnight. And that is when the magic happened. I had no tripod, no remote trigger, and all I could do to stabilize the camera for long exposure shots was find rocks to prop it up and a self timer of 10 seconds before it took the photo.

What had happened was simple, I looked up, saw the universe, the galaxy’s core. I looked around and across the canyon and saw small lights of towns miles and miles away. I saw the eerie emptiness of the visitor’s center and how the lights and shadows painted a scene for me.

It sparked something inside me that I couldn’t even understand. Until we got back home to New Jersey at the time and pulled all the photos from the trip. The photos were beautiful, sharp, and well composed and cropped. Then, I found the night photos, and my jaw dropped open, I found the “thing”. I found “it”. I found my first pillar of photography that I fell in love with. Night Time Long Exposure Photography.

The shots weren’t in focus mostly, some were weirdly cropped, some were under exposed, but they were all lessons and fuel for exploring this more. I wasn’t the only one who was digging the photos, I shared them with a few friends who were already out there in the world of photography in some regards. It was my friend Damian Battinelli, an amazing and often sought after portrait photographer, that said, “You have it, you have the eye, you didn’t need someone to teach you this, you see it”.

So, with my own pet portraits, my night photography, and my occasional abstract macro work, I would launch into a career of art!

Or so you would think.

I did take a leap though, while still working a day job, I started putting together a portfolio and became a commercial photographer.

I worked with contractors, real estate agents, and land scapers to show before and after work, homes for sale, and yard transformations.

And, I hated every second of it. I thought, “Photography is photography”, so I should enjoy getting paid to do photography. But it felt like a job, not even a career, just a job to make some extra money. During that time I was growing my pug’s instagram following with the cute photos I would take of her too.

By the time we moved to Georgia in 2018, I had left my position as a Digital Content Director at iHeart Media and decided it was time to take my love of pets into a full time thing.

Since I had a great following already, nearing 50k followers for my pug at the time, a lot of local pugs and other pet owners started reaching out to me for portraits of their pets.

I had begun honing in on a signature pet shot, the Pet Headshot, and it would make any pet look professional, regal, and larger than life in detail. While this was steady work, I still had been toying with my other loves in photography.

I just didn’t know what to do with all of them. Pet Photography is easy, because people pay me to capture their pets. But, all the photos of my night work, long exposure work, macro work, all of this art, it’s not something people just come to you for.

How do you get people to buy art? Go to art shows? Set up shop at a flea market with prints? Post about it on social media? All very valid ways.

For me, it was chance post I had done on NextDoor. The neighborhood app that has goings on for everyone in your area. Well, I had taken a night to head to a newly added traffic circle in Milton Georgia and some of the surrounding areas, and posted them the next day on the local area forum.

I received a direct message from an admirer of the roundabout photo I had posted. It was the wife of the late arborist of the town, the horse in the traffic circle was a dedication to him. She wanted to buy prints for herself and her children going off to college.

I was touched,

I also had my first fine art sale as a photographer.

I then realized that it’s not just about where you show your work, it’s who you show it to.

So, I started taking different parts of my work and showing them to different groups of people. Art lovers, car lovers, night scene lovers. I even ventured into the web3 space with some more of my off the wall abstract photography art.

It made me realize that I have to not be afraid to put my art in front of people who want to see it. You can’t just put it on your instagram or facebook and hope your followers tell new people about your work. You have to find ways to go beyond that, you have to network, you have to talk to people.

Why is it important to do that? Because it goes from having skills in pet photography and fine art photography, to having clients wanting your skills in those realms really fast. From there, it will start to grow.

I’ve worked with a lot of big brand and smaller businesses with my pugs Philomena and Penny.
I’ve sold prints, digital copies, and more of my fine art work.

What it’s growing into now is a Photobook series of Pug Headshots that is in the starting stages, online courses for pet photography, online galleries across the globe showing my artwork and online galleries selling editioned prints of my work, a podcast, and two books being written about working with pets and navigating the life of a professional artist while also having to overcome a lot of hurdles due to undiagnosed neuro divergence.

And it will only grow more as time goes on, because I stopped being afraid to tell people, show people, and educate people on what I do.

Can you share your view on NFTs? (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

I saw this question coming up somehow, and my view is this. NFTs are in an infant state. Some people do the Profile Picture NFTs, some people do Digital Art, some people do One of One art, some people have different plans with multiple editions that have utility.

I look at it as this;

This is the beginning, it’s had it’s growing pains, it’s scammers, and it’s letdowns.

However, it’s a new way for artists to get exposure and possibly make money. When the big dreamers like Nik Kalyani of NftyDreams step in and try to create a world where it’s not just about “collecting jpegs” and more creating a community where being an artist doesn’t mean struggling, but actually creating a sustainable income for creating art, it’s a game changer for a lot of people all over the world.

I will always thank Nik, because he was the first person who believed in my art in the Web3 space and bought one of my One of One macro photos I did, well before the recent “crash”. Not because “it was gimmicky”, but because he truly loved the art and truly loved the story behind it.

The fact that people like Nik are in that space and leading the charge to help create communities that are meaningful and not there to scam anyone, is the reason why I will always keep one foot in the NFT world. It’s another beautiful avenue for artists to go down and show their work to the world.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

I have a hard time explaining my thoughts and ideas to people. Putting those types of concepts into words (spoken word) is really hard to do for me. My mind will run a million miles a minute and my mouth can’t keep up. Typing helps, but even getting as verbose and detailed as possible will still not compare to being able to show someone a photo of mine and have them get it.

The most rewarding part to me, is having my perspective seen. I have an ongoing series of photos called “Macro Mundane – The Hidden World Around You”. Where I take the most mundane or boring things around you every day and capture them at a very different angle and in high detail. While one might look over and see 2 screws sitting on their table or counter, I see something very different.

I can’t explain it in words.

But I can show it in photos.

When people see these things and get drawn into them, that is the most rewarding aspect for me.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.stefanglazer.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sng.photo/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stefan.glazer
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefanglazer/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ghengis317
• Other: All of my links, galleries, podcasts, and more are here https://linktr.ee/Stefan.Glazer