I was born in the State of Washington. I moved to several places in California because my father was in the Navy. When I was 15, I moved to Edmond Oklahoma. That is where I live now and call home. I think I have always been an artist. I took art all through high school. I only took one semester of photography and to be honest, I wasn’t that into it. Crazy, I know!
When I was 21, I decided to get into graphic and web design. I thought the first website I built was the greatest thing on the web. It was pretty bad. The first few years of my design career I didn’t make much money, but I learned so much. I probably put in a good year’s worth of 16-18 hour days working, reading and learning. With little real work experience, being self-taught is hard when it comes to getting jobs.
Toward the end of 2005 I decided to buy my first DSLR, a Canon 30D. I wanted it to take good photos for my design projects. I shot mostly landscape, cityscape and macro stuff. I did this for a few years and then started to get burned out on the design and web thing, so I looked at options to get more into photography. I decided to learn more about lighting. So I bought some books, a few speed lights and read everything I could on the internet. This was kind of like a repeat of learning about web design. Only not on the same level.
Six months after doing the strobist thing and 5000+ photos of my wife and daughter, I took the plunge and invested a lot of money in some nice Profoto gear. Probably a little too much. I was in heaven. Several nice soft boxes, reflectors and grids. Now, with all this gear, I needed to learn how to use it. I took some things I learned when I did some 3D modeling and lighting years back. I started with a 3 point setup and then experimented from there. I am always trying new things when it comes to light.
Now I shoot mostly people, but I do a lot of personal work. I think personal work keeps me going. I still get excited about a strange shadow or reflection. This is probably the artist in me. For my future, I would like to continue shooting portraits and music stuff, but I would like to get into some fashion and do more editorial work. I will probably always do a little bit of design, but photography is where it’s at for me. I recently added a few film and Polaroid cameras back in to my bag. Even an out of focus Polaroid puts a smile on my face.
I am inspired by a lot of things. Mainly life and people, but it’s really hard to narrow it down because every day brings a new inspiration. I am blown away at work I see every day. There are some photographers out there that do it for fun, but are some of the most talented photographers I have ever seen.
Links:
Website: http://travisclancy.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/travisclancy
Google Plus: http://gplus.to/travisclancy
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