Today we’d like to introduce you to Eric Booth.
Hi Eric, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I’m a colorblind photographer and filmmaker, but I don’t capture reality—I engineer it. Drawing from my background in mathematics and my roots as a musician and documentarian, I treat light as a physical medium to be bent, distorted, and reimagined. Instead of chasing photorealism, I design and build my own custom optical tools to manipulate light in-camera, creating highly calculated, non-standard visual experiences.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Breaking into the market on my own terms is an ongoing battle. I often don’t shoot in a familiar manner, which means my audience is naturally fractured. Because I rely so heavily on custom tools to manipulate light and motion before the shutter even clicks, the final results are sometimes surreal (and sometimes my practical, in-lens engineering are mistaken for AI). My challenge isn’t standing out , I think my images generally have a look and feel that are easy to recognize when scrolling through a social media feed, rather it’s matching the needs of clients and audiences that want more human texture to photos in era of AI/phone-driven sharp/enhanced version of perfect photos.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I meet artists where they are at creatively, financially, and energy-wise. For low-income artists, I’ve got a day job (as a statistician) so I shoot their content for low cost or free. If artists, have a lot of inputs and creative energy for their projects, then I’ll dig in deep with the artist, document their creative journey with great BTS/documentary-style content along with the final product, and show up for long hours to follow them on their journey. Where I feel my work falls short is that I’m not the coach to get artists to that point – if they hire me to capture a live show, event, or music video and they don’t have much creative energy behind the performance or concept, I find that challenging to draw out of them and inauthentic to manufacture ‘in post’.
Any big plans?
I’m slowing down my live event and performance shooting in lieu of longer-run projects that invest in the subject being captured – this includes some documentary style captures of a local musician foundation, a nonprofit serving homeless musicians, and following artists that are going through some kind of artistic infection point (reinventing their sound, audience, or style in some way). I’m also helping shoot some local street artists in Austin later this year. I’ve been building out a print shop with intent of starting a local art/photography zine as one outlet of this work.
Pricing:
- I treat my work as non-profit – I do charge when the project can sustain it, but often that goes back into production.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.eric-booth.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eric_a_booth
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eric.a.booth3141
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-booth-746376a/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@StaticGrainMag
- Other: https://www.instagram.com/staticgrain.mag
