Part I: About Preston Smith:
JM: Would you be willing to tell us a bit about yourself?
PS: Well, I grew up in small family in a small town in the Piedmont of North Carolina. I was the youngest of three children. I have a brother and a sister. Although I grew up in the South, we later moved to North Dakota where I completed high school. I earned a BS degree in Business Administration from Western Carolina University with a concentration in Economics. In my first career I worked for a large international conglomerate, starting out in Information Technology and then moving into Business Strategy and Development.
JM: Can you tell us a little about what life was like when you were growing up?
PS: Frugal, but happy. My Dad worked and my Mom stayed home to take care of the kids. It was a typical 1960’s family growing up in a small Southern textile mill town. We all had chores to do like washing the dishes, tending to the garden, or mowing the lawn. I learned the difference between right and wrong, and was taught to treat others the way I would like to be treated. We had dinner (my parents call it supper) and discussion together around the table almost every night. Growing up, we always had pets. I can’t remember not having a dog to play with and care for and clean up after. There were also hamsters and rabbits and iguanas around the house throughout my childhood.
JM: Do you have a family of your own?
PS: My wife, Carol, and I have been married for nearly 25 years.. We have two rescue cats and a large extended family here in Kansas. There are 40-50 of us here when we have a family get together.
JM: When and how did you first begin to photograph?
PS: When I was 10 or 11 years old I bought a used Yashica twin lens reflex with several months of saved allowances. At 13 or 14 I built a black and white dark room in the attic. I could develop film and make prints after dark if there wasn’t a full moon. That was cheaper than taking it to a lab. In high school I got a Minolta SRT-100 which I used to shoot assignments for the high school yearbook. Due to the cost of printing, all of my personal photographs were shot on slide film. Not only did that lower the cost of my hobby, but it also taught me to really think about composition and exposure of each shot before I pressed the shutter.
JM: Who were your photographic influences?
PS: I’ve had several. Growing up I was probably the only person in town that subscribed to Popular Photography Magazine, and I still subscribe to it to this day. Then in high school my biggest influences were the Editors of the Yearbooks, and the town Photographer with whom I interned.
I was in my forties when I decided to return to school to study Photography. That is when I met Tom Tarnowski, a Photographer and head of the Photography program at the local junior college. Taking formal classes with him was invaluable. During that time I did an internship with David Morris of Studio 2131 in Kansas City. David is a nationally acclaimed food photographer. I learned a lot about the photography business watching how David planned his photo shoots, ran his business, and interacted with his clients.
In the field of Cat Photography, my greatest influences have been Helmi and Ken Flick. Creating images as beautiful and compelling and flattering to the animal as Helmi does has been a goal of mine. Both Ken and Helmi have been very generous of their time and knowledge in helping me learn the ins and outs of cat photography, and I really can’t thank them enough for that. At this point that mentoring relationship has evolved into a close friendship and an occasional collaboration.
JM: What sorts of things were you photographing?
PS: Family, pets, Christmas trees, friends. I remember playing a lot with double exposures. Nothing serious, and not much of any merit.
JM: Do you ever have the opportunity to go look at older slides that you took?
PS: The first work on 120 film that I did in black and white is long gone. I don’t know what happened to it all. I still have the slides from high school. That was a time when the family had moved to North Dakota and most of the photos are about the new things I was exposed to in my new environment: flocks of snow geese, sunflower fields, sunsets, flooding, the International Peace Gardens, trips up into Canada, sand greens at the golf course, Curling, snowmobiling, snow, and more snow.
JM: What formats (eg. Medium, digital, 35mm, etc). do you use for your current work?
PS: I shoot digital exclusively. Professionally, I am shooting with a Canon 5D Mark II and a Canon 50D.
JM: Is photography a first career for you?
PS: No. I have hopped cars, waited tables, worked in a cotton mill, moved furniture, and maintained landscapes (watered and mowed lawns). I have also been a COBOL programmer, systems analyst, HP3000 guru, IT trainer, computer help desk manager, business analyst, head of a corporate business intelligence unit, and strategic planning manager.
When I left the corporate world and went back to school to study photography I discovered that Johnson County Community College has one of the best programs in the area. I met students there from Kansas University and Kansas State who came to JCCC to get specialized photography classes that their schools did not offer. I also went into intensive Photoshop training. Online Photoshop training did not work for me, I needed to have a live instructor with whom to interact.
And as I mentioned earlier, I interned with David Morris, a nationally acclaimed food photographer ( HYPERLINK "http://www.DavidMorrisPhoto.com/"www.DavidMorrisPhoto.com ) at Studio 2131 in Kansas City. Although you are never behind the camera in an internship, if you watch and listen you can learn an amazing amount about running your own business.
JM: How did your family adjust from the corporate world to photography? I cannot imagine that the incomes were even close.....
PS: That is correct. We are very frugal now. I like to tell people that we live our own lives now. We used to pay people to cook a meal, clean our house, mow our yard…now we eat in (I am a pretty good cook), I tend to our yard, and we clean up after ourselves. I shop sales. I buy groceries at Aldi’s and Costco and Big Lots…no more Dean & Deluca. When I travel I shop hard for the best rates and use every discount I can. CheckINN, PPA, NAPP discounts can cut hotel costs by as much as 50%.
JM: What caused this decision to switch careers?
PS: After a change of ownership and some management changes at the company I worked for, I found that I no longer enjoyed working there…in fact, the exact opposite was true.
JM: What is it that you feel draws you to pet photography versus other professional ventures?
PS: I love cats, and pets of almost all types, although I do not seek out spider or snake clients.
JM: Are you doing other paid portrait/professional work?
PS: I do some other work, such as weddings, Seniors, human portraiture. I also photograph animals other than cats. Cat photography done well is more difficult than shooting people. When I have the time I enjoy nature photography, although I’m not currently well equipped for it.
JM: What is it that gave you the confidence to go pro?
PS: Well, the alternative was to go back to the corporate grind. I came to a point in my life where I wanted to start enjoying the ‘journey’ of life instead of spending every day just looking forward to the weekend or for retirement. I love what I am doing now.
JM: What motivates you in the work that you do?
PS: I love doing it. I enjoy the cats that I meet, and people who love their cats enough to hire me are just my kind of people.
JM: Why cats? It seems that your business is very focused around felines... (LOL, why not cats??)
PS: First of all, I love cats and they like me. I speak cat. So it seemed to be a good fit.
When I first came to Kansas, I went to several cat shows which I really enjoyed. At that time there were a couple of photographers that were working the shows in the Midwest, but often I would go to a show and there would be no photographer there. I saw an opportunity to do something I liked that people would appreciate and value, so I started looking at it as a business opportunity.
Tom Tarnowski, whom I mentioned earlier, once told me that the only way to be really successful in a photography career was to find a niche or a style and become the best in the world at it. That is what I have tried to do. I want to be the best there is. I do see cat photography as a way to achieve that goal.
Purebred cat photography is very much a niche market. It is not large enough for many players, and there are entry barriers that make the market much harder to enter than other photography markets such as Weddings or Seniors. It is a lot of very hard work without excessive financial rewards, which diminishes the attractiveness of the market. It is not a fast growing market, if it were it would attract more competition.
