As reported on Wired.
BY JAKOB SCHILLER
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Feature on NFL Minnesota Viking Jared Allen for MAXIM. -
Breaking Bad actors Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul for NEWSWEEK/Daily Beast. Photographed on location in Albuquerque, New Mexico. -
Feature for Field & Stream on Ville Platte, Squirrel Town USA. -
Feature on 60 million dollar High School football stadium in Allen, Texas. Photographed for ESPN the Magazine. -
Sniper School photographed for MAXIM. -
Lyle Lovett for GQ. -
Basketball guru turned ESPN analyst Jeff Van Gundy photographed at his home in Houston, Texas forMen’s Journal. -
Coachella Music Festival in Indio, California for Blender. -
Steve Carell photographed for WIRED. -
Erykah Badu photographed for People. -
On the campaign trail with Congressman Ron Paul. Photographed for The New York Times Magazine. -
Feature on ex cop turned marijuana advocate Barry Cooper and his business Never Get Busted. Photographed for MAXIM in Hutto, Texas. -
Insane Clown Posse’s Gathering of the Juggalos. Photographed for WIRED at Cave-In-Rock, Illinois.
Make pictures you like, not pictures you think someone else will like. If you do, the clients will come.
Brent Humphreys says that’s the best piece of advice he ever got and it’s what helped him develop a successful career in the editorial and commercial photo business.
“That was really a road to discovery as far as feeling like I was a real a photographer,” says Humphreys, who lives in Texas. “Before that I felt more like technician.”
Today, Humphreys shoots for many of the biggest national magazines. Wired just hired him to take a series of portraits at 30 companies for Kevin Kelly’s article about the future of the tech world.
Before he got that advice he says it was a struggle. He says he came out of photo school (Brooks Institute and then East Texas State) trying to mimic other people’s work. Pretty pictures of fizzy soda over ice seemed to sell so why not shoot that.
“You get out [of school] and you think you have it all dialed,” he says. “You think you have this portfolio that is going to get you work but I quickly realized I wasn’t getting the straight scoop.”
The problem was, shooting things the way other people were shooting them left Humphreys uninspired. He needed his own style.
That opportunity came when he started assisting Fredrik Broden, the photographer that gave him that piece of advice about personal creativity. They traveled the world together and under Broden’s wing Humphreys turned himself loose. He developed a portfolio that represented his own vision and the work quickly got the attention of magazine photo editors and commercial clients.
“I finally started to see and feel it as a photographer,” he says.
Today Humphreys is probably most well-known for his portraits and his style revolves around two things: personality and light. Most of his work is lighted as it is because he likes the way a flash highlights his subjects — for better or worse.
“The colors are really hard, everything is really poppy because I think it invites the viewer in,” he says. “It gives you a really honest look at the person or the environment you’re looking at.”
Humphreys is also good at getting his subjects to open up in front of the camera. That veneer that plagues some portraits is gone and viewers get a more real sense for who they’re looking at.
That’s certainly true of the portrait series he shot for Wired. With one camera, two strobes and an assistant, Humphreys made environmental portraits of employees at companies including GitHub, Scribd, Reddit and StumbleUpon. Starting back from desks and labs are the people — with all their unapologetic quirk, style and ambition — whose ideas are changing how we experience and use the resources of the internet.
“It was super guerrilla-style and a lot of fun,” Humphreys says.