Blast - Every picture tells a story

This was the first article ever written in Blast Magazine and was part of the 1/1/07 launch.

In his youth, James Crotty may have qualified for the title of Youngest Professional Photographer in Dayton, Ohio.

A shy personality in a family of extroverts, he discovered his passion once he started messing around with a 35mm camera his father brought home one day when he was 10 or 11.

“That was my escape,” he explained. “I was more quiet, introverted, and more aware of my natural surroundings. It was a way for me to go out and explore nature.”

At 13, Crotty had already set up a makeshift darkroom in the basement of his parents’ house, where he developed the photographs he regularly took around the neighborhood and in the wooded area around his home. When he entered high school, he got a job working in a local frame shop. He talked the owner into displaying some of his photographs, and people started buying them.

“I started seeing that people were responding to what I was creating,” he said.

And they’re still responding.

In September, the 42-year-old was awarded a first place prize in National Wildlife magazine’s annual Photography Awards, in the category of New Life. The winning picture, which was published in the December/January 2007 issue of National Wildlife, was an image he snapped in May of two young house finches nesting.

The photo was also chosen by Nature’s Best Photography magazine to be displayed as part of an exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. through April.

Every spring, Crotty said, the birds build a nest beneath hanging ferns on his front porch. This year, after two days of anxious waiting, the eggs hatched. The hatchlings were less than an inch long in their early days, Crotty said.

“I started seeing if I could get a really good shot of them,” he explained. “I kind of know when the babies are the most photogenic, the most interesting. They’ve got this otherworldly look to them; they almost look like Muppets. It only lasts a few days because they grow so quickly.”

Crotty said he was able to get off a series of shots with his 35mm macro lens camera and hand-held flash before the birds ducked back into their nest, realizing they would not be fed.

“It’s just a very brief moment to get them up when they’re looking at the camera,” he said. “The whole look of new life–it’s just something I wanted to capture and I happened to hit it at just the right time.” The birds were only days old at the time the picture was taken, and the fact that their eyes had not yet opened would normally be detrimental to a wildlife photograph. But not in this case.

“Most wildlife photographs are so engaging when the photographer is able to capture the animal’s personality through their eyes,” Crotty explained. “What’s interesting about this one is their eyes are closed, but you can still tell so much about what these birds are going through and the challenge of being so new in the world and so dependent on their parents. [Their wide-open mouths] kind of take the place of the eyes.”

According to Crotty, the photo started generating buzz as soon as he posted it in an online album on Flickr. Complete strangers began marking it as one of their Favorites.

“That one just took off,” he said. “It got a huge amount of hits. I kind of had a hint that it was a good image when I saw that… It was an image that really caught people’s attention.”

After he came across the National Wildlife photography contest online in August, Crotty decided to enter the photograph on a whim.

“When I saw that [New Life] category, that image came right to mind,” he said.

According to Crotty, the picture has a universal appeal.

“There’s both a cuteness factor and a humor factor,” he said. “These little birds, when they’re born, they’re so small. They’re not even an inch long. When you get in close and see all the detail, it brings out their personality in a much larger way.”

Forging a career path

Crotty, who lives in Dayton, Ohio with his wife and two daughters, initially pursued a career in marketing. He worked in various managerial and public relations positions, and even earned a master’s degree in professional communication from Westminster College in Salt Lake City, where he and his wife lived in the late 1990s. But visual art remained his passion.

“I tried to do the whole corporate thing, and it just wasn’t me,” he said. “I always felt there was something within me that wasn’t being utilized or tapped into.”

That conviction strengthened when Crotty was hired by an elevator manufacturing business and assigned to take architectural photographs for use in the company’s promotional materials.

“When I was doing that, I really started thinking, ‘I could do this as a business,’” he said. But it took one more corporate job, a three-month stint with an ad agency after moving back to Dayton in 2002, to convince Crotty he needed a career change.

“I finally had enough,” Crotty said. “I got fed up with working for other people. It was the same thing no matter where I’d go. I thought, ‘Why should I be using my talents to make other people financially successful? I should be using my talents to my benefit.’ Coming to that conclusion is what motivated me to start my own business.”

Crotty said he was brought up to believe that a real career entailed working for someone else, and that job security and benefits were the most important career aspects. His experiences, however, caused him to change his tune.

“I realized, if you have a talent and you stick to it and you follow it to the best of your ability, the monetary rewards, the financial security will come,” he said. “Now I’m finally doing it; I just think I’m about 10 or 15 years late in getting started.”

In 2003, Crotty started his own studio, which he runs full-time, independently.
“A lot of people think it’s a big studio,” he explained. “It’s just me.”

Although he remains partial to nature and landscape photography, Crotty has expanded his lens to business portraits, head shots, architectural shoots, and pretty much anything else.

“I had to diversify my photography quite a bit in order to make a go of the business,” he said. “It really runs the gamut.”

For Crotty, no matter what the subject, but especially for nature landscapes, the intent of the snapshot should be the same.

“A perfect photograph should tell a story,” he said. “It should create a journey that the viewer can follow and use their imagination to actually be drawn into the image.”

Crotty uses technical aspects like angles, lines and lighting to establish a path for the viewer’s eye. He pointed out that unlike painters and drawers, photographers have less flexibility with their art.

“A photographer has to use what’s presented before him or her,” he said. “It’s not only the physical elements or the parts of the composition, but it’s how those parts are arranged… It’s a balancing act, but once you get it you know it.”

As exemplified by the finch photo, the best shots are often unexpected. Crotty said some of his best photographs have come after he’s turned away from the intended subject and noticed something else.

“You just have to be so aware of everything around you and try to let the picture come to you,” he explained. “It’s the ones I’m not looking for that are the best ones.”

His long-term goal is to publish his work, but for the moment, he hopes the award will just generate publicity for his photographs.

“One thing I’ve realized in my line of work is one success leads to another,” he said. “You just keep going after the small successes and they keep building on each other… I’m hoping this will definitely be the case.”

Elizabeth Raftery is the features editor of Blast Magazine.

In Art, Culture, Features on January 1, 2007 at 00:00 with Popularity: 6% [?]