 All right, well welcome back to Geeks Are Sexy. It has been a while since we have done the fourth Friday of the month show. I'm Jason Laduke from Evil Genius Leadership Consultants. I'm your host talking about business in Las Vegas, success in Las Vegas, and all things you need, whether you're a business owner or not, to build your successful dreams here in Las Vegas. Today I am here with Emily Wilson. She is a photographer. We met at a first Friday gathering a couple of weeks ago, and Emily and her family moved to Las Vegas about six years ago. She, like most of us, are fascinated with the work being done to revitalize the downtown area that you're in Las Vegas. If you haven't been to Las Vegas in a while, or if you live in Las Vegas, you haven't been to downtown in a while, you definitely need to go check out what's going on downtown, not just under the Fremont Street experience, which is still a lot of fun, but go a couple blocks east, see what's going on on Fremont Street East, and then really take a walk a few blocks down to the Arts District, the 18B Arts District here in downtown Las Vegas, and you'll see a lot of great, fun things going on there. A lot of quirky, cool little shops, a lot of quirky, cool little eclectic bars and that kind of thing. So please check out downtown Las Vegas if you haven't. But Emily, you remain drawn to the aura around doers and dreamers and people who have an entrepreneurial spirit, and that's what we got talking about a couple of weeks ago where I really wanted to bring you on the show, and you're looking to help those who endeavor to make of the built world, whether it's a home, a neighborhood, or a community through your own personal energy and passion. I love that. Welcome to the show. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much. So tell us about you. How did you become a photographer? Where did you start out as a kid? Did you always want to be a photographer? What's the story and how you got to where you are today? Well, so in junior high, I definitely needed an outlet for all the ideas that were in my head. Was not great at drawing, was not good at painting, and you know, ceramics also just kind of plateaued. Okay, yeah. And so, yeah, I was able to take a photography class in the 10th grade, and immediately it's like this, I love this. But at the same time, parallel to that, I loved art history. So I ended up, I went to school. All my internships were with curators and museums and galleries. And I went to school for art history, but I always did photography. And then my last year of school, or actually my second to last year, I was in the UK studying. I was taking pictures for the school newspaper and mainly the live shows that came. And that's when I really was like, okay, I really want to make art and not write about it and curate other people's art. That's awesome. I want to make my own. So where were you at in the UK? Because I didn't know you had studied over there. Oh yeah, so I was at UEA in Norwich. Okay, I've been out there really quickly. I did some stuff in the, when I was in the Air Force, I did some stuff in the Lake and Heath area and we had a day off. So we drove out that way just to kind of see what was going on out there. Yeah, so I picked it obviously for its program, but also its proximity to London, which is also the reason why I had chosen UMass to go to and it's proximity to New York. So I could kind of zip down to those urban amazing places and not have to live there. Yeah, that's the, I grew up in Connecticut and that's where the one advantage of growing up in Connecticut is that you're not right in the cities. I lived halfway between New York and Boston. It was amazing. So I spent a lot of time in both of those as a kid and then I went to college in Boston. But yeah, it's great to be close to the city, but not in the city, right? Right, but then of course, after school, it was either, so then I decided, okay, I'm gonna be a professional photographer and I'll start now trying to assist other photographers. And so after college, it was basically either like LA or New York for that. And so of course, I'm gonna go to New York. Right, why not? Went there and then, yeah, I worked at a magazine for about a year and then assisted other photographers and then started shooting on my own. Cool. How do you think your art history background, as opposed to with like a straight visual graphic arts background, which is what a lot of photographers do, how do you think your art history background helped you as a photographer? How did that help build that foundation for you as an artist? Well, I think that, that's a really good question. Yeah, I don't always stick to the ones I gave you ahead of time. Yeah, so I think that realizing that all these great artists, painters, they all started with the fundamentals, they all started with the basics. And then they developed their own style and themes to going off from there. And so I think with photography, you need to know the basics. Okay. There should be a foundation and then you build on that. You know, if you start off really abstract, you sort of lost that process of getting you to the abstract. So yeah, I think about that like Picasso, I think about that, I've thought about that a lot over my career and how they're sort of different phases of my own interests and that's how those great painters were. That's really impressive. One of the things I've learned as I've started to grow as a public speaker and do more professional public speaking is that those fundamentals are really important. I've had to go back to the ideas of just things like organizing a speech or choosing the right word. So for someone who's thinking about going into the visual arts or becoming a photographer, what are some of those things that you go back to over and over again? What are some of those foundational fundamentals that you advise everyone to get really strong on? Well, I mean, the compositions and I think that, you know, I haven't really gotten used to looking at just a screen on the back to make a composition. I still very much look through. You're a viewfinder. That's how I learned to shoot pictures too. I'm a viewfinder person and that's how I do it. And so I think just the basics of composition and light and then how, you know, with the different f-stops and apertures, there's a different feeling that you get with those settings, within those settings, you know, when your depth of field is shallower, you have sort of like a softer image, you know, if it's, if you're way up a, you know, F-18, F-22, it's super sharp and it could be really contrasting. That works for some things, but definitely not. So if you're using your phone for your Instagram pictures, what I heard here is composition matters. Even if you're doing, it still matters. So, and, you know, we make a lot of fun of the people who take that picture over and over again on Instagram and try to get it right and try to get the perfect filter. But that's a lot of what you do as a photographer, right? Is really, you have a vision of what the shot should be and you're not satisfied until you get there. No, yeah, exactly. I mean, just yesterday I was doing a shoot at the Baric Museum on the UNOB campus with doing a portrait of a good friend of mine for magazine and I really, I caught myself even taking three frames of the same composition. I don't think he changed his expression, but it just wasn't exactly right. You know, and so I had to sort of stop myself and, you know, just move a little bit to the left. Do I go up just a little bit, you know? And so- The little details that matter when you're doing something like that. Right, right. And then of course they get distracted because his shirt's wrong, you know, something's wrong with the shirt and then I got it. Right, like mine right now, I got a duty. I always bunches up here, right? So, yeah, but you know, one of the photographers that I assisted early on was a still life photographer. Okay. And for as so boring as that could be on a set, where you're just moving things ever so slightly, but all of that attention to detail really made a great foundation in the work that I do and which is portraiture, whether that's, you know, a human interest story or just like one shot in an environment. Every little thing is, you know, I'm looking at every little detail and if something's off, I can catch it before, you know, having to go back and retouch too much of post. And that was where our first conversation started about some portraits you had taken. Besides your commercial work, you've actually started to grow into this field of sports photography, particularly working with boxers. And you talked about a couple of, you told me and showed me a couple of portraits that you had taken of a boxer before and after his match. Can you tell me about that experience? Okay, so I've always done personal projects. 15 years ago, for seven years, I followed some young race car drivers up the ranks from Dirt Track, one of them up to the NASCAR seat. Okay. So I've always been attracted to the journey to the spotlight. Okay, yeah. And it's just been recently that I was able to just put that into one sentence, journey to the spotlight. Love it. That's the title of your new book. Yeah, right? So with the boxing, I personally started to box. I was looking for something that would give me mental focus and challenge me, I learned something new. So basically at the gym, it's me and a lot of pro fighters. Yeah, for sure. Right. And all these people are just working so hard and the sweat is just pouring off. And so I will just walk up and say, what are you working towards? When's your fight? What's your story? And so I've been able to start to follow about five, five or so... And this is all local here at Las Vegas. Yeah, all local. Five or so six fighters and all at the professional level, all in varying degrees. Some hold titles, some don't. And so I'm working to get pictures of them outside of the ring, outside of the gym. What sacrifices are they making at home? What kind of training are they doing at home? What does that family look like? What kind of sacrifices are they making there? And yeah, I really don't know where it's gonna take me. But I'm doing it. Well, that's the best part of a story like this. You don't know where it's gonna take you and the story's gonna be worth telling no matter what. That's right. And then what I hope is that, I mean, in this journey to the spotlight, it's applicable to sports, entertainment, a construction site, anything that is, people are working on something that's being built or being worked towards, right? A chef in the kitchen. Just all of that behind the scenes stuff. I mean, it's sort of, I guess on my website, it's called Behind the Scenes. But- And you have some beauty, her website is amazing and we're gonna give you a, we're gonna take a break here in a minute, but I want you to finish your story there, because we're gonna take a break and this video is gonna go up separately. I want you to tell everybody when you're done your story about how people can reach you in case they only watch this one segment. Okay. So, but yeah, chef in the kitchen. Chef in the kitchen. So it really, it's just across the board. And that's what I love. You know, I, so I have to be sort of careful with how much of the boxing stuff that I show because I don't want it to be like, oh, Emily just does sports now, you know? And it's like, no, not at all. Like, I'm still doing stories of doers, dreamers, entrepreneurs, people are just really working hard. Love it. Behind the scenes. And yeah, one of the ones that I'm gonna do just next week is a friend of mine, Papa Pizza, who Mike owns Papa Pizza here in Las Vegas. He got number one pizza in Las Vegas. And then fifth in the country, he just competed in New York and so I called him up. I was like, Mike, we gotta do, like. That's a story right there. I gotta come do a portrait. Like we gotta, he has a mentor, so we're gonna do a photo with this mentor as well. Okay, awesome. Yeah. Awesome. Well, we are gonna close up this segment real quick, but tell everyone where they can find your website and tell them how they can reach you just in case, don't go anywhere. I'm not saying, I'm giving you permission to leave. I'm not saying you can leave, but if people only see this segment, tell everyone how they can reach you. Okay, so I actually just launched a new website yesterday and it is emilywilsonphotography.com. It's always been that, but I just relaunched it. It is a beautiful website. I spent a lot of time on it last night. I worked so hard on that. Literally, it took me three days and it is an incredible platform to use. So emilywilsonphotography.com and then I'm on Instagram at EWphoto. All right, well, don't go anywhere. There's gonna jump back in. We're a little bit in flux today with our other guests. So we're gonna bring Emily back. We're gonna talk a little bit more. I don't know what the rest of the show is gonna look like, but I promise you'll get to find out within the next few minutes. So we're gonna take a little bit of a break. We'll be right back with Emily Wilson. This is Geeks Are Sexy. Stay here, keep watching.