Today we’d like to introduce you to Laurent Ramis.
Laurent, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
I was born in Spain and grew up in France. I traveled to Spain many times to visit my Spanish Grandparents and extended family. I developed a deep connection with the colorful and warm Mediterranean culture through my family, music, and food. Growing up, I developed a passion for photography in my teenage years. I got my hands on various compact film cameras and started shooting everything around me. I finally purchased a Pentax P3n SLR camera that was fully manual at that time. I learned on my own the basics of mastering light, exposure, and film ISO, experimenting with various subjects and settings. After graduating as an engineer in France in my early twenties, and helped by the fact that I was speaking Spanish, I found my first job as an IT engineer in Mexico for the Mexican subsidiary of a French electric manufacturing corporation.
During my two years there, I spent all my weekends traveling around Mexico with my camera around the neck, fascinated by the colorful diversity of this immense country, full of visual (and culinary) flavors and contrasts. From the beaches of Acapulco to the top of the Popocatepetl volcano at 17,800 feet, I took my camera with me everywhere, photographing majestic landscapes and the most interesting people. I took advantage of being in the American continent to backpack to Central and South America including colorful Guatemala, Belize, and the Amazon forest and beaches in Brazil. I still have so many great memories from these trips in my head. Back to France and responsibilities. I started a career at a consulting firm in Paris, leaving after three years to create my own multimedia startup providing video production services and website design. During these years, I had the chance to meet many highly creative people in various categories involving photography, videography, and design, and learned a lot in different creative and technical fields. Trained as an engineer and exposed to multimedia environments, photography became a true passion and obsession at times. I continued traveling in Europe, North Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean Islands, always backpacking, the best way to find and photograph the unexpected including amazing people.
Then my life took a turn. While I was vacationing in California to capture more wonderful images, I met the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Like me, she had a Mediterranean background, being the daughter of a Spanish mother and a French Moroccan father, and she was also speaking three languages. She was an international class pianist, a designer, and paintings collector. We connected instantly and got married one year later. We decided to start a family in Southern California and of course taking more pictures and videos of our babies growing up. That is when we decided to combine our respective talents and passions to create a photography studio dedicated to capture and document love, through wedding and family events. We made the switch from film to digital photography at that time which opened the door to so many new possibilities. Petal of Light Photography was born in 2008 and has been growing since then in San Diego, which we believe is the most beautiful place in the world to get married, anytime of the year!
We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
I create photographs of couples and family’s love for each other. I focus on capturing smiling eyes, tender expressions, holding hands, small tears, winks, laughs, joy, whether they last a 10th of a second or much longer. Portraiture and illustrative photography is also a key objective to capture groups of people, their outfits, details, the beauty of venues and sceneries, whether it is a sunset on the beach, visual aromas of a winery, or an extravagant indoors decor. My objective is to document and provide my customers with genuine memories of their event, everything that was there on that day and all the people that mattered, in their best light. The final product must tell a compelling story, how it happened, who was there and did what, and the intensity of everybody’s feelings. I want my photographs to ignite for my customers the same emotions they experienced on that particular day, and even new emotions that they didn’t feel before. The final product can be photos on a digital screen, prints, slideshows, videos, a photo-book or luxury wedding album, and they all must tell my customers’ unique stories.
To achieve these results, we work as a team to get prepared for each event, scout locations, build a detailed schedule and plan how we will photograph each event, the gear, and settings we will need. We own several cameras and lenses and use them appropriately depending on each event characteristics. Flashes and strobes are a key equipment in our toolbox. Many photographers say they only work with natural light. I do not believe in that. Flashes, diffusers, reflectors and other accessories are absolutely necessary to manipulate, redirect the light or sometimes overpower the sun to create images that our customers want and appreciate. We master multiple shooting techniques and use them accordingly depending on what our customers desire and each situation. When the big day comes, we are ready to shoot what we know will happen and ready as well for anything unforeseen. Many photographers specialize in a particular shooting style whether it is photo-journalistic, documentary, illustrative, or more traditional. We do not. We have open discussions with our customers before their event and interview them about their preferences, and then we deliver the style they are looking for. This work includes the photo editing phase when we edit all the pictures that we deliver to our customers according to their preferences. Despite this customer-centric approach, we have a tendency to deliver images that are pretty colorful, contrasty, a bit dramatic in nature which I believe convey stronger and more intense emotions. Probably the influence of our Mediterranean latin backgrounds and travels around the world especially South America. We tend to stay away from dreamy and soft images, that is just our nature. But when our customers ask for it or when the situation or scenery dictates it, we deliver those.
Have things improved for artists? What should cities do to empower artists?
I think conditions for artists have tremendously improved since internet has arrived. Artists can now explore and discover online other artists, trends, and influences, learn from so many images and videos circulating on the web. They also have access to plenty of tools and platforms including social media to publish their own work and potentially get discovered. And all this at no or very little cost. However, getting discovered and/or recognized is a real challenge. With billions of new pictures being published online worldwide every day, how can an artist stand out from the crowd of other artists, the visual noise and mediocrity, and the power of money and advertising? I think artists today don’t have the choice but to become businessmen/women, learn about online marketing, and create a thorough plan and budget to get known. Artists don’t typically like to do that. They, of course, would rather be doing what they love and are talented for which is creating new art pieces. But without a solid business plan, they might never be discovered and have to put aside their art to face responsibilities of life. My advice: learn about online marketing as soon as possible or surround yourself with marketing experts. It might take some time and a little investment in the beginning but the rewards will eventually be substantial.
Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
We haven’t been very active in exhibiting our work but we understand now that this is an important part of being an artist. We have started recently to share selected images on Instagram which seems to be the perfect platform for photographers. Of course, our website shows some of our work as well. One of our key objectives for 2019 is to expand to other platforms, online of course, and why not, offline.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.petaloflight.com
- Phone: 760 410-8060
- Email: contact@petaloflight.com
- Instagram: petal_of_light_photography
Image Credit:
All pictures by Petal of Light Photography
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