Today we’d like to introduce you to Stephen Bay
Hi Stephen, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Landscape photography is my second career. I grew up in Canada and attended university for engineering. I move to California to pursue graudate studies in Computer Science. After I finished I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area with my wife and began working as a data scientist.
As part of this career, I had to travel to various conferences in order to present my work. While I was traveling, I would often take a bit of time off afterwords to see and photograph the local area. I got to see many different places in Europe and Asia and my love of travel photography blossomed. I couldn’t stop thinking about photography and if I wasn’t working, I was photographing.
However, after about a decade of work for big corporations, I realized that I wanted to leave that lifestyle and try something else, something completely different. My wife felt the same way, so we sold our house and quit our jobs. We then traveled around the US for about a year just seeing the country. Eventually we started to miss California and decided to move to San Diego and settle down here.
Once I landed in San Diego I decided not to return to my engineering career and instead move to photography to a full-time profession. I focused on making beautiful landscape images of the city.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
When I started selling my photography as prints, people told me not to bother. That everything has already been photographed and that my work would be lost in a sea of other photos.
While it’s true that the photography market is very saturated with an incredible amount of imagery, I’ve always tried to make my photography unique. I enjoy the challenge of taking a historical landmark that everyone has seen and for which there are millions of existing photographs and then coming up with a new image with a composition that hasn’t been done before.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I specialize in landscape photography prints of the San Diego area. I try to capture local landmarks and scenes in the best conditions when they are at their most beautiful. I search for unique views and conditions that haven’t been photographed before. Sometimes this means reshooting a scene a dozen times until I get the image as perfect as I can make it. I think print my images with the best modern printing techniques on the finest media.
Can you talk to us a bit about happiness and what makes you happy?
The joy of printing! I love printing my work and making large artworks of my photography to share with others. There is something very rewarding about taking your art which exists in digital form on the computer and then turning it into a tangible object that you can see without being glued to a monitor. The fact that people enjoy my work so much that they are willing to buy my prints is very gratifying.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://stephenbayphotography.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stephenbayphoto/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stephenbayphoto/
