Photographer Gary Roche
In this episode of the Art Marketing Podcast, I had the pleasure of interviewing photographer Gary Roach, who has an impressive background in both nursing and photography. Gary has been living in Naples, Florida, for over 30 years and has developed a passion for wildlife photography, particularly in the vibrant ecosystems of Florida. Throughout the conversation, we touched on the importance of marketing, building an email list, and leveraging social media to connect with potential customers. Gary's journey is just beginning, and I look forward to seeing how he utilizes his skills and experiences to grow his photography business in California. This episode is a great reminder of the power of passion and perseverance in the art world.
Podcast Transcribe
Patrick Shanahan: …and then it just goes in comes right back out so even if you didn't star all of your images or edit all of your images you're going to be able to put that in there contextually and I I think about I think about guys like you a ton because you know amateur photographer okay I took some took some photography in college just for fun not trying to make a business out of it but I have a huge archive right and I I I would love an AI to be able to rip through everything that I have and and and and categorize it and know what everything is and put it all in boxes and then be able to show me slideshows like all of this stuff is going to be possible and I feel like for guys like you that have probably a pretty staggering archive most of which is not seeing the light of day like if it helped you surface a bunch of it combine it in different ways you know like you could go from okay yeah I've got prints of the owls to all of a sudden you ask the AI go and get every single solitary species of owl that I've ever shot I want you to get the best images that I have framing composition sharpness and put all of those in a folder and then it's like boom you grab that and then all of a sudden you're like "Okay it's time to make a book about owls." Right and now you have three to five shots of each one you can have the AI go and get the scientific names for all of them where they live where you shot them tell a little story all right coming up on another edition of the Art Marketing Podcast back with another artist interview in this case uh it is photographer Gary Roach just met but I have taken a look at his Instagram account which I'm going to show you guys in a little bit and it's suffice to say his work is absolutely amazing which will be very very easy to say Gary thanks for coming on welcome to the show uh love to start with the origin story where are you where are you from how'd you get into this how long you've been doing it all that type of stuff uh and then we can kick things off from there.
Gary Roach: Yeah sure uh I currently live in Naples Florida um I've been coming coming up it'll be 32 years I've been down in Naples uh if you don't know where Naples is it's pretty much directly across from Miami on the Gulf side uh yeah and it's hot we're cooking right now it's in the 90s this week and we're not we're just barely into April but uh been here 32 years I'm actually registered nurse as well that kind of got me down here and I'm still still a nurse uh part-time and photography the rest of the time yeah and then actually I'm moving to California in June so looking forward to that just in a couple months
Patrick Shanahan: Wow where where in California you going to move?
Gary Roach: San Francisco Bay area we're looking at Monterey as well so just just better weather we're just uh Florida's just kind of brutal for about nine months out of the year and my wife retires so we're gonna Yeah take advantage of her retirement and she's probably going to keep working out there as well
Patrick Shanahan: Awesome well good for you amazing so nurse the whole time so you've had a day job and then was photography always just a passion and you went from there and while you're talking about that I'll I'll scroll through your Instagram give people a look
Gary Roach: Yeah um so I you know I wanted to do photography since I was like 20 um and I was doing some underwater photography in my 20s down here but it was you know it was film you know so you had to go scuba diving you had to get like whatever 39 pictures on a roll of film and you hope they came out and all that stuff but now uh but now obviously you can take as many pictures as you want and delete the ones you don't want and it's a lot easier
Patrick Shanahan: That such a good point there was no change in film out back then was there
Gary Roach: No not underwater not underwater and we didn't have autofocus or anything so I was shooting I was trying to gauge distance and your distance is distorted underwater anyway and whenever I thought I got good picks I got them developed and they were horrible and then when I thought they were terrible they came back great so it was always a surprise when I got them developed
Patrick Shanahan: But yeah amazing and when did you when did you start taking it more seriously as a business I mean the sheer amount of hours that you've been into this already just based on these nature shots that you get I mean these are these are not easy to acquire on just one little trip out in the backyard here
Gary Roach: No so it started in 2017 um I had a little bit of money and I said "What am I going to do?" And I ended up saying "Why don't you why don't you get a uh a lens a good lens for your camera you know" and I ended up getting um it was a 200 to 500 millimeter um Nikon I just had a I had a camera that you can get at Walmart it was probably $400 with the whole kit so it was not an expensive camera so anybody doing this or starting out you don't have to have a great camera um a lens is definitely more important especially if you want to reach wildlife if you got that extension and that reach it's going to kind of change things for you and I would just go out every single day I wasn't working as a nurse I'd work three 12-hour shifts as a nurse so I was off four days so my four days off I'd be outside and in Florida we have some great wildlife down here and you'll see a lot of that in my Instagram uh yeah so I would just go out and I wasn't I didn't have any inhibition about like sharing my stuff and so I just started submitting to some local magazines and I got published right away I got published I started shooting in like February and after a few months I just submitted to um Golf Shore Life which is a pretty popular magazine down here and I got I got accepted and I got published I think with them like six seven times and I said "Wow this could be something you know."
Gary Roach: Um and I got a lot of a lot of good feedback on my photography but uh then I just kind of stalled with it I didn't try I didn't do any marketing and I wasn't doing anything to kind of promote myself and the years go by and if I didn't sell anything that was fine I still had my nursing job I still had a job still making money um and I would sell some here and there I started doing some art shows and I did pretty well in the beginning but art shows can be kind of tough because I bought a whole tent um started doing those and my first show I sold like $1,000 on my first show and I was like "Oh this is cool." My second show next couple shows I didn't sell quite as much um I think barely anything and it's a lot of work I mean you got to take your tent you got to set it up
Patrick Shanahan: Long long day on your feet the whole thing
Gary Roach: Oh man long weekend it's uh it's a lot of work and then you got to fulfill your orders and everything after that and you know but you collect the money too so obviously that's a good part but so I just kind of stalled on the art the art shows and but what was uh what was most important to me was doing was just doing the photography so I think like any artist I don't think you really want much to interfere with that like I didn't want anything messing up me going out and just being outside and taking my pictures and that and if I took if I sold some that was fine if I didn't that's fine too but I just really wanted you know people if you get too caught up in trying to monetize things sometimes it just kind of dampens the whole thing out and burns your fire out so
Patrick Shanahan: Kills the joy
Gary Roach: Yeah it kills the joy so that's but I'm at the point now where I'm like nothing's going to kill my joy I don't think you know what I mean like so why not try to monetize it and take the next step and really you know go for it because it's you know Arnold Schwarzenegger said this thing is if you have more than one option and things you're probably going to you know it's you're not focused on 100% on you know success so like I have two jobs which is good it's good backup but like if I just dove right into the photography and start selling I think I could do something and you know he said like he said too you got to bet on yourself so that's what I'm trying to do
Patrick Shanahan: I love it so will the plan be then make the move to California get that going on you just came on board with us so you're going to have the fully featured art website and a bunch of capabilities probably didn't have as easily before is it stop nursing when you move to California and just start hammering it full-time
Gary Roach: Well probably not to be honest I'm probably going to have to you know dive into the nursing a bit but the good thing with nursing is I can work if I just want to work part-time I can work two 12 hour shifts I'll have 5 days off during the week but my mindset has changed where I really want to monetize this and really make it happen so that's what's new and yeah and then California be a great start I think
Patrick Shanahan: Oh yeah absolutely great start I live out I live out here in California too and I absolutely love it so okay couple of shows sold some prints did local fulfillment never took the marketing seriously so despite the the you know very healthy following on Instagram you're at you're at 20k or whatever 21k um you've never had a website up till now and you and you've sort of aside from the shows or just requests here or there you've never really pushed the sales is that correct
Gary Roach: Yeah so I do have a website and you can go to it but um the front page of it is kind of wonky right now I was just starting to trying to update that but I was also doing some workshops I take photographers out here in South Florida um and I was working on a couple Costa Rica options too for um workshops there and that's another thing I want to get into more as I move on here is uh workshops but yeah so I you can see my pictures there
Patrick Shanahan: You shoot you lot you shoot a lot of video now too don't you
Gary Roach: I do um people love video video is difficult though because with with a camera you take a picture you got one great picture you just got to get one picture out of it you know with video if you if you mess it up you know if you don't turn it right if it's not smooth it's immediately going to distract people and it's immediately screwed up you know um so it's more challenging but people love video
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah for sure and it's it's great social media media thought so you you're going to come into this business I imagine with with what amounts to just a massive hard drive full of pictures already that are that are pretty spectacular huh
Gary Roach: Yeah I have um well I had a computer store here in town too so a little bit of IT guy but I have a NAS here with Scott I have like 32 terabytes I don't I'm not filling that up yet but I got a lot of I got a lot of probably too much to be honest when you take when you got that much you got too much you got to trim it down you can't even you're never even going to be able to see it all but I am so I'm so optimistic about what's going to happen with AI and you know how quickly everything's dropping with AI
Patrick Shanahan: Good question for you there period how much have you played around with AI and are you using it regularly in any capacity
Gary Roach: No I'm not really using it too much I just kind of use um the only uh I use the Topaz product for the photography the uh photo AI I use that um but yeah so that's another that's another uh thing I I signed up for you guys with the the AI um Art Helper
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah Art Helper that's it
Gary Roach: So I just signed up with that so I'm looking forward to that and the guy that kind of let me uh led me into you guys he was showing it to me and it looks amazing yeah like as far as just and that's where I that's where I'm lacking is the marketing and how to approach different people with my uh with my stuff you know uh interior designers all that good stuff and you guys have it kind of formatted out so what do I what do I say how do I present this you know the best way so I'm looking forward to it.
Patrick Shanahan: 100% but even even on the AI side of things like the cost of storage is going down to nothing right so we're going to be in a zone and we're we're contemplating how quickly we want to build this into Art Helper but the idea is is that you'll give it let's just say the 32 terabytes whatever it is maybe it's 15 terabytes you don't have the whole thing filled up whatever and the AI will just rip through every single solitary picture and contextualize it to the best of its ability if you've already given it metadata in Lightroom or whatever else it'll incorporate that metadata but you can once it's all done and you have that centralized database you're going to be able to search your entire archive and go "Show me all the pictures I have of owls show me all the pictures I have of the owls in certain days." And what's going to be so important about that for you is like you probably didn't do good contextual metadata on all of those things or maybe you did I don't know but every trip every location every vacation spot every everything all of that can be used in the marketing right and the thought of you going through all those photos by hand one by one are you kidding me it's like you know it will never happen it just wouldn't you know
Gary Roach: No
Patrick Shanahan: So the fact that AI can chew through it and what's what's even more insane than that is like AI is not perfect but AI can go through all of your folders and say "Come back." You're going to be able to prompt it and say "Come back with shots only that have perfect framing perfect composition perfect lighting and perfect focus." and then it just goes in comes right back out so even if you didn't star all of your images or edit all of your images you're going to be able to put that in there contextually and I I think about I think about guys like you a ton because you know amateur photographer okay I took some took some photography in college just for fun not trying to make a business out of it but I have a huge archive right and I I I would love an AI to be able to rip through everything that I have and and and and categorize it and know what everything is and put it all in boxes and then be able to show me slideshows like all of this stuff is going to be possible and I feel like for guys like you that have probably a pretty staggering archive most of which is not seeing the light of day like if it helped you surface a bunch of it combine it in different ways you know like you could go from okay yeah I've got prints of the owls to all of a sudden you asked the AI go and get every single solitary species of owl that I've ever shot I want you to get the best images that I have framing composition sharpness and put all of those in a folder and then it's like boom you grab that and then all of a sudden you're like "Okay it's time to make a book about owls right?" And then you now have three to five shots of each one you can have the AI go and get the scientific names for all of them where they live where you shot them tell a little story
Patrick Shanahan: And you know I feel like guys like you especially when I when I look at it I mean you're obviously only putting your best stuff up you're not you're not you're not pussy-footing around you guys got to go check out his his page after this I'll link it up everywhere but you have some National Geographic level shots in here all over the place
Gary Roach: Thanks appreciate that
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah I mean I I think it's obvious for anyone to see it's like normally you get like a good photo here or there some incredible framing here or there you don't get every other image is like really really pretty staggeringly amazing so I'm
Gary Roach: Thanks
Patrick Shanahan: I'm very excited about that side of things I'm also I really want you thinking about the photo books because I think the photo books they play like a really unique role I love this one like literally owl and a cactus my brother is obsessed with owls um so that I got to send this to him but anyway um I think in terms of revenue have you ever even contemplated a book or thought about doing a book
Gary Roach: Uh when I first started people were like "You should make a book you should make a book." But this hasn't gone anywhere
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah
Gary Roach: Yeah but yeah I'm open to it 100% whatever you know whatever I can do yeah to start bringing in revenue
Patrick Shanahan: What What percentage you know the only bummer is that you probably have a massive archive of Florida right and now you're about to leave Florida um so you might have to have somebody carry on some sales for you you know ground and pound status but is the majority of the archive Florida
Gary Roach: Yeah majority is uh I just did Alaska this August so the grizzly bears you see there are uh those guys um I've done Costa Rica five times um and and so the other thing is I was travel nursing for the last four year well since 2021 so like yeah four years I've been back in April since October but I've been all four corners of the country so we were up in Maine I did a job there for three months as a nurse and then uh we picked up our new camper there and then ended up extending the time there we did Nova Scotia Newfoundland so I got stuff up there too I got a lot of stuff I hadn't even touched you know then uh Washington State I was in Spokane Washington ended up going up to Alberta Canada which is just if you guys have never been there it's amazing stunning it's our Rocky Mountains but just a whole another level yeah it's crazy and then yeah so then I did two gigs in um Arizona so I was able to you know kind of translate that uh traveling into the photography obviously you saw the the owl and the cactus that wasn't Florida I was in down in Arizona but uh Florida but I'm excited to be uh to photograph in uh California as well they uh I was just out for Christmas and we kind of toured up and down the coast a bit and went up to we tried to make it to so this is when the LA fires were going on so we were in but we're up in Monterey and uh we're in the camper and kind of tried to make our way up to the Oregon coast there to to Oregon I should say and we were flooding so it was raining real hard there so we had flooding in the north and then then LA was on fire so we had to cut that short a little bit uh but anyway and going back to your point of uh like marketing here um ironically I have a friend that's retiring in the fall and I still have my art tent and I still have all the supplies for that and he uh I kind of mentioned to him was like "Would you want to do art shows?" And he's like you know he really thought about it he said "Yeah like he's like with your work and this opportunity for me," he's like "I I could see it working you know." So and we have our art shows down here in the winter time in Florida so that wouldn't be till next you know next fall they would start They're just finishing up now with the season here but anyway yeah so he could be my he could be my art show guy down here and I'm in California and Yeah so it's exciting
Patrick Shanahan: I love I love the you know and and we have some case studies with some some Art Storefronts customers that you probably end up meeting you know virtually or whatever over the years but the the combo of the book being this beautiful thing on the coffee table driving the desire to have the beautiful thing on the wall or having the beautiful thing on the wall driving the desire you know and it's like one of the one of the most important things about this business and especially you like you know getting restarted let's say is the whole thing comes comes down to how many customers you acquire per year how many new customers you acquire per year and there's a couple of reasons for that one the easiest customer to get is the one that you already have i.e. it's easier to get someone to come back and purchase again than it is to get someone new to purchase for the first time and then two sort of just the phenomenon of collectors in this business right like an artist a photographer's number one goal is to get as many collectors as possible because they're going to keep coming back year after year after year and buying more and more and more right so when you isolate yourself to just wall art wall art is like a little bit more of a friction-filled decision i.e. I got to talk to my spouse I got to go home and measure is it going to dovetail with the furniture do you know am I going to get a frame I'm not going to get a frame but a book is like oh hell just take my card you know slide it whatever and then the book goes home with them you get an email address they're on your email list you just acquired a customer chances are they're going to look at that book and then a month or two later they're going to be like "Let's get a print," you know and and so it's such a it's such a a powerful driver right and I feel like it really works on the nature niche you know it really really works on the nature niche and the wildlife niche
Patrick Shanahan: One other big thing that I think definitely you want to spend some time on is like and you said it right like we've we've lived through the evolution you and I because we're similar in age I'm sure um where photography was hard the equipment was expensive developing was expensive you know the the equipment wasn't as good we've watched it go from that all the way down to everyone has a pretty decent camera in their pocket 24 hours a day right and so with that the sheer number of shots of amazing things has expanded and blown up and and exploded right and you know even on Instagram for instance you know it's where everyone spends their time or take take insert whatever social network you want you can be a significantly better photographer and better well-traveled and have better equipment and have better photos but it's like you're just another tree in the rainforest for how many images there are out there and so why do I bring that up what can really differentiate you and set you apart is when you incorporate in some of the story of how hard it was to go and find that shot of what happened when you were there with that shot of what's going on with that animal of what happens in this particular swamp in Naples for what reason do you know so really challenge you to start thinking along those lines ahead of time because the more story that you can incorporate in and really the more anything okay the more anything
Patrick Shanahan: And like another just fantastic use case and I I can just show this off in real time and give you an example right like another fantastic use case uh again of AI is like okay so I'm going to pull up this is going to take me a second to get this all dialed in but I'll show you I'm going to pull up some of your images right and let's just say I download a couple of the owl images right and I have this little plugin that lets me download directly from Instagram so it's just going to give me these like okay so you you have you have these great owl shots and I'll see if there's any more there's one more right okay so I'm going to stop that screen share I'm going to pull up another one and in this case just to make things faster I could use um I could certainly use uh Art Helper to do this too but I'm just going to use ChatGPT because it's right here and it's faster so okay I just downloaded those images right I'm going to upload those images that I just downloaded of your work and let me just grab them here this will take me just a second where's my download folder I've been like a lifelong PC guy that just switched to a Mac so I'm just not fast at things anymore sadly
Gary Roach: Yeah I was there I'm Mac now too
Patrick Shanahan: Are you Mac now too
Gary Roach: Oh no I'm on Mac yeah I've been Mac for a couple years now was PC used to fix PCs actually as a business as well
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah anyway yeah I mean like you know my literally my whole life on PCs I had a buddy that built them and just like he was so good at it you know um that I would get like these screaming like out of control machines but okay hold on let me get some of these owls but what I'm talking about is like you know you really want to start thinking now because especially you you're going to be processing a lot of these images for like the first time right um and and getting them up on the website and deciding what you want to put on the website and what capacity right so can you see the ChatGPT do I have that up no I don't let me get it up all right so this is the type of work that I'm talking about it's like I just grabbed three of your owl images right and what I would do first is I would say please please create a color palette that dovetails well with these images I can't type I should have probably just done my little text thing and so what the AI will do is it will look at these three images and come up with like a beautiful color palette that would work with it incredibly well right like these are the colors that just perfectly dovetail and you go you make an Instagram carousel and you say "Okay show these colors right with like the squares and what the color is underneath it." And you already get people thinking about the shades of what what their house what their furniture looks like that matches those right that dovetails perfectly with what the owls are and instantaneously instead of just a photo of an owl which is a beautiful thing you have a photo of an owl and you have what is that individual photo dovetail with from an interior design standpoint right and then you can get some of the room mockups out of ArtHelper and then you tell a little bit story a little bit of story about the the type of owl that it is where it's native and then instead of just presenting you know a photo which is what everyone does on Instagram all the time you're starting to cook with gas with like real story you know like a backstory and some some additional elements that like set it off and and and really make it pop off from the page so that's that's what I'd say
Gary Roach: Absolutely
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah it's um it's amazing but you'll have Art Helper too and Art Helper makes all of it easy but that's the beautiful world that we're going to move into and I love talking about it I would say for you priorities are don't worry about the website just get it up get whatever you can get on it pick your print provider you should probably choose Bay Photo because you're going to be living like you know where I'm literally going to be around the corner from Scotts Valley where I just looked up where Scotts Valley was and I had an idea but it's right around the corner from where we're going to be living so
Gary Roach: Yeah I'm excited for that
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah so you're going to be able to pop in and you can look at your prints if you want to which is really really cool
Gary Roach: Sign them if it's like gonna be a more of a that kind of print
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah yeah super local local I mean you could go and pick them up if you had to and just you know sign them
Gary Roach: Yeah could go right into the shop sign them and then get them shipped out
Patrick Shanahan: I think that's going to be amazing um but you want to just get live as quickly as possible and start selling as quickly as possible and then literally start thinking about the photo books right out of the gate that's what I that's where I would spend my time because you know especially the economic situation that we're in right now which you know you got to call it dicey at best inflation's raging some people think we're in a recession some we're not you know I people are struggling out there and art sales are down significantly across the board it's just like you know kind of known knowledge so when you have those books that more equally equate to a lower dollar purchase than some of your bigger prints you're also going to have impulse type of items that you can buy right so I want to start seeing these things on your Instagram profile like immediately immediately
Patrick Shanahan: And I would also so talk to me talk to me about your camper operation and your wife loves camping I take it she loves going with you on these things
Gary Roach: Yeah my wife my wife loves it so um out in California you guys have a company called Four-Wheel Camper they're out of I think they're outside of San uh Sacramento and that's their main headquarters but they uh I've been loving their campers for a long time go out to Colorado a lot and would see them we don't see them too much out on the East Coast I've only seen a handful in Florida to be honest but I have it on a yeah it's a 2023 model I bought brand new picked it up in New Hampshire because that was one of their distribution points they had three on the east coast and New Hampshire happened to be tax-free
Patrick Shanahan: Amazing
Gary Roach: Um so that's why I saved a little tax and then we turned that into a vacation with Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and stuff for that uh summer two two summers ago um yeah but it's great so if you've never seen one it basically goes in the back of uh you could be either on a flatbed pickup truck or it could slide into the back mine slides into a Tacoma and um yeah it pops up to uh six and a half foot um when it's open and the bed is over the cab and it pulls out to a king size if you want it I mean it's huge you don't even pull it out that much because we don't need to it's got a little table and two chairs to sit it's got a I have a yeah I got a two-burner stove it's got a furnace uh and it's got a little fridge too I put the fridge in myself so
Patrick Shanahan: So you're you're ready you're ready to go and you can take that thing off when you need it
Gary Roach: Yeah yeah uh California is waiting for me so I can't wait to get back out there and get in it
Patrick Shanahan: Amazing amazing well I can't wait to see what you do and you know I I would love to check back in when you've been six months at it or nine months at it you know because you you got a lot of marketing muscles to build up we got to get you going on an email list more consistent marketing on Instagram let alone having the website but you know you can uh it's exciting it's exciting the first couple of months finally getting any other questions you have for follow-ups or anything else
Gary Roach: No sir
Patrick Shanahan: All right well you you're you're you're off to a great start in the sense that you're not starting with an Instagram account from scratch right um we definitely we definitely have some best practices on Instagram that you're going to want to bolt in and add but you know you'll be drinking from a fire hose the minute you start going through all this stuff anyway there's so there's so much stuff to learn but great talking to you Gary can't wait to uh to see where you take this entire business the work the work certainly holds up can't wait to see the photo books and uh maybe we'll see you in California soon
Gary Roach: All right thanks Patrick appreciate
