By Michael Clark, author of Digital Masters: Adventure Photography

In the last decade, Corey Rich has become one of the most prolific and well known adventure photographers in the world. He has worked with National Geographic Adventure, Sports Illustrated, and the New York Times Magazine as well as corporate giants such as Apple, Nike, and Anheuser-Busch. He shoots a variety of sports including rock climbing, skiing, kayaking, surfing and adventure racing.


Photo copyright Blaine Deutsch / Aurora Photos

I had a chance to interview him recently about his work and how he has matured into the photographer he is today. We discussed a variety of topics but, because of his incredible success, we talked about how he got started and how he markets himself and his work. His sudden rise to success is an excellent example for any emerging photographer to carefully consider and it is also the reason I chose to interview him for this book. If you’d like to check out more of his work his website is www.coreyrich.com.

Note: An edited excerpt of this interview appears in Digital Masters: Adventure Photography by Michael Clark.

Michael Clark (MC): How many years have you been a working pro photographer?

Corey Rich (CR): I fell in love with climbing when I was thirteen years old and it was such a natural progression to start taking pictures of these weekend climbing adventures, mostly so the kids back at school would believe the fact that these stories were real and not some fantasy. It is a hard question to answer when I actually became a professional photographer because within a year or two I was doing everything a young aspiring photographer would do, which was taking courses at the community college, working on the high school newspaper and yearbook, reading every photography book I could get my hands on, and by the time I was a junior in high school I started shooting for the Real Estate section of the community newspaper. They would give me a list of addresses and I would drive around the community and take pictures out the window of each house. That was it. Here I was in high school, I was a junior, 16 years old and I was getting paid and I felt like the coolest guy on the block.

When I was 18, I got a job at the Antelope Valley Press Newspaper, which was a daily newspaper with a circulation around 60,000. The first day on the job, they handed me my walkie-talkie and I became Photo 6. They explained all of the radio protocol and I made it two blocks and got into an auto accident in which I slammed into a car. My first transmission back to the photo desk was, “Desk. Desk. This is Photo 6. Do you copy?” They came back with, “Go ahead, Corey.” My response was, “Uh, I just got in a fender bender.” Of course, their first reaction was “are you OK”? I said I was OK and in the background I could hear laughter; they were trying to be so serious on the radio. Their response was, “Ok come on back, we’ll get it all worked out.”

I was basically this kid that loved everything about photography. The paper paid me for eight hours a day and I would spend 18 hours every day at that office working and printing in the darkroom, shadowing photographers, and whatever they would let me do I would do it. The big breakthrough at the newspaper was when I had proven I could shoot real estate pictures and they began to feed me low-level assignments like “Pet of the Week.” You know, just ridiculous stuff. As a young photographer in the photojournalism world you just need experience. Going to the kennel and dealing with the owner was a world experience that I didn’t have. Eventually I graduated to the point where they would allow me to shoot for the Sunday edition of the newspaper and I would have real assignments. That was big.

Those early days of shooting for the Antelope Valley Press hugely influenced my photography and especially the breadth of experience I gained shooting everything from portraits of the mayor to football games in low light to a family with a drug addiction problem. It was a really diverse set of assignments. I realized years later that diversity and that photojournalism background which forced me to produce content on deadline with no excuses is a big part of my success as an adventure photographer.

No one at the newspaper wanted to hear that your assignment didn’t really work out. It’s 5 o’clock and your filing a picture because it’s on the front page and you have to make something happen.

Now I work in an environment where we don’t have tight deadlines and it is very rare that I am filing a picture from the field. I do feel like my job at the Antelope Valley Press is where the expectation was established that there are no excuses in this business. You can make a million excuses but the bottom line is you either produce the goods or you don’t.

At the newspaper I learned very early on that you do everything in your power to anticipate what you are going to experience at the location; you get there early and you stay late, you keep your eyes open, you work really hard, you pay attention, and you try to anticipate moments. You are friendly, you are interested, you’re curious, you ask the right questions, and you understand the subject. Now I apply all of those same lessons to my photography even though it is more feature-based photography and I have more time to tell the stories.

MC: How long did it take for you to go from that point at the newspaper to the point where you were making a full time living as an adventure photographer?

CR: I always say that in any career, certainly in my career, there are pivotal moments when the realization occurs that I just took a major turn and this is a breakthrough moment. One of those breakthrough moments for me was when I took a semester off from university where I was studying mass communications and journalism. I took six months off. That was like pulling teeth with my parents. My mom was a nurse and my father was a teacher and the last thing in the world he wanted me doing was taking a break from school because he feared I would never go back. I had a really hard time attending my classes in college. I spent so much time shooting for the newspaper. By the time I was actually in college I was working for another newspaper, the Modesto Bee in the Central Valley, and I got along really well with their director of photography and I was very close to the staff. It was supposed to be an internship and it turned into a job for as long as I was willing to do it.

In reality, the pull started the day I started working at that newspaper. I was making money with photography and I loved every minute of it, not the making money part of it, but I really loved the experience of it, the actual pursuit of images and the experience making those images. But I had this realization that the reason I really became interested in photography was to document these outdoor adventures, not to be a newspaper journalist. I realized part way through working at the Modesto Bee that I had really honed in my skill set and had polished and fine-tuned my ability to make pictures and now I wanted to apply it to the outdoor world. I wanted to apply this skill set to climbing and something I was really passionate about, something I knew a lot about and cared about.

So, back to my story, I took six months off from school. I had a Honda Civic and I took out all the seats except the driver’s seat and I cut a piece of plywood so it was like a platform that I could sleep on and cook on. I had 100 rolls of Fuji Velvia (this was the early 1990s) and I loaded those in the car with all of my photo and outdoor gear. And then I drove around the United States photographing rock climbing and every aspect of the sport. I had never really photographed rock climbing but it was in my blood, it was what I cared about. Rock climbing was what I was passionate about. I wanted a lifestyle to support the art. I mean everything about rock climbing was just perfect for me.

So I spent six months driving around the western United States trying to document the culture and the sport and make fantastic climbing images. I actually had no intuitive sense of whether I could do this. I didn’t know if a career was even possible. I didn’t understand the mechanics of how you make money with photography and I wasn’t really concerned with that part of it. I was a kid in college. I was making enough at the newspaper that I could buy a hundred rolls of Fuji Velvia and take six months off. My expenses were low. At the end of that trip I came back and, as promised, I went back to school. I edited my 100 rolls of Fuji Velvia down to the best 40 pictures and I shipped those to Patagonia (the outdoor clothing company) and the next 20 went to Climbing Magazine. I didn’t know anything about the business. There was no book on adventure photography. I had read somewhere that I didn’t want to mail the slides; I should pay the twelve bucks and Fed Ex the images. So I Fed Ex’ed the forty images to Patagonia and the other twenty to Climbing Magazine. I didn’t expect to hear anything and the next day I am sitting in my dorm room and the phone rings. I was a college kid so I pick it up like an idiot, “Whazzz Uppp,” expecting it to be the guy down the hall. Instead it was this older woman who sounded like a professor and she said, “Is Corey Rich in?” I said, “Oh, hold on just a second.” After a second or two I answered, “Hello, this is Corey.” She introduced herself saying, “This is Jennifer Ridgeway from Patagonia. I run the photo department. “ After a long silence she says, “These pictures are really great. Who are you?” I think right there in that moment a light bulb went off in my head. It was that credibility, that acknowledgment that my stuff was OK. I didn’t expect to hear anything. I expected an envelope to come back six months later with a note saying, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Jennifer made it clear in that phone call that my work was pretty good.

The next day Jeff Achey from Climbing Magazine called and said there was some great stuff in my submission and, in fact, “We think there is a cover in here.” And out came the best selling issue of all time for Climbing, which showed a girl bouldering in a bikini top.

Within a few months there was this acknowledgment that OK, you are making some great images, and then a check showed up. I don’t remember the dates and timing exactly, but I got a check from Climbing Magazine for the cover and then another one from Patagonia. When the check showed up from Patagonia that was it, everything changed. That was absolutely it. I realized in that moment that I was done. The newspaper was behind me. I really had almost disengaged in school after that phone call. All I wanted to do was pursue this passion. And within a short duration of time it was on. I would all of a sudden get phone calls and assignment offers. At Patagonia, Jennifer Ridgeway left and a new photo editor, Jane Seivert, came on board. Jane would call me and ask me, “Hey, what are you doing next week?” She knew I was in school. They knew I was this kid. She’d say, “Can you go to the high mountains and shoot something for us?” I’d say, “Sure!” She responded, “Anywhere?” I replied, “Sure, I’ll go anywhere. How about Peru?” And Jane said, “Ok.” She’d buy tickets to Peru for a couple of people and we would travel there and do a photo shoot in Peru for Patagonia.

When I got back from Peru, I bought a fax machine and magazines would fax over their lists of images they needed. I treated the needs list very differently than most photographers. I would get the needs list and that would become my assignment for the month. I was mostly working solely with Patagonia and the climbing magazines at this point. I really didn’t need any more clients. I would get $300 bucks for a photo in Climbing Magazine and at that point I started traveling non-stop. I shot continuously. And I am not really sure how I made it through school at that point. I was never there. I found myself shooting for these needs lists and I became a major contributor to the climbing magazines. There was a period where I think I would own half the magazine every issue. It was simply because I would be pumping so much content in because I was shooting the needs list.

Fast forward a couple of years, I’m still in college, but barely hanging on thanks to traveling so much. The teachers loved it; so did the Dean. He loved the idea that I was out there doing these insane trips. I’d come back after three weeks and he’d call me into his office, close the door and say “Tell me about it.” And I’d tell him about wherever I had been.

And then I got a phone call one day, which turned out to be the next pivotal moment in my career. I had learned a lot at this point. I had transferred to Fresno State to be closer to Yosemite. I had learned you can’t answer the phone like a moron. This time around it was a secretary from San Francisco who said, “I work for the vice-president of creative at this company called Quokka Sports, and Brian was flying home from France last night. He was reading Outside Magazine and saw this full page ad for Patagonia.” It was a picture of a guy getting a shot in his butt with his surf trunks pulled down. She went on to say, “He really loves the picture. We think from a creative perspective this is the look and feel, the real documentary type image we want. Are you available to come in for a meeting?” She didn’t know who she was calling. I could have been a really accomplished photographer or a person who knew what I was doing. Of course I said, “Yes, that sounds great.” So I got in my van and drove to San Francisco and slept in front of their office the night before the meeting. At this point I wasn’t doing much assignment work. I was really just selling stock and the stock sales seemed to translate into buying more film so I would have enough money to travel and shoot more stock. At this point in my career I had never done a day rate. I didn’t understand the business. I had no idea. So I called a mentor friend of mine, Brad Mangin, who runs the Sportsshooter.com website, on the drive in because I assumed this could be an assignment. I asked Brad, “So what happens if they ask me to do an assignment?” He said, “Dude, a thousand bucks, a thousand dollars.” I thought to myself great, I don’t even know what they are going to ask me, but that sounds good.

So, I walked into Quokka and sat down in this boardroom with all these glass windows and Aeron chairs. I could tell there was money just pumping out of that building. It was as if money were growing on trees. So, I sat down in this boardroom. The company brass reviewed my work and my portfolio. Finally they said, “Hey, we have this assignment that we think you are perfect for. Are you available next month?” I looked at a school binder and pretended it was actually a calendar and said, “Yeah, I think I can adjust my schedule – what are you thinking?” They said, “We have this assignment; it is in Morroco. You’d be going to the Sahara desert to photograph this adventure race across the desert but it’s for the web and this will be cutting edge.” This was in 1995, by the way. They told me I’d be shooting with digital cameras, which was a big deal back then and cameras cost around $25,000. They said, “We’ll be transmitting images via satellite and we’ll put your images on the web in real time and you’ll be working with a writer and a video team.” I replied, “That sounds great!”

And then they say, “Ok, what do you cost?” Thinking back to what Brad Mangin said on the drive over I replied, “A thousand dollars.” And honestly, it was really hard to say that because I was thinking, “Man, I’d pay you guys a thousand bucks to go and do this. This sounds insane!”

Then there was this silence. Finally Brian, the CEO of Quokka Sports says, “That’s pretty steep. How about $800?” And of course, I was just so nervous that I didn’t really know what to say. I’m thinking in my head “Dude, this is great! $800 and I am going to Morroco.” I was so excited I couldn’t respond, I was a little nervous in this environment—they were all in suits. Then Brian finally says, “Okay, okay, okay. $900. But you do realize this is 30 days?” And right there I realized he didn’t mean $900 bucks for the project. He meant $900 per day!

And that was it. Everything changed. I realized right there on the spot that I was done with college and I was not going back. I realized this was really going to work as a career. This was going to be a $30,000 dollar job. It was going to be insanely fun and it would be cutting edge with the digital technology.

So that was another one of those turning points. I did a string of projects for that company and they were all cutting edge and really unique projects that were way ahead of their time. At one point, I flew back from Fiji and went to the University where my grades had suffered and I had to drop classes because I just wasn’t there. I would try my best to make it through the courses but at one point I walked in and the Dean pulled me into his office and asked me to tell him where I’d been and about the adventures I’d been on. I gave him the update and then, I’ll never forget this, he closed the door and asked me “What the fuck are you doing here?”

At this point, I was spread so thin I could barely hang on. At this point, I was doing the career that I was going to school for. I’d found my path and it was working. I was and still am short three classes of a college degree.

So those are a few of my big turning points—coming back from my six months on the road and that Quokka Sports job. The recognition that I could make pictures after those six months on the road I guess was the start of my career as an adventure photographer.

MC: So aside from adventure photography, are there any other photographic specialties that you feel you have?

CR: If I were to describe my specialty, even from the beginning, I think I am as good as the next guy at capturing action and I think there are a lot of great action photographers out there but my real passion is telling stories. It’s communicating a message through multiple pictures that are inter-related. I love documenting adventure. Not making adventure images, but documenting an adventure. Now I end up having to produce shoots and make stuff happen that looks real, but my number one passion in life as it pertains to photography (and even how I spend my time) is being a part of the adventure, of whatever that experience is and to record what is happening in front of me. The best projects are when I don’t have to ask for anything, when I just have stuff unfold in front of me and ideally I am part of it, when my responsibility is to be a member of that team as well as document the experience. That’s really what I love doing the most and I feel that’s really influenced my commercial photography. It is what I get hired most often to do. I don’t really think about making polished images. Occasionally a client pigeon-holes me as the guy who can make the really polished fine image but I think more often than not it is my ability to make a very real looking photograph that is an authentic moment, but do it on demand for the client.

MC: Now I am going to shift to some marketing questions. You were saying how your editorial work was your marketing early in your career. Is that still the case?

CR: Certainly, early on it was. I’m not sure it was my strategy but it became my strategy and I realized it worked really well.

MC: It was a brilliant strategy.

CR: My strategy was essentially to work as hard as possible. And it was easy to do that because I just loved every minute of it. Also, my strategy was to get published as much as possible. That was easy for me. I had that wired; I had it down. In my genre, which was rock climbing, I shot a lot. I think there were years early in my career where I was on the road shooting 300-plus days per year. Early on, I was still in college and I was hiring office assistants. I had another college student working for me to keep up with the demand for pictures. Getting published editorially turned into amazing marketing. Most of my great commercial work came as a result of my images being in editorial publications.

MC: Is that still the case now?

CR: We still get work from editorial publications. Now I focus my energy much more into what stories I am telling and where those stories land in terms of the publications and also packaging projects that are much more complex than just a single article. We are selling a good story idea in multiple channels to maximize the profit and the exposure. It starts with a good idea and then we find the right venues for that idea to maximize the profit and the exposure. Certainly from a financial standpoint, absolutely, it’s how do you maximize the profit for everyone involved. Sometimes with the bigger ideas as well they are more expensive and more complex and it takes layers of outlets to actually justify the time and energy to produce the project.

MC: How do you market yourself?

CR: We dabble in marketing. We are certainly using HTML emails, we do print pieces, we are getting away from sourcebooks—in other words we aren’t paying for blackbook.com or workbook.com or paying for pages. The sourcebooks in my opinion are dead and I think the sourcebook websites will die soon. That’s just not where people go to find photography anymore.

MC: Do you use Adbase or any of the list services specifically for photographers?

CR: Yes, we certainly use Adbase. [Editor’s note: Adbase.com is one of the worlds largest list services specifically for professional photographers.] We have a very sophisticated network in our office and we are really diligent about managing both our photographic and contact assets. We have a database that we spend a lot of time maintaining. In terms of our contacts, we can divide those lists in a fairly sophisticated way so that we know who we are targeting when we send out an HTML email promo or if we send out a print piece. Our goal is to send out a quarterly print piece. I’m not sure we always execute on that goal, but we really try. Our goal is a monthly HTML email promo that goes out the door to our targeted lists. The beauty of HTML email promos is that they are cheap, but you need a good message. Certainly the web is the future. That’s the bottom line.

On that subject, we also have a blog on my website now, a Facebook page, and a Myspace account. The idea is to tie it all together so there is this merge of content. What we want is web traffic. We want people to come to the website and see my pictures. The belief has to be that once you get them to your website that you have great pictures and they are going to be excited.

The question is how do you build a brand around, in my case, Corey Rich? What is it about my pictures and me that sets me apart? I have to believe that we have built the brand and now we just need for people to see the brand.

I also do a lot of face-to-face communication with people. One of my favorite things is talking on the phone with clients and actually visiting people. I think I have been in this industry long enough, and from the very beginning I never felt like I worked for clients—I work with people. The people I worked with ten years ago are some of my closest friends. I like to work with people I want to be friends with. It doesn’t always work out that way, but the ultimate marketing is maintaining relationships and those relationships lead to other relationships. When you make good impressions in this industry, because it is a small industry, word spreads pretty quickly. I always say there are these three ingredients for being successful in adventure photography. Obviously, you need to have some raw talent. You need to be able to make a good picture. That’s number one. Number two is you really need to be willing to work damn hard. And that’s the passionate part. That’s when everybody else is having fun and you are actually still sitting there editing in your office or still waiting for the sun to set. You have to work harder, longer and more efficiently than anyone else out there. And, three, it really helps if you are a good person. You’ve got to be a good guy. So it’s some raw talent, a lot of passion and drive and being a good person. If you have only two of those, your opportunity to succeed is greatly reduced and if you only have one then it isn’t going to happen.

MC: Do you have a print portfolio that you take with you when you meet with clients?

CR: Yes, we have about ten print portfolios. They are all pretty similar. I have an agent in New York City, David Laidler, who has some of my portfolios and we ship a lot of books out of my office. We are constantly changing the book. Not just the physical look or exterior, but the feel of the book including the images, the pacing and the layout. We just changed the look of the books six months ago so they have full-page images, one per page. Before that, we had a design with multiple pictures per page.

Though a print portfolio is still a big part of personal visits, I find I’m working with a lot of new media and you really need the computer to show off the new media. But, I think there is an impression that is made with the print book. It is very refined. There are no excuses. A computer screen can be dirty or maybe it’s too bright in the office to see the screen, but with a print book you can see the image, you can study the detail. There is no confusion about if the image is sharp or if it is soft. There it is.

MC: And you just said you have a representative in NY? How is that working out?
Note: Corey is represented by Aurora Select which is a branch of the Aurora Photos stock photography agency of which he is part owner.

CR: Yes, for a long time I decided not to have a rep—it’s a little more complicated that just deciding to get a rep—but I really believe in the Aurora Select business. Part of my decision to start the Select office was that it was really important to me as a partner in this company that I was actually one of the select so I could see what was happening, what was working and what was not working.

I am a believer in the philosophy that I need to do what I know how to do best. I don’t necessarily want to know how to do everything. I actually want people that know how to do things really well to do it for me and I’ll focus on what I know how to do really well. I am really good at taking pictures. I love taking pictures. I’m not really good at pounding on doors and negotiating assignments. I don’t really enjoy building web galleries to submit images to clients and sell my stock photography. My philosophy has been to hire people to do those things for me. When we need a network in my office, I hire someone that’s good at building networks.

I know if you are just starting out in the business you might be thinking, “Oh, that’s nice, but if you don’t have money then you can’t do that.” It’s at any level. If you are a one-man show and you have $10,000 to allocate towards operations, equipment, and marketing, it is still a question of how you choose to spend that $10,000 relative to your time. From the very beginning, if I didn’t know how to do something I’d rather pay and have it done efficiently versus wasting time to figure it out. This is true in life in general. Do you want to learn how to put a toilet in or do you just want to pay someone to put the toilet in correctly.

MC: What makes up the lion share of your work? How does it break out in terms of editorial vs. commercial?

CR: It seems to really change in three-year blocks but, currently, it is a 50/50 split as far as assignments are concerned. I really need that balance. When I end up in a situation when I am not doing enough editorial work, I loose a little passion for what I am doing. The commercial stuff pays really well most of the time, but usually the commercial and advertising work is not quite as engaging. Nine times out of ten, an editorial story means I have come up with an idea with a writer and have pitched it to a magazine. It is something we care about. It is something I want to do with a group of people I want to work with, in a location I want to work in. When you are an expert on something, when you really know a lot about the subject matter, it is a hell of a lot of fun to get out there in the field and really do that next piece of exploration.

MC: Do you shoot a lot of jobs that are outside of the Outdoor industry?

CR: I’d say 75% of what I do is within the outdoor industry, if you include something like Men’s Journal in the outdoor industry or Nike ACG. There is another 25% of work I do that is totally unrelated to the outdoor industry. A great example of that is that I shoot for the TRPA, which is a governmental organization. Clinton created this to keep Lake Tahoe blue, which is where I live. I do a lifestyle shoot for them with families on the lake. Everything I do in general is outside. I don’t like to work inside. I don’t have fun usually inside. There is something that happens when I end up under a roof and with four walls around me, I’m not as comfortable as when I am outside.

MC: What is your most valuable piece of equipment?

CR: I think the most valuable piece of equipment is me. I think what separates us all is not our cameras or our computers. Rather it is how we use them, how we think, and how we see the world and communicate. My most valuable tool is probably a quality – that is that I just love what I do. I love what I do so much that it really puts some other things in life in the backseat, including a few things most people would consider really important. I think that dedication, commitment, and passion for photography keeps me in this position of really enjoying everything I do and really looking for those opportunities that light me up.

MC: Would you say that is the key to your phenomenal success?

CR: If there is phenomenal success, I’m not sure that is the case. But yes, loving what you do goes a long way, whether it is in photography or teaching or investment banking. This is not a job for me. It’s everything. This is my life, my friends, my family and it all kind of blends together in some kind of seamless way. I love it that way. I can’t imagine it any other way.

MC: What has been your most adventurous shoot?

CR: It’s funny, this happens to me all the time, when I finish a trip—unless it is a real dud—I can’t help but say whatever I just did was fantastic. I am having that experience right now. I just came back from a week in Alaska. It was a conservation piece with an adventure twist to it and I can’t stop thinking about how important this piece is and how much fun we had and how alive I felt on this trip. We were in an eco-system that was functioning perfectly with Grizzly bears and thousands of salmon swimming under our kayaks and heavy rain, wind and cold weather. The flip side was the threat of a gold mine annihilating that entire eco-system. I was able to go and meet some fantastic people who were equally as passionate about their place in that community as I am about my photography. The leader was a biologist that loves the fish. There was a statistician who understands what these numbers really mean in terms of destruction, a guide who spent ten years there and really fell in love with the place, and an activist who really believes that the destruction of this place would be catastrophic. I am totally in love with Alaska right now. But I am also the guy that wants to be present and paying attention to what is happening in front of me right now as soon as I head to the next shoot. I don’t really have a favorite place. I really try to enjoy everything that I am doing and try to be as open to the experience as I possibly can.