Interview with Corey Rich, Outdoor Adventure Photographer

Corey Rich is one of the world’s most recognized adventure and outdoor lifestyle visual storytellers. He has captured stunning still photos and video on a wide array of assignments, including rock climbing in India, ultra-marathon racing in the Sahara Desert of Morocco, freight train hopping in the American West, and snowboarding in Papua New Guinea. His editorial work includes assignments for National Geographic Adventure, Outside, Sports Illustrated and The New York Times Magazine. Commercial clients include Anheuser-Busch, Apple, Nike and The North Face. Today, much of his time goes into capturing both still images and video for the creation of multimedia projects for commercial and editorial clients.

© Corey Rich / Aurora Photos

As Vice President and co-owner of Aurora Photos, Rich was the driving force behind founding Aurora’s Outdoor Collection, which is the world’s leading brand of outdoor adventure and outdoor lifestyle photography. He is focused on overseeing Aurora’s continued growth in sales and business development. Most recently, Rich played a major roll in the creation of two new divisions: New York City based Aurora Select, focused on photo and video assignments and Portland, Maine-based Aurora Novus, an innovative multimedia production company. Additionally, Rich is a Nikon evangelist and a member of the SanDisk Extreme Team. He is also on the Board of Directors for The Access Fund, member of the Visual Journalism Advisory Board at Brooks Institute, co-founder and lead instructor of the National Geographic Adventure Photography Workshop, member of the Rowell Legacy Committee and on The Rowell Award for the Art of Adventure judging panel. His first book, My Favorite Place: Great Athletes In The Great Outdoors, was published by Chronicle Books.
I had the pleasure of meeting with Corey in person at PhotoPlus Expo 2010 in NYC, where we found a relatively quiet corner to conduct the interview. I also was able to briefly catch one of his engaging presentations on his work and methods at the Nikon booth. Thanks Corey!

Corey Rich’s Outdoor Adventure Photography Contest: We hosted an outdoor adventure photography contest judged by Corey Rich and Peter Dennen (creative director of Aurora Photos). It ran from December 22, 2010, through January 10, 2011. The winner received their choice of any Lowepro bag or pack (value $99-$500+USD).
View the winning entry and honorable mentions: Corey Rich’s Outdoor Adventure Photography Contest.

Photography Background

© Corey Rich / Aurora Photos

How did you get into this vein of photography?
I’ve been shooting pictures for 21 years now, I started young—13 years old when I picked up a camera for the first time. I went on a rock climbing trip and wanted to document the weekend trip. I fell in love with the outdoors and photography simultaneously and it turns out they’re these perfect parallel passions.
It occurred to me just recently that I’m more excited today or at least equally as excited about photography and video today as I was 21 years ago when I first picked up a camera. I think it’s largely because of video. There is this evolution in my craft. It used to be I just shot still photography, I told stories with still imagery. Today, I tell stories with motion. I have the opportunity to utilize still photography, motion, and audio. It’s from that same device that I fell in love with 21 years ago, which is kind of amazing to think of it in that way.
I meet a lot of people who are the best at what they do, whether they’re athletes, musicians, politicians, writers, and it’s very rare that you meet someone who says they’re as excited about what they do 20 years later as they were in the beginning. I can say this is partially due to the advance of technology. I feel like I’m evolving as a visual story teller today in a way I could have never imagined possible. The technology became a great leveler in that we’re all on the same playing field—there are no more limitations in terms of video production (i.e. large crew, lots of dollars). Now, mainly you need a DSLR, a camera that allows you to switch from still photography to video and back whenever you feel like it. We are living in such a special time. We’re still using light, composition, moments, but now there’s this completely new paradigm and opportunity for people who have loved making images and telling stories. I feel so lucky to be a part of this time in still photography/video, or whatever we are going to call this new world.
I joke that I need to get a new business card, and I’m not sure yet what it should say. It shouldn’t just say Photographer or Videographer. Perhaps Visual Storyteller or Creative Media Maker? I’ve watched my career really shift in the last two years from shooting almost exclusively still photography, to a mix of more than 50% video/multimedia and 50% still photography. My old teachers used to tell me, “Move film through your camera.” Now the proper saying is, “You need to fill those flash cards—fill a flash card a day”
If you’re a runner, you need to get out there and put some miles on. By filling a flash card a day, that’s how you create that muscle memory to shoot and see in a way that’s repeatable. You can actually show up at a scene and instantly go into a mode of I know what I’m doing, it’s second nature, you’re not worried about how to technically manipulate the piece of equipment you’re using, it’s muscle memory.

© Corey Rich / Aurora Photos

As you started with a lot of sports, how did you see yourself progress?
In some ways I followed a conventional path. I started photography by looking into the world of photojournalism. I love the outdoors but then I went down this track towards becoming a photojournalist. In high school, I worked for a local daily newspaper, 60,000 daily circulation. I shot everything from the pet of the week to the real estate section, to the mayor, parades. For college, I went to photojournalism school at San Jose State University—Jim McNay was running the department. It was a pretty fine program and he really took me under his wing. I entered in all the upper division courses as a freshman, which in retrospect is probably why I don’t have a college degree today.
He let me dive into the deep end first, but I was just farther along in my career and I did a newspaper internship at The Modesto Bee where I was exposed to that next level of what finer photojournalism is like, what it takes to be a photojournalist, to go out and work on a rigorous schedule where you’re doing 4-5 assignments a day and you have to deliver, there are no excuses, you need to be creative, you need to tell the story. I realized after almost 2 years of working at the Modesto, with a great staff of editors and photographers, that it was not my calling. I didn’t pick up a camera originally to be a newspaper journalist. I picked up a camera because I wanted to document these outdoor adventures. I eventually sat down and had a talk with Al Golub who was the Director of Photography at the Bee and a dear friend. What he told me was, “You need to go out and you need to follow your dreams. You need to shoot what you want to shoot.”

© Corey Rich / Aurora Photos

We concocted this plan: I would save my $3000 from the summer internship, my second internship at The Modesto Bee, and convince my parents to let me take 6 months off from school, drive around the western US and photograph rock climbing. Even though I loved rock climbing, I hadn’t photographed it. My time had been going into doing daily journalism. The test at the end of six months on the road was to edit my pictures down to the 40 best images and send to Patagonia, and the other 40 best were going to go to Climbing Magazine (the magazine I grew up reading). The response was incredible. It turned out that two days after I shipped these slides out, I got phone calls from both, and pictures were published. That was the beginning of the future and the beginning of the end of college.
How far along were you in your program?
I was a sophomore at the time I made that decision. In the end, I’m 3 classes shy of a degree in journalism. It’s because simultaneously my career was taking off. I was traveling around the world for some of the best brands on the planet at age 21. I started doing a lot of assignment work. I wasn’t an entrepreneur with a business plan, I was a guy who loved making pictures, never worrying about how the cash was going to flow. My goal was to make good pictures and the cash would follow. It turns out that’s really true. I disagree when people say, “Oh, it’s about who you know.” It’s not. It’s about what we do. At the end of the day, unlike many other jobs, it’s what’s in the photograph. How many great photographs do you have? Are they better, are they different, are they cutting edge? I still say there’s a shortage of great pictures out there.

© Corey Rich / Aurora Photos

Success and Talent

What are the ingredients for success with photography?

A little bit of raw talent, talent doesn’t need to be oozing out of you.
Willing to work really hard. I call that passion—you’re so passionate about something that the other things in life become less important. You’re willing to put it all into your craft.
It really helps if you’re a great guy or gal—if you’re not an asshole. People want to work with people they enjoy being around.

Now, maybe if 2 out of these 3 qualities are so extraordinary, that people will tolerate one of the other being lesser, but if you have those three qualities and you’re willing to commit to your career as a photographer, I think that is the recipe for success in this industry. I have more of the “I’m a nice guy, and I love to work really hard”, than just straight raw talent. I think you can really make up for the raw talent with the other 2.
Who would you consider in your playing field to be oozing raw talent?
I have a pretty high bar. In my entire career of admiring and looking at the work of hundreds and thousands of photographers over the last 20 years, I think there’s one person who I met. He’s a pioneer of rock climbing, Tom Frost, now about 70 years old. Tom is quite an accomplished business man who co-founded Patagonia in the 1960s or 70s, then he went on to create Chimera, the lighting company. On top of that, he was a pioneer of rock climbing. He created the systems that we use today for modern rock climbing in Yosemite and around the world. The guy’s a legend. Along the way, he took some pictures. He has some black and white photographs of rock climbing and they’re historic. You see them in print and in historical reviews of climbing. (Take a look at some of Tom’s work on Aurora Novus.)

We’ve become friends over the years and at one point I drove to his house in the Central Valley of California and I was going to do an edit of his photography. I wanted to include some of his photos in the Aurora Photos archive. I also thought it was a great opportunity to spend time with a guy who I admired and respected. I arrived early in the morning and sat down with Tom and his wife—they were so excited to have a guest. He had his light table out, all of his binders on the wall. He said, “Ok, here’s binder no. 1.” Of course, it’s black and white film and he’s an engineer so it’s meticulously organized. It’s contact sheet 1, roll 1. Contact sheet 2, roll 2. So I take out a loupe and start. Instantly in the first 5 frames roll number 1, I see 2 of the most famous pictures of all time in the world of rock climbing. They are THE most historic images ever. I move down this roll and I find 12 more amazing images that the world has never seen before and I circle them with a grease pencil. I’m thinking to myself, this is incredible—the world has never seen these pictures. It’s just laden with gems. I make it through the first 15 rolls of film and I’m realizing that even though I told Tom we were going to edit out 300 images to scan because it’s costly, I’m going to go to 1,000 because there’s so much rich content. There are such great, high-quality beautiful moments perfectly composed, great use of light, technically perfect. Mind you, these are pictures shot in the 60’s on a Leica.
We go out to lunch and I ask him, “Tom, how long have you been shooting pictures?” I thought he was confused by my question, because he said, “That was the first time, that was roll one.” I said, “No, no, I know that was the first time you started shooting rock climbing, but how did you learn photography?” He said, “That morning, before we went up on the wall, someone over in the campground let me borrow his Leica and showed me quickly how to use it, and that’s roll number 1.”
The thousands of portfolios I’ve reviewed and looked at photographer’s work, Tom Frost is unquestionably the most talented photographer I’ve ever met, period. I went on to look at another 100 rolls of his film over the next 2 visits. Everyone from myself to Galen Rowell, all are following in the footsteps of this guy. I saw pictures he shot 40 years ago intuitively, which he shot in just one frame. And I have strived through my career to make these pictures. Only once in my lifetime so far have I met someone with that much raw talent. With Tom, he never intended to be a photographer, never did he want it to be his career. “I’m no photographer, I was just a guy who liked to take pictures on my adventures. I was a climber with a camera.”

About Lighting

When you’re on set, what are you looking for when capturing. Do you use supplemental lighting?
It really depends on the scenario. I love most to work with available light. I always miss breakfast and dinner because I’m out shooting. I’m awake an hour before sunrise all the time and I’m always out with a headlamp an hour after sunset trying to get back to the hotel or the car or the campground. Nature provides some pretty incredible opportunities, but you have to be there, you have to be in the game to play the game. When you’re there, some amazing opportunities present themselves. You just never know what that sunrise will look like, you won’t know what those clouds will do, you never know what that mist over the meadow will do when the sun comes up. I’m not a landscape photographer, but I’m often shooting spectacular landscapes with people interacting with those landscapes. It’s two-fold. What is your subject or person going to be doing, and what is the landscape going to provide in terms of a background and light to play with and paint with? And then as a photographer, I make decisions on where I’m going to be relative to the landscape, relative to the sun coming up, relative to where the person is going to be.
In general, I try to use available light first. That allows me to focus most on the story I’m trying to tell and there’s less technical stuff that I have to manage. I do bring in whatever tools I need to bring if that natural light is not working. In the still photography world I use reflectors, big strobes, small strobes. In the video world, the one new piece of the equation is you need continuous lighting—strobes don’t work. Reflectors do a better job for video than strobes because it’s not 1/250 of a sec, it’s 25 seconds, 25 minutes. So now I’m really starting to use a lot of LED lights, light panels for example, where you can take them into remote places and set them up right on the back of a mini van and light a scene for video where you can actually control it and it’s continuous. I have a philosophy: less is more. The less crap I have hanging off me and in bags, and to manage, the more focused I am on being creative.

There are plenty of trips, though, where I’m checking 6 bags under the plane. It’s not just photography equipment. It’s all of the stuff that allows me to get into these wild environments: tents, ropes, rock shoes, ice axes; cameras, lights, etc. I always have two sets of equipment for taking on trips and usually all of the climbing outdoor gear goes into soft bags, and all the photo equipment goes into the hard cases or Lowepro bags. I’m always scaling it so I can minimize the number of people that need to be standing around moving equipment. I like to be in the storytelling business, not the luggage moving business. My wife jokes that our garage is set up like a warehouse. We have shelves of gear and shelves of bags. You can literally walk in and lay out 6 bags or cases and start pulling things off shelves, almost like it’s inventory. That’s the nature of the beast.

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