A Brief Overview of James' Photographic Journey
Internationally Published
Jim has had his photography published in 44 countries on every continent except Antarctica. His images have been used on the covers, and inside, of travel books and travel brochures; by airlines, cruise lines, travel and tour companies; TV commercials; advertising and editorial use in consumer and trade magazines; for direct mail and point of purchase displays; and calendars, postcards, textbooks, and wall decor, to name a few of the many uses.
Since the mid-1980s, and through the mid-2000s, Jim had been represented by two major stock photo agencies, one in New York and one in Barcelona, Spain, and these two agencies were instrumental in marketing Jim's images around the world. These agencies sold, to buyers, limited rights to use Jim's images, effectively "leasing" or "renting" them for a particular use and for a specific period of time. (Stock Photo Agencies are companies that maintain large files of images they receive from contributing photographers and then find buyers from around the world who use those images in their businesses, such as travel and tour companies, advertising agencies for airlines, cruises, hotels, etc., and to book and magazine publishers, and many other kinds of businesses.)
Photographic Beginnings
Jim has a B.S. degree in business from college, and had worked, until he retired in 2008, in the financial field of securities and real estate investments and as a business owner. He had no prior interest in photography and bought his first camera in the mid-1960s, not long before his son was born, because he wanted to be sure to get those early family years on film. (In those days you actually had to have a camera to take photos.) The capturing on film of moments in time of people, places, and things, stimulated a passion in Jim to explore the world around him and to preserve what he saw, especially landscapes, the natural world, and iconic travel locations, on film.
Jim, a self-taught photographer, spent many of those early years picking up whatever information he could about photography and applying what he learned to continually improve his photographic skills. He enjoyed seeing a few of his photos eventually become published in a magazine or two and that encouraged him to pursue investigating other ways to expand on his publishing opportunities. Jim learned that working with stock photo agencies provided one of the best avenues to accomplish that, especially with less than full-time available for photography, provided you were able to produce images that the agencies felt were marketable. Letting the agency handle the marketing of his images would free up Jim to concentrate his limited time, due to his ongoing business obligations, on producing more marketable images. Within short order, Jim was accepted by two stock photo agencies, which were mentioned earlier. Soon, Jim's images began to be marketed worldwide, and he continued to travel domestically and internationally with his late wife, shooting more images to continually add to the files at his two agencies.
Photography started out as a part-time hobby for Jim, pursued during weekends, on vacation trips, and during other free time, but which eventually turned into a creatively satisfying and rewarding avocation on many levels.
During the 1990s, Jim also gave over 100 half-day seminars, or lectures, at 22 community colleges and universities in California in their adult or extended education departments, imparting what he had learned about how to shoot for the general stock and travel photography marketplace and how to successfully work with stock photo agencies.
Jim remarried and he and his wife make their home on the central coast of California.