Photographer Ritche Perez: 5 Things Anyone Can Do To Take Stunning Photos
An Interview With Jason Sheppard
People can interpret a picture in many ways — whether it’s positive or negative, and I’d like to start a movement to be able to use a camera positively to help expose issues within our society today.
As a part of my series about “5 Strategies To Take Stunning Photos” I had the pleasure of interviewing Ritche Perez.
Ritche Perez is a photographer based in Portugal Cove — St. Philips and St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. He has worked as a graphic design artist for twenty-five years. Growing up reading through his parent’s magazines such as Life, Time, and National Geographic the photographs inside them fascinated him.
Perez enjoys capturing moments in street photography, travel, portraits, events, landscape or structures. He also enjoys incorporating his photography into surreal compositions using Photoshop.
He enjoys documenting and capturing current culture and support, empowering and exposing our social issues of today. His interests include public space and people.
This winter, Perez is enjoying a new level of fame as the CBC Gem series Son of a Critch showcases the friendship between a younger Ritche (played by Mark Ezekiel Rivera) and his best friend Mark (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) as they navigate what growing up in St. John’s, Newfoundland during the 80s was like.
Thank you so much for joining us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
It was a lot of different factors. But mainly, I grew up with a father who was always into gadgetry. He was into a lot of electronics, and he’d always buy the latest thing in gaming, like the Atari system and Pong, and then it went towards cameras, like Minolta and Polaroids. He was buying electronics and gadgets, so that influenced me to also tinker with gadgets and stuff. I’m a visual person. I always liked looking at pictures rather than reading books. Furthermore, I’ve always looked at many magazines parents had growing up, like Life magazine, Time magazine, and National Geographic. As I got older, I was attracted to those pictures of documentary-style journalism. In 1993, when I finished high school, I got into graphic design. I’ve always been drawn to the artistic side of things. And shortly after my kids were born, I decided I wanted to document their lives growing up.
I bought my first official camera and started taking pictures. With my graphic design background, I found it fascinating to edit my picture. Working for advertising agencies and web firms, I was editing stock photography to create compositions on websites and advertisements. Then I realized I can colorize my own photos with the raw format. I liked picture taking, but my strength was, was in post-processing and editing.
As an introvert, I struggled with engaging or interacting with people. I found the camera was the perfect excuse to push myself to meet people and find out who they were and try to capture them. I went from starting off with landscape photography, capturing my kids, to landscape, to now doing professional photography.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
There are experiences in just meeting people, but the most interesting was when I went to the Philippines to discover my roots. I was born in the Philippines and I moved here to St. John’s, Newfoundland, in 1977. And I hadn’t been back since I brought my mother in 2017, and I went on an adventure journey of my own. When I left her in her hometown, I went off on my own and travelled to different places, not knowing where I was going.
I went around with my camera and I took pictures of things I’d never seen before, which brought me back to wondering what it would’ve been like if I didn’t move to Canada. I discovered another perspective of what it’s like in a different place, and a lot of things I saw there were pretty intense with the poverty and the hardship in a lot of places. Not only that, but I made myself go to the slums, to places I would never have gone before when I was younger. But in my forties, I wanted to know what, what the Philippines was all about. So that’s one of the things that I’ll never forget.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
So I got into wedding photography. I did a few weddings for clients and one of the mistakes I did was I missed the altar kiss, which is one of the most important shots. I’m not going to mention which clients any of them are. I’m thankful that I had a graphic design background, so during the reception of that evening, I asked the couple to kiss at their dinner table. Luckily, they were kissing constantly, and I was just trying to get the right angle. So I ended up cutting their heads out of the reception photo and I photoshopped the heads to a shot of them walking down the aisle, the altar, the wedding ceremony. And to this day I haven’t recieved a call or a contact saying, ‘hey, what’s going on here?’ {laughs}.
What I’ve learned from that is to be more aware of what shots the clients expect for wedding shoots. I’m constantly learning. I’m constantly making mistakes and thankfully nothing has blown up so far, but that would’ve been a terrible blow-up if I couldn’t have fixed that one.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
I don’t know what stands out. What I’ve heard from other people is they do enjoy the comfortableness of the communication that happens when there is an interaction between the photographer and the person that’s being captured. What I do is I make people feel comfortable when they’re getting their pictures taken, so they don’t feel self-conscious or, or on the spot. So, that’s what I try to do. My big thing is I make sure that communication is happening and the person I’m capturing is comfortable in whatever pose they’re doing.
I got compliments on that and was told it was easy. That the session was easy. They came in very nervous but realized it only took a short amount of time to capture that particular moment that they needed or what I needed. I’m pretty fast with the turnaround with the pictures again, with the graphic design background. I can do it fairly quickly. So clients do enjoy receiving their pictures in the evening. I try not to leave it for a long time. I’d hear a few clients and friends have had experiences with past photography sessions where they haven’t received their pictures within a month or two. I understand this culture now is the expectation is ‘now’ because they want to post their moments as it’s happening on their social media feeds. So I try to be as fast as I can to deliver their pictures as soon as possible. As soon as I finish a shoot, I run home and start editing until I get too sleepy. The longest I’ve ever taken to deliver photos was two days.
Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?
I did mention staying up to get things out the door, but it’s also the balance of your work as opposed to everything else in your life as well. I have kids; I have a day job. I also do music, so it’s just balancing your time. I learned to use a Google calendar to help me with my scheduling. Now I’m trying to make sure I have enough free time because the last thing I want is to hate the work that I’m doing by constantly editing pictures or taking pictures.
Learn as much as you can. From my learning experience, it’s not just one thing like the camera, the lens, the skill set of the design or the software. It’s the little factors. When I first started taking pictures and posting them online, I’d get a comment, ‘oh, that’s a beautiful picture. What kind of camera did you use?’ That was pretty interesting because it’s not the camera that determines if it’s a good picture or not, but it’s all factors within what you use. It’s your knowledge in light and composition as well.
Learn as much as you can by reading up on other photographers and what they do. Look at beautiful pictures from past photographers. Henri Cartier-Bresson is one of my favourites. He was a street photographer back in the early 1900s. I love the New York photographers like Bruce Gilden, who’s pretty aggressive in his style. He goes in, in people’s faces randomly with a flash and a rangefinder camera and shoots them from a foot away, but portraits are amazing. They’re just, uh, I don’t know. They’re, they’re different from what you would normally see.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
I always mention Shane Kelly, who was my last photographer teacher who taught me a lot not only about the technical side, but he also trained me into the etiquette — to be compassionate when you’re taking a portrait of people. I struggled at first with taking pictures of people because I originally was. I don’t know if I’d called myself an extrovert now. I guess I am, but I was an introvert.
So Kelly helped me to go out and talk to people or take pictures of people. And I had a few other friends who influenced me. I worked at an advertising agency, and my first experience being in a dark room was with a gentleman named Matt Sharpe. He was a photographer who took the phone book, uh, covers here in St. John’s during the 90s. He showed me how to develop film and that influenced me to take pictures.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
One thing I’m an advocate for is empowerment and social injustice. I’ve attended a lot of anti-racism protests and things like that. I was asked to capture the landing here that happened a few months back with the Afghan refugees that came here. That was a pretty powerful moment to see that happening for the first time. I was the only photographer on-site, and it’s fulfilling for me for things like that because as a person of colour and could use my art, which is photography, to expose and advocate and create an awareness of things like that. And I’ll continue doing things like that. I will work at corporate events, but there will be times when I’ll help social justice causes like those examples I mentioned, like marches and protests, and I always enjoy attending those. It feels like I’m doing something for our community and the world, too.
Can you share “5 Things Anyone Can Do To Take Stunning Photos”. Please share an example for each.
- Focus on natural light and observe where it’s coming from and how it affects the subject or place. For example, bringing them closer to the source. Or turning them left and right.
- Experiment with different angles and focal lengths. I use prime lenses — fixed lenses, which makes me have to work with my distance by walking closer or further from the subject. It makes me think about how I’m going to compose my photo.
- A graphic design background helped me with post-processing and editing. If you want to get more into post-processing and playing with your photos to give them a certain look, learn about colour theory and use tools such as Lightroom and other similar software apps. I love the Wes Anderson movies because of the colour grading and compositions as well.
- Compositional grid guidelines helped me compose my shots. There are many types such as the rule of thirds, diagonal lines, Golden Triangle, Golden Spiral and Golden Section, etc. lots of resources on the internet about these grid overlays. The rule of thirds grid can pop up on phone cameras and other mirror-less and DSLR cameras as guides.
- When working with people, I am compassionate. I have conversations with them rather than just tell them to smile for the camera. My photo teacher (Shane Kelly) said don’t forget to capture the ‘in-between shots’. They are usually the best captured moments and make it as the chosen photo.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
Oh, wow, that’s a heroic question {laughs}. I think it would be a movement of exposure where photography can be used in a powerful way. People can interpret a picture in many ways — whether it’s positive or negative, and start a movement to use a camera to help expose things we have issues within our society today. That’s all I can do is to attend things such as anti-racism protests and other issues that are helping the small people recognize they have a voice. I always keep that in mind when I’m doing event photography. I always make sure he, what work that I do help advocate that..
I remember attending the 2019 Yellow Vests protests which were anti-immigration, and I went down there with my camera and stood six feet away from them and started taking pictures of people that were against everything that I stood for because I’m an immigrant. I went down there as brave as I could to protest and fight fire with fire, with my art.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
My website is https://www.inbetweendays.ca and I am on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ritche.perez/?hl=en, and Facebook www.facebook.com/perezphotos/https://www.inbetweendays.ca
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
