Meet Luis Tarin of ANGEL in Burbank

Today we’d like to introduce you to Luis Tarin.

Luis, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I originally started pursing photography as a hobby when I was about 14 years old, which for many years was taking photos with my phone of whatever I happened to think was cool at the time. It all changed direction when I was 16, when I first started getting into BMX with my friends from school. This usually consisted of pedaling around where we lived in North Hollywood every day after school, while exploring and looking for spots usually until it got dark out. Living in a place like Los Angeles, a bike and the metro got you almost anywhere and it granted me a close-up perspective everything the city had to offer, which really inspired me to shoot more. Through a chain of borrowing friend’s cameras, I eventually got my first real DSLR when I was 17, which allowed me to really explore my creative ideas and push myself as a photographer.

I made an Instagram, and people around me started to notice my work and that provided me with some of my first paid shoots ever, which completely astonished me. Eventually after graduating high school and while attending college I started exploring other visual fields and applying my skills to cinematography, editing, and videography while also continually working as a photographer in my free time. Through lots of networking and friends I made along the way I was luckily able to quickly grow my career with numerous opportunities that enabled me to work alongside some of the largest brands and celebrities in the world. It’s almost surreal to have the ability to make a living off photography and I’m really grateful for the opportunity to continually work in a field that doesn’t feel like a job to me.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It definitely was a challenge, due to a variety of things. Photography can be an expensive pursuit so for a while I was working as best I could with budget gear which would often result in missed shots or technical problems. Once I’ve had a whole memory card fail during a shoot and lost numerous photos or dealing equipment like batteries failing to charge after a few days. A major struggle early on was being able to start charging for my work and being able to assert myself with what I should be paid with rather than talking shorthanded offers which is something many other photographers currently struggle with. Lastly, a reoccurring problem is that I would sometimes lose direction in my work and therefore temporarily lose my interest in shooting but I eventually realized that was due to burnout, which I try my best to avoid now by scheduling my shoots father apart rather than cram them all within a week span.

ANGEL – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
At the beginning of this year I quietly acted on a long term goal of mine, with this article being the first public announcement of the founding of my creative media company, ANGEL. With this company I am in the process of assembling an in-house team of talented artists who have notable bodies of work in fields such as virtual reality, contemporary art, fashion, photography, film, and music to create a space where artists can share ideas and create with each other without commercial pressure. The main goal of establishing ANGEL is to create content which shatters the strict boundaries of these particular areas, and create pieces that can freely combine or cross into many fields simultaneously, inspiring artists to think of new methods to create their work, and finally creating new ways for audiences to experience media and the environments they interact with. ANGEL is different from other content production based companies because rather than focusing strictly on the execution aspect of a well-developed idea provided from client, we instead aim to create, execute, promote, and release content completely in-house, with minimal to no outside involvement, with all content created from ANGEL is intended as artistically focused rather than purely commercial projects.

Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
My favorite childhood memory has to be whenever when we would travel to a new place, I would always be so overwhelmed with all the new sights and sounds in this new city I found myself in along with the experiences along the journey and I think through that it gave me a permanent desire to travel even into today.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://luisangeltarin.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: @luisangeltarin

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