(dramatic music) - [Narrator] The art of seeing is such an extraordinary sense.

Through the lens, we re-envisage our world, painting it with light and shadow.

Each frame becomes a portal revealing a story waiting to be told.

Colors.

The story behind the picture.

(upbeat music) - Atlanta's a magical place, because it's a place that embraces people.

Like no matter what.

It's not a gatekeeper city that's like, "Well, you're not from here, you're not," you know, like it doesn't really have those elements.

It's kind of like, "Oh, you're from wherever.

Cool.

Welcome to Atlanta."

Like, you know, hopefully you do right by it, which I always felt is a responsibility to do right by it.

But they're open, you know.

Some of the people that have a lot of stuff going on in the city are not from here.

- What I love about Atlanta is the food scene, (upbeat music) the music history, hip hop, blues, all of these things.

And it's green space.

It's surprisingly very green.

The trees, the parks, the nature preserves, all of these things just make life so enjoyable here.

Gives a refreshing escape from the city life, the sounds just in nature, and I'm editing food and doing what I love.

- I'm originally from a small town called Loveland in Colorado.

(upbeat music) I grew up like right on the plains, tucked into the mountains.

So I grew up doing a lot of backpacking and outdoor stuff.

I moved to Atlanta because of the culture and the amount of art and things that happened here.

It's a great place to not just live, but make a living.

I was in Savannah, my wife and I for eight years, and we've spent the last over 10 years now in Atlanta.

(upbeat music) - I was never really inspired to become a photographer.

I kind of stumbled into photography.

So I grew up in a photographer's home.

My dad's a photographer, so photography's always been around me.

It's been around me since was a baby.

Every house, apartment, any place I ever laid my head at, at my dad's side was a photo studio existed in there.

So photography was like doing the dishes for me at home.

So if I wanted to make allowance, my chores were like helping my dad, you know, on set or at a wedding or a place that he was shooting at.

So it was always kind of around me, but I never took a liking to it, to be honest.

When I moved to Atlanta, and I kind of got into the music scene, and just kind of finding out who I am, trying different things, that's kind of when I stumbled back to photography then.

And originally I bought a camera because I was throwing parties, I was throwing concerts, and I was like, "I wanna document my own events."

That's the real reason why I brought one.

And in the meantime, in between events, I would just have a camera and I would shoot friends or different people in the scene, and it kind of just turned into something.

(upbeat music) - Before food photography, I actually was in event marketing.

I went to school for sports PR, oddly enough, and I am way outside of that realm now.

But my style of photography is food and beverage.

I specialize in the dark, moody, elegant, chic kind of look, specialty and action.

I love splashes.

I love seeing food fully alive, splashes, pours, cheese pulls, sprinkles.

I love to make food come alive in photos.

What inspired me to become a food photographer is my fundamental love for food and passion and appreciation for the art of plating.

When I see a chef's artistic expression on a plate, it's just so inspiring, and I want to capture that.

And so it was a hobby, and now it's my profession.

So I also do food styling, which is pretty much a makeup artist for food.

So sometimes we have fun little tricks that we do to make the food look beautiful for camera.

It is tough to explain that to a chef, because they make food to eat, they plate to eat, and so they season it, and they're very particular about how the food is prepared and plated.

And if I move it just a little bit, or paint oil on it, or something like that, they get a little tricky.

But food styling is an art in and of itself.

So that's actually a whole separate career path.

And I taught myself both so that I can be knowledgeable in both, and how something is supposed to look before I take the photo.

- I got into photography when I was in high school.

(upbeat music) At first, I fell in love with the dark room, but then I started to get a little more educated about the history of everything I fell in love with, the street photography and the early street photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, especially, just the way that they could capture the world mathematically, like the compositions that they could make that just, through their talent and their patience, they could capture these unfolding worlds.

I was always really attracted to that.

I do a lot of environmental portraits, a lot of people, people in their spaces doing what they do, concepts that are hard to pull off, you know, in camera might require a little bit more thought into the production, and, you know, you're building something that's not gonna be captured in a single frame.

One of my most iconic photographs, I think is probably, it's a portrait of a bass player from the Atlanta Symphony, and he's in Krog Tunnel, which anybody from the area knows it's a very iconic area where all the street artists do.

It's constantly evolving.

It's this beautiful underground underpass, and he's playing a piece of music that he made dedicated to the Krog artists in the Krog Tunnel.

That's definitely one of my most iconic.

(upbeat music) - The first artist that ever really gave me a full fledge, like, shot and brought me around and really changed my life was Young Scooter.

Young Scooter was a music artist based in Atlanta.

He had a number of local hits, but he was like ahead of his time and his career, but he was associated with Future, and then also associated with Gucci Mane.

So a lot of the photos that I took of Gucci, I never once asked him to pose or, "Hey, look this way."

That's why my majority of my early catalog of the photos of Gucci Mane are all candids.

He never once looked at me one time, and it also, it kind of became like a style that I got known for.

It's like he shoots the craziest off guards.

When he's candid, he makes you feel like you're in the room.

And it was really because I just was intimidated and scared to ask him to, "Hey, can I get this particular shot?"

It was just like, I don't want him to know I'm even taking this photo right now.

I'm gonna just shoot it.

- I have a photo of spaghetti where there are noodles hanging down.

There are meatballs.

There's sauce splashing over the meatballs.

There's levitation involved.

There's my dark and moody style.

So it's pretty much all encompassing of the things that I love to do in photography.

One of the most fun cookbooks I worked on was T-Pain's cocktail book.

It was 50 cocktails that represented all of his hits, which takes me back to high school and college.

So it was very nostalgic, very full-circle.

So the challenge behind it was in its simplicity.

The backgrounds were all black, so there was no backgrounds or things to hide anything.

So I had to make sure the cocktails were vibrant, and bold, and perfect, and the ice had to be perfect.

Like every food stylist, I have a set of fake ice, but there is truly nothing like the real deal.

So I went to an ice purveyor to get the perfect ice, to get the chill and the sweat on the glass.

And when I shoot it right away, it's just more authentic, and it's perfect.

(upbeat music) - Encapsulating a city in a single image is a tall order, and it's exciting.

I had a hard time thinking about picking like a single subject, and so thinking about this amazing diverse city, I decided to go back to, you know, the things that I do best, which is like shooting a lot of elements and building something like a scene.

So rather than shoot a single person in an environment, I've chosen to build a whole story within a scene.

Those people will be artists, movers, and shakers, the whole spectrum of what Atlanta is, and who Atlanta is to me.

(smooth hip-hop music) - Yeah, when I got the brief about this particular project, it was really exciting for me, because for the last few years, I feel like I've been really in business mode and like CEO mode, and looking at computers all day and pitch proposals that I haven't, as much as I would like to, tapped into the my creative side as much.

I still do photo shoots here and there, but a lot of it is really like quick work or just overseeing or proving things.

So this is really exciting for me to be able to ideate something and try to, you know, think of an idea, and seeing if I can still bring it to life with a vision that I have for it.

Like anything that I do, my energy's gonna have, it's gonna have to feel like Atlanta, it's gonna have to feel like me, and it's going to have to have a nod or something to the music industry here in Atlanta, 'cause that's what has inspired me and changed my life.

My goal would be to capture here at my studio.

I like to capture iconic moments here, because I like to be able to show the community that I utilize the same resources that are available to you.

So I always like when it has that element to it, because it's like these same things that I'm shooting and working with.

You can use the same equipment too, so 90% sure it'll be done here in my studio for sure.

I think my studio is Atlanta.

- I want to highlight the iconic flavors of the city.

Everyone knows that peach is Atlanta, Georgia, but you know, Atlanta's the best.

(laughs) And I also want to represent lemon pepper wet.

So I plan on doing a couple of dishes, and the chef that I'm working with is Chef Robert Butts, and he is from Atlanta, which, fun fact, this is a transplant city, so it's very hard to actually meet someone born and raised in Atlanta.

He had his classical training all over the world and brought his gift back home.

And so I gave him full autonomy on the dishes, just gave him a theme, make it peach forward and lemon pepper wet.

So the inspiration for my photograph came from Andre 3000, Atlanta's own, statement of "The South's got something to say."

And with Michelin coming to Atlanta, it was just proof that we have something to say in the culinary industry.

And so I wanted to have a big, beautiful, rustic table, no white tablecloth, just keep it true comfort soul food, like a vision of a table and a peach-inspired dish.

And I gave Chef Robert Butts full autonomy, because I want his creative juices to flow and plate this thing so beautiful.

And he will be presenting it on the table, bowl full of peaches.

Atlanta's history is full of culture and music and food.

And so I want to have a couple of books with Martin Luther King Jr.'s photos, Andre 3000 and OutKast's album, something peeking in on the inside, and then just the angle will be overhead, just kind of looking down at this table that we have a seat at now.

The inspiration behind one of my other photos that I cannot wait to shoot will be sandwiches, and Chef Robert Butts will be encapsulating the flavors of Atlanta.

So there will be three sandwiches that will be levitating, one on top of the other, and he will have his hand over top just kind of like, this is my creation.

And so the bottom sandwich will be barbecue, because even though it's not frequently highlighted like Texas or Memphis, Atlanta has a rich history in barbecue as well.

So there will be a barbecue sandwich.

Then the middle sandwich will be a brunch fried chicken sandwich with a little egg drip.

I need my action.

The bottom one will have smoke from like a barbecue, and then the top burger will be lemon pepper wet.

- Atlanta's such a great combination between like the old and the new.

So I chose Skyline and the rooftop at Ponce City Market, because it's such a beautiful historic building that's been transformed into something new, and it mixes a lot of beautiful old things and new things, and I think that that represents Atlanta really, really well.

My wife, for several years, gave BeltLine tours, and so I (laughs) have been listening to a long time about the historical details and everything that went into making this place unique and special.

So I've wanted to photograph something up here for a long time, and so it's a great opportunity, taking my lead from street photographers that I love, that could capture a moment, the perfect arrangement of people in an environment.

We're gonna be going about it a little bit different way, but we'll be capturing the background as basically a canvas, and then going into studio, and capturing each of these groups of people.

So they will be coming together in post, the retouching, to tell a bigger story, and then a lot of little stories.

So it'll hopefully bring the viewer in to keep looking at it to discover all these little microcosms.

We decided to photograph the talent separately indoors to help address like any variables with the weather, because we'll be shooting groups of people over three or four hours.

The light and the sun will be changing, so they won't look like they're in the same environment if they're captured outdoors on location.

So everything will be shot separately, which is, you know, the good way, the more in-control way.

(upbeat music) ♪ It's so jumping - Today we are working with a really dope up-and-coming artist, somebody that I believe a lot in, I think, is really the future of Atlanta's sound, his name's Domani.

(singer singing in foreign language) So when you look at my career, some of my most iconic images are oftentimes the early image of that artist.

Not to say that I don't like working with them when they become superstars, but it's something really special and magical and organic about creating with a younger artist or an artist that's like still developing who they are and what they wanna bring to the game.

So that's when I like to work with the artists the most.

So when I was thinking about for this project that I'm working on, who could be that future?

I think about like young artists in the city that are making waves, and that really represent what I hope to be like the future of Atlanta and Atlanta's sound, and who I think could really be the next, I think it's kind of like me challenging myself to see how predictive of the future I can be, you know, like how much my eye for talent and through the years, if you look at my portfolio and artists I worked with early from Lil Yachty, to Metro Boomin, to Future, to Rae Sremmurd, I really haven't missed, and I don't think I missed this time with Domani.

♪ I hit it, I hit it ♪ I did it, I did it, I did it, I did it ♪ ♪ Hm ♪ I did it, I did it, I did it, I did it ♪ ♪ I hit the eight on the break ♪ I hit the eight on the break ♪ I did it, I did it, I did it, I ♪ ♪ Yeah, yeah (upbeat music) - So we're shooting today at King Plow, who gracefully came through at the last minute.

We were having trouble finding a venue.

Sometimes that happens with shoots, especially food shoots, like you just, some things happen and come up.

You don't expect it, and you have to pivot.

That is the life of a food stylist and a food photographer.

So we are here at the venue.

It is the perfect rustic look that I was looking for.

I really love dark and moody.

That is my style.

I'll shoot everything when dark and moody is my preferred, and it has rustic walls, brick walls, barn doors, really nice oak tables.

It's perfect for exactly what I was trying to shoot for my three Atlanta burgers and my Seat at the Table scene.

So normally I shoot alone.

I go to restaurants and there's limited space, sometimes limited budgets, so I have to shoot by myself.

A lot of times I am my own lighting tech, digi tech, hand model, action person.

(laughs) But today I'm lucky enough to have a team with me.

I have my friend and also peer photographer Mike D. with me.

He is great at lighting.

He understands it like no other.

So he's helped me with that.

And also trigger man, so he'll press it while I'm throwing hot sauce or dripping some lemon pepper, something like that.

I'm also working with Chef Robert Butts, who is just an amazing chef, and he brings out the best of Southern comfort culture food, and he puts elegant twists on it, which is why I wanted to work with him for this shoot, because his plating is, it's art on a plate.

And that's how I view food is art on a plate.

We wanted to do a big basket full of peaches, but they are out of season.

And when I came up with the idea for this shoot, they were in season, so we had to pivot and buy some peaches, and we'll cut them in half, or we will try to put them on the table, rather than have a basket.

So the main part was that the dishes themselves are peach crazy, because Georgia peach, of course.

I actually trusted and left the theme of the dishes up to the chef, because I know he would kill it.

And so we are shooting a peach Burrata, a peach salsa, and of course, a peach cobbler all on one table.

We have a few little Atlanta accents, like a Martin Luther King book, an OutKast coaster, and of course, the peaches.

So yes, we ran into not having enough peaches, but we had enough for the dish and enough to set around the table.

So we just kind of changed our vision up a little bit.

(upbeat music) (smooth music) - Atlanta is a diverse city in the way that like, you know, you would want it to be any great city.

There's just so many people doing so many amazing things with so many backgrounds from all the world.

So whatever it is that you're interested in there, you'll find your people here.

And there's a big group of people here that are into it too.

And that's one of the many things I love about Atlanta.

The message that I'm trying to get across in this image is as much as I can in a single photograph representing the diversity, the spectrum of the kinds of people and what they do, and what I see in Atlanta is great.

Also with the environment, bringing the old and the new together, which I think Atlanta really is representative of.

(upbeat music) ♪ Ah - This is a city where anything's possible.

There are a lot of ways to make money.

There are a lot of ways for your dreams to come true.

Well, I can plant my flag here in it.

♪ Ah ♪ Higher, higher - The South's got something to say, like, we have a seat at the table finally.

- Atlanta is my muse, and just inspires me, because every story is represented here in this city.

It's a wonderful place to investigate as a photographer with a lens.

♪ We want to lift you higher ♪ Ah (upbeat jazzy music)