Brian Dalthorp kind of fell into photography. In high school, he signed up for a Drawing class, thinking it would just be an easy elective to fill his credits. “I had no idea what I wanted to do. Then, I started winning all these art awards and I really fell in love with it all. So then after graduation, I had to figure out where to go from there. But I couldn’t see myself doing the starving artist thing. Plus, I’m more of an instant gratification guy: like, with a camera, you just take the shot, and boom, there it is. Done.”

A few months ago, Brian and his fiance (a graphic designer) packed up and moved to New York City from Las Vegas, their hometown for the past seven years. “We sold all but ten percent of our belongings. New York is what we were always looking for: the culture, the city, the mass transportation. I love the feeling of people walking on the street and the different vibe as you walk from Chelsea to SoHo to Wall Street to the Village…I mean it’s a lot colder here, and you pay a lot more for a lot less, but still I wouldn’t trade it. I’ll sacrifice some things to have a hot dog vendor on the corner.”

Brian works mostly in commercial photography, although he admits that the idea of doing an artistic show has come up in the back of his mind since moving to New York. “I still get to express myself in an artistic way; it just depends on the client. Now that I’m here, I really want to play more with the fashion world and the advertising world. Working with people and different locations is a lot more fun than studio landscapes. I’m all about locations. I would love to travel for the rest of my life and just shoot, National Geographic style.”

In Vegas, Brian and his fiance ran their own design company, Pop Studios. They’ve started to re-establish their business here in NYC. “I’m just getting here, starting to build, networking. It’s about living in the present, not living in the future. There are goals I have in mind, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate where I’m at right now. I always say, why not set your goals as high as you can and keep working towards them? I’m not an employee. I’ll never be a number. I’d rather get my guitar out and go out on the subway and put my hat down like everyone else than ever become a number.”

* Special note: Brian is the photographer and creative visionary behind my new bridal gallery pictures on http://www.yumichen.com *

* Photo Credit: Brian Dalthorp – www.wearepopstudios.com *

For a man who has spent his entire adult life in America, between New York and Los Angeles, David Hay still sounds like an Australian. He attributes it to being tone-deaf. (I guess it’s a good thing he’s a writer and not a singer!)

Hay’s dad was an Ambassador for the UN, so he grew up traveling the world and spending a good amount of time in New York, having “all these great New York experiences”. He didn’t realize it at the time, but he was pretty much inundated in culture: “I saw all these great plays and whatever. I was taken to everything… my parents had all this access to great culture.”

With an M.F.A. from the UCLA film school, Hay now finds himself spending all of his time writing. He is a playwright, working on revising his second full-length play, “A Perfect Future” and about to begin a new one. He also writes about architecture for magazines, he mentions as a side note.

“Writing is hard. You just gotta get up and start and do the work. Obviously you think about whether something’s good enough or whether it’s developed enough, but you can’t get bogged down by that. When you’re actually doing it, you’re not worried about all those other issues, you’re just dealing with the issues at hand. It really all depends on your own ability not to get distracted. It always starts off sort of agonizingly slow. You have some ideas, and then you go through all the typical procrastination things. Sometimes, I’ll just sit and do nothing. Or, like, clean all the tiles in the kitchen. And then, suddenly, you get going and you just write and write and write. You forget about everything else: you lose track of time, you forget to eat or shower. There’s really nothing else you can do but write.”

I always thought I would be working in the arts of some sort. I just like the process, you know, cause it’s like, whenever you’re making something, you’re not thinking about yourself. And New York had always been on my list of places to live before I died. I moved here from Austin, Texas about two years ago. For a girl. It was a real culture shock. I mean, I grew up all over the midwest. I’ve never paid more than $500 a month for rent in my life.

When I first moved here, I was trying to do music. I started playing the guitar when I was about 14. I had this red lightbulb and I used to turn off all the lights in my bedroom and blast “Shout of the Devil” by Motley Crue as loud as I could and play guitar to it. I had lived in Austin for about fifteen years, playing in bands. But there’s a certain amount of reality that you come to when you play music: that you really don’t like being poor all the time and being stuck in a van with two smelly dudes. It’s sort of a vagabond lifestyle. It’s great for single dudes; I mean it’s fun going around and seeing the country, but when you have a girlfriend and a dog, it doesn’t work so well.

What I’d really like is to be a painter and a photographer and sell that work for a living. I got my B.F.A. in Painting from the University of Kansas, but I sort of like all artistic mediums. I’m pretty good as an illustrator, I love painting, I like shooting and developing pictures- both. I’ve never done much sculpting with clay, but lots and lots of pounding and hammering and stretching and molding of metal. But it’s hard here because I can’t afford a studio and the kind of work I do requires a lot of floor space.

When I’m painting, when they turn out best is when I’m just, like, completely out of my mind, almost like a meditation. When there’s nothing bothering me. When you can go out to the studio and spend like eight hours in there. I guess it’s just easier to do photography, just ’cause you don’t have to have a studio. A lot of the stuff that I take pictures of is like environmental stuff, not people. So if I’m not interacting with anybody, it can have that same sort of meditative thing. Just, like, get on your bike or get in the truck and get lost, you know? See what you can find.

www.jmathiasdesign.com