Malloy - A New Direction
Note: This is an older blog post originally posted in May 2019 on my previous website.
Seven years, that’s how long the Logan Hickle Photography branding lived.
In January 2012 I purchased my first DSLR camera. From January 2012 - August 2018 I mainly focused on Senior Portraits at Sam Houston State University.
Throughout the two years leading up to August 2018 I started to feel a bit of burnout. I was photographing the same type of clients in the same locations over and over again. Every once in awhile I could throw a new, interesting location in the mix, but on a college campus clients always want the typical campus landmarks. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that as that is their campus, their pride, and I love delivering those portraits to them. Creatively speaking though, it can get repetitive and feels like spinning your wheels, so to speak.
In February 2018 Paula and I found out that we would be relocating to Massachusetts, about an hour west of Boston.
I could stick with Senior Portraits and market to Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Framingham State, etc…..but it would be doing the same thing over again. I very quickly realized this was the time for a change.
So I told myself that I would not be taking a Senior Portrait job once we made the move up to Massachusetts.
Over the past few years I have become interested in more Commercial & Editorial work. Inspired by the work of Jeremy Kramer, Felix Kunze, John Keatley, and probably most importantly, Joey L. Joey’s work is incredibly inspiring and humbling to see how he creates out in the wilderness, slogging around in rivers, mud, freezing temperatures and more. Even more inspiring is seeing how the finished images end up around the world in tourism campaigns, ad campaigns & more through his blog and Instagram stories.
This desire to re-center my focus has led to Malloy Photo.
This new branding and direction for my work is exciting and thrilling. For clarity, Malloy is my middle name which not many people know.
I will be focusing my work on businesses and artists of the community. People like Hans who build bikes from scratch and ships them around the world. People like the incredible staff of Less Than Greater Than, a local speakeasy in the back of an ice cream shop.
Admittedly, it’s been hard.
From being in one town for long enough that your clients just come from referral and a few FB ads here and there. From a portfolio that was well rounded and solid for my clientele. A portfolio that was robust that made my services an easy sell, and is now almost completely gone. You will see a few pieces of old work in the Portraits section of this new website that I am still really proud of, but ~80% of my old portfolio is gone. Living the rest of its days in my Dropbox account and on a hard drive.
To now having only two shoots to show for. It’s been a rough patch for my creative side these past nine months in Massachusetts. I truly think it’s just been so daunting having to rebuild from scratch that I have been dragging my feet. Hell, I have been working on this re-brand off and on for five months. Something that should be exciting, has been put on the back burner in my mind.
I decided to just push this new branding, website, social media profiles, and more out there. Push it out and let it breathe for a bit. Let it sink in and grow.
I am lining up a few more shoots with local business owners and am incredibly pumped to get in there and tackle those challenges. Next up is a shoot with Bedlam Books in Worcester, MA this coming Thursday.
