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Today's Guest: Peggy Dyer of Peggy Dyer in Boulder, Colorado
Today's Host: John Bentley

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ANNOUNCER:  Welcome to the  More Photos Photography Spotlight brought to you by morephotos.com helping professional photographers with all their internet needs. Now here is your host, John Bentley.

JOHN: Today on the More Photos Photography Spotlight we have Boulder, Colorado, photographer, Peggy Dyer of Peggy Dyer Photography joining us via the telephone. Welcome to the program, Peggy.

PEGGY: Thank you so much for having me.

JOHN: Glad to have you on the program today. Now you are a photographer out in the Colorado area. Tell us a little bit about Peggy Dyer Photography.

PEGGY: I’m an editorial photographer based in Boulder Colorado, and I specialize in long term projects with families and that’s everything from photographing a couple on their wedding day to photographing, you know, maybe the birth of their first born baby to on and on down the stream or circle of life.

JOHN: How long have you been a photographer, Peggy?

PEGGY: I’ve been a professional photographer for about 15 years.

JOHN: And why did you decide to get into the photography business?

PEGGY: Photography…I’ve been an artist my whole life and photography just is my medium. You know, I’ve always painted and really got into taking photographs in high school and I was very blessed to have a wonderful high school art teacher who would stay hours and hours after school just so I could putter around in the dark room developing prints. And then that led to, you know, time to go to college and one of my aunts told me why don’t you just go for photography, and you could always do weddings and senior portraits, and I thought, oh that’s a good idea, and so off I went.

JOHN: Now do you find that weddings and senior portraits are a big part of your business?

PEGGY: Weddings and senior portraits are a fairly large part of my business, but I think the biggest chunk of my business comes more from the circle of life projects. The lifestyle sessions are where I’ll photograph a family over the course of a year or maybe over the course of 5 or 6 years.  I’ve got some families that I’ve been photographing for about 6 years now.

JOHN: Now when you say photographing these families, are you shooting out of a studio, or are you an on location photographer? How do you work that?

PEGGY: I’m a location photographer. The world is my studio. Every place/every corner I turn that’s my studio. And so a lot of times, families will take me, you know, we’ll set up…I might go to grandma’s house for one of their sessions and the kids will be baking cookies with grandma and I’ll be taking pictures of that or they’ll be setting up the Christmas tree, and I’ll photograph the whole family doing that or preparing a big meal or boating, you know, they might go and play in the wake. I’ll photograph them in the water; anywhere and everywhere. I try to do things that are a little more every day moments that kind of get lost, but you know a really engrained in our lives as we grow older.

JOHN: Now do you find yourself doing any other types of photography?

PEGGY: I do some product photography; not a lot. The product photography that I do is normally for other small businesses that have other products that they’re selling like, you know, a company that might produce some soap or some hand lotion or something, and I’ll do product shots for them. But mostly I prefer to work with people. You have to have a person in there.

PEGGY: It’s a lot more exciting to photograph a fork with a kid holding it with like a big meatball on the end of it, you know?

PEGGY: A fork is just a fork. A fork with a meatball on it and a little kid behind it…that tells a story. 

JOHN: Sure does, but you don’t turn away any commercial projects then, do you?

PEGGY: Absolutely not. I will shoot pretty much anything, within reason.

JOHN:   Yeah, sure. Now you mention that you are a lifestyle photographer. So obviously people are going through all sorts of different changes in their lives. You had mentioned kids, but what about the maternity? Is maternity a big part of what you do?

PEGGY: Maternity is a huge part of my business. I actually am one of the only photographers in Boulder that specializes in underwater maternity photos. So we will go to a cement pool. I have access to some really beautiful, private pools in Boulder and we’ll jump in the water and throw some fabric around and now we’re doing under water maternity photos. And the great thing about those maternity photos is that that is just sort of a natural segue into the larger circle of life. So when the mom is pregnant, when the baby is newborn; maybe when the baby is actually being born and taking it’s very first breath of life, all the way through that first year, when they hit all their milestones, crawling, toddling, walking, baby’s first birthday.

JOHN: Wow. It sounds like you have a really nice perspective on the kind of photography that you’re doing. Now I understand that you use a special lens on a lot of your photography. Tell us a little bit about that.

PEGGY: I do. I use a lens called a lens baby. And a lens baby is a specialized lens that gives you a point of focus and then the edges blur out. You can control that sweet spot based on how you hold the lens, you know, you kind of move it around to accentuate certain parts of the image and let the edges flair out.

JOHN: So people can get kind of a focus on a certain part of the pictures then?

PEGGY: Yeah. It’s basically like a sweet spot of focus. So you can have, you know, for example like on a photograph of a little baby, I might zoom in and by zoom in I mean just focus in on little details like the baby’s hands or baby’s toes and then from there the edges will be nice and soft or a nice photo of a mother breastfeeding her child. It’s a very tender thing that happens and when you do that with the lens it gives it more of an impressionable look to the photo rather than just a picture. It has a little bit more of an artistic edge.

JOHN: Sure. Now if anybody out in our listening audience wants to see some of your photography where can they find your website address?

JOHN: Excellent. We are in the studio with Boulder, Colorado, photographer, Peggy Dyer or Peggy Dyer Photography, and you’re listening to the More Photos Photography Spotlight.  We’ll be right back after these important messages; do stay tuned.

ANNOUNCER:  More Photos Radio is powered by www.morephotos.com the online sales solution for professional photographers worldwide. 

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ANNOUNCER:  We now return you to More Photos Radio Photography Spotlight with your host, John Bentley.

JOHN:  Welcome back to More Photos Photography Spotlight. We are in the studio with Boulder, Colorado, photographer, Peggy Dyer or Peggy Dyer Photography. Welcome back to More Photos Photography Spotlight, Peggy.

JOHN:  Glad to have you on the program today. Now you’re in Colorado. Let’s talk about some of the cities and communities surrounding the Boulder, Colorado, area that you work out of, Peggy.

PEGGY: I work all over the state of Colorado. I travel a lot up in the mountains areas. I do lots of weddings in Aspen, Beaver Creek, and Vail. I do also a lot of work up in Estes Park. There’s a beautiful National Park up there, Rocky Mountain National Park, which we love to do portraits in. It’s a great place to take a family for an afternoon picnic and do some very wonderful photos of them having a fun time together.

JOHN:  What about facilities in the area? Do you find yourself doing let’s say weddings or anything along those lines?

PEGGY: The Oxford Hotel in downtown Denver which is right across the street from Union Station is a location I do lots of weddings and receptions. And it’s a wonderful spot again with Union Station to do some more environmental type portraits. You know, people kind of in their…you know the locations that I do weddings, they vary. Some are in churches. Sometimes they’re in somebody’s back yard. There kind of all over the place. I also do photos in down town Boulder and Denver 6^th Street Mall is another great place to take lots of wonderful photographs. 

JOHN: Great. Now you have a pretty exciting thing going on in it looks like a coffee shop in the Boulder, Colorado, area? Tell us about this visual journey through Thailand.

PEGGY: Yes, I had a wonderful opportunity of spending 3 weeks in Thailand in 2008, and I went from the downtown areas of Bangkok, and traveled all over to Northern Thailand; Chiang Mai down to Ko Si Mai which is an Island and then I got to spend 4 days in a sanctuary. And from that I was able to develop just such a wonderful rapport with elephants; spent some time riding elephants and feeding elephants and just hands on; swimming with them at the ponds, and chopping down banana trees and I photographed this entire journey, and it was very immersive.

PEGGY: I went swimming with elephants. The sanctuary is called Boon Lott’s Elephant Sanctuary and basically elephants in Thailand don’t have a lot of rights and it’s hard to imagine, but a farmer in Thailand might shoot an elephant for wandering onto his property and eating a tree or something. So elephants who spent their entire history of building up Thailand, they’re now just this discarded…they have a very hard life. So there’s a lot of sanctuaries throughout the region and the one that I went to was Boon Lott’s Elephant Sanctuary, and I had the wonderful opportunity of meeting an actual baby elephant that was four months old, and they have…I want to say there are eight or ten elephants that they have, and every day they have this routine. They wake up, they feed, you know, they go out and chop down elephant grass and banana trees and you feed it to the elephants and then the elephants go swimming in a big pond. So after my first day I got up the courage to get in the water and swim with the elephants, and of course my friend, Katherine, would photograph me having these encounters with elephants. And the very first time I rode an elephant, I have to say it’s nothing like riding a bicycle at all. Despite what you may have heard, right? Riding an elephant is not like riding a bicycle.

JOHN: Well let’s talk about the coffee shop in Boulder that you’re having this wonderful art display at.

PEGGY: The coffee shop is Ozo Coffee and they’re located at 5430 Arapaho Avenue in Boulder, and basically it’s a visual journey through Thailand, and I’d like to think of it as the world’s first double-sided art show in a coffee shop. So what I’ve done is I’ve printed out these large canvases. Pictures of the buda's, pictures of the elephants, and I’ve adhered them to board and on the backside of the boards they tell a story, you know, so I’ve painted the back side and I do a lot of the visual journaling. So whenever I go on a trip, I’ll prepare a blank sketch book with pages that have random paintings on them, and then as I take pictures I’ll write the story about what was happening when I was shooting, then I’ll come back once I’m home and take photos from the trip and put them into the spots in the books. So the idea of these boards is that they’re double sided. So you might go in for your cup of coffee on Monday, and you see six pictures of elepants and then three buda’s. And then at some point between Monday and Wednesday the show changes because we go in there every few days and we literally turn the pieces over so they’re double sided.

JOHN: That’s interesting. That’s a unique way of doing things. Now we have to wrap things up here pretty quick, but I understand that you’ve been doing some live music photography out there in the Boulder area as well, Peggy. Tell us about that.

PEGGY: Yes, I have. I met a band called Something Underground, and they’re based in Denver, Colorado, and they do lots of acoustic music, lots of live shows. So I got into photographing live music using my lens baby. And it’s been a wonderful experience. It’s taken me from Evergreen, Colorado, photographing a very famous wild west saloon called the Little Bear all the way to KBCO Studio C which is a local radio station that artists from all over the country come and perform music in.

PEGGY: You can find those photos on my blog primarily which you can find through Peggydyer.com

JOHN: Is there a phone number people can reach you by?

JOHN: Well thank you for joining us today on the More Photos Photography Spotlight, Peggy Dyer.

 

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