The Rhoads

Tell us about the Rhoads and how you got into photography?
Well for starters we’re married, and we work together, our last name is Rhoads, hence our company name, We Are The Rhoads. Working together really works for us and we love getting to travel and collaborate together on the daily. We met when we were freshman in college, and have been pretty inseparable ever since. Chris was a professional bass player at the time we met and would go on tours and take these beautiful black and white documentary images from life on the road and I was going to journalism school because I wanted to tell stories as a career one day. I realized pretty early on that my medium was a little off with writing as I kept gravitating toward my camera to tell a visual story instead of a written one, but stories always did it for me. I went to Togo, West Africa one summer to document some humanitarian work some friends were doing and then backpacked through Europe with my camera (stereotypical college soul searching trip!) but I came back and knew that telling visual stories was really what I wanted to do with my life.  Chris encouraged this path as we both just knew we really wanted to create things for a living, a couple years later a lot of our projects naturally started overlapping. Chris hung up his touring shoes a few years later as our shooting got to be the primary bulk of what we did creatively together we were both enriched by it. Now we live in LA and have been creating things together for about 10 years in the visual medium. We both shoot stills and direct and typically always as a team.

How would you guys describe your work?
Alive, honest, spontaneous

Your work has a lot of energy and fun. How do you get your talent and models to open up that way?
I think a lot of it has to do with building a basic rapport with people on the front end of a shoot and also explaining our vision up front before we even raise our cameras. A lot of times people/models/actors step into a photo-shoot with a lot of pre-conceived notions about what a photo-shoot is and we really want to break those down and start with a blank canvas of sorts.  Sometimes it takes a bit of showing what we want as well to gain trust, playing along with the talent in the process, ie. If I’m asking them to run and jump on something we may run and jump alongside them. We also keep the music going through our shoots to keep things feeling easy-breezy and fun.

Do you do test shoots and personal projects? How and when do those happen?
We try to shoot for ourselves on the daily. I (Sarah) personally carry around a pocket camera that goes with me everywhere, a Contax-T3 and I try to shoot every day. Chris prefers the Leica M6 in B&W for his daily musings but a lot of those one-off personal film shots that have zero production value ironically end up being the type of shots that get us booked for things.

We used to “test” a lot more before we had much of a client list, and we’re big believers in it, but just in the interest of time now we are fortunate enough to be able to utilize our editorial commissions for those exploratory and creative opportunities since editorial work really gives us a lot more leeway than what you get on a commercial project for example. 

 What current personal projects are you working on?
We actually are finishing up a short we’ve been working on that we hope to bring to life in the form of a short format film sometime end of this year/early next, as soon as we can get the funding and all the pieces in place!

What are some memorable shoots you've done in the past? What happened?
Our work takes us to all kinds of interesting places and gets us in front of lots of interesting people, which is one of the main things we both love about this line of work.

We’ve done everything from a commission in Kyoto for Kinfolk magazine where we were shooting in bamboo forests in Japan, to shooting Taylor Swift in Montauk New York for a big company like Keds. But I think the most memorable shoots are the ones where we walk away really having pushed ourselves (and sometimes our clients) creatively. We did a shoot recently where we pitched an entire concept for both a print and motion campaign to a client and they signed off on it and really let us run with it and what came out of it was work we really felt proud to have created, those kind of moments feel like growth spurts as you try new things and evolve. Those shoots are the most gratifying of all.

What is typically in your camera bag?
Depends on the project but here’s a few things that never really leave the bags:
- Canon 5D MK III’s
- 2 sets of L series prime lenses (35/50/85/135)
- 580EX II flashes
- Pocket wizards sync cables
- Mamiya 7ii
- Some medium format film, preferably Kodak Portra 400
- A Polaroid land camera or another one of our toy cameras, holga or otherwise.

Do you prefer digital or film? Why?
Film will always hold a special place in our hearts and be our preference, but digital has a place too especially with turn around times in the commercial-space. Film has a certain intangible quality that makes it timeless, special and full of a bit of magic, which we love.

Who are some influences in photography/art?
Annie Leibovitz, Herb Ritts, Sally Mann, Avedon & Filmmakers like Alejandro Jodorowsky

What's your opinion on social media?
We have a bit of a love hate relationship with it to be honest. I think just like anything it can be grossly overused to fuel people’s egos and pull them out of a very real-life moment and into the screen of their devices. But on the otherhand it can also be a really great tool for getting great work in front of people. I think just like anything it’s all about the intention behind it. This day in age it’s defiinitely a necessity as it is a great way to showcase the visual medium through places like instagram etc.

What one piece of advice would you give a new photographer that you had to learn the hard way?
Get ready to ride the wave. Stepping into the career of being a freelance photographer is full of ups and downs, moments when you hate everything you’re creating and other moments when you feel on top of the world and totally invigorated by it, but this is the life and the struggle of any creative trying to make good work.

Where can we see more of your work (add social media links)?
- Website: http://wearetherhoads.com
- Blog: http://blog.wearetherhoads.com
- Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/wearetherhoads
- Instagram: @wearetherhoads
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wearetherhoads