Dean Bradshaw: From Zoologist to Conceptual Portrait Photographer

“Often photographers are so obsessed with single, beautiful frames without really thinking about the overall story and intention. You’ve got to engineer a dream—that’s what you’re doing. You’re a puppeteer and you’re moving the dream around so the viewer feels something. It’s easy now to create beautiful imagery; it’s not as easy to tell a good story.”
— DEAN BRADSHAW

WHY YOU SHOULD KNOW HIM

With a curiosity for stories and characters, Dean Bradshaw’s narrative approach to client and personal work serves as creative inspiration to rethink style across subject matter.
@deanbradshaw | www.deanbradshaw.com

Photo © Ryan Essmaker

Dean Bradshaw chiefly identifies himself as a still-image maker, but this L.A.-based commercial and conceptual portrait photographer saw the filmmaking wave coming long before it crashed onto the industry. A couple years ago, the Australian expat (he grew up in Perth before moving to the States in 2009) shelled out some serious bones for a Red EPIC camera—a hefty purchase that, for him, was motivation alone to start using it.

Luckily, the purchase has paid off: Most of his jobs these days involve a combination of stills and video, plus he’s been experimenting with filming creative videos on his own time. As an extension of his ongoing portrait project called “The Craftsmen”—a series of dark, fly-on-the-wall photos of local artisans such as “The Metalworker,” “The Carpenter” and “The Machinist”—he’s making wordless, slow-motion videos, most notably “The Hatmaker,” in which Bradshaw captures a brilliant shot of the famed milliner Nick Fouquet (a favorite among stars like Pharrell Williams and Madonna) briefly setting a fedora on fire, an old material-distressing technique. 

SNAKEY START

Bradshaw’s photography roots began with reptiles. As a kid growing up in Perth, he was fascinated by them—particularly lizards and snakes. He eventually pursued zoology professionally and worked as a field biologist, venturing into remote areas of the outback to find and catch them. Having been tipped off to photography after his parents got him a digital point-and-shoot for his 18th birthday, he’d photograph the reptiles for fun, and quickly noticed he had a much stronger interest in taking pictures of them than tracking them.

Reading up on Strobist and other blogs and books, Bradshaw gleaned everything he could about lighting techniques (having realized that lighting was critical in getting the good macro shots he wanted) and fiddled around for countless hours in Photoshop. Traveling to remote areas for his field work allowed him to expand his portfolio to include some landscape and photojournalism work, too, though he began to feel a yearning to delve more into people portraiture.

An earlier portrait shot of the Platt Brothers, a performing trio whose shows consist of dance, acrobatics, lively music and comedic acts. All photos © Dean Bradshaw

“I hadn’t always been interested in people,” Bradshaw says with a laugh, “but I guess I realized that the best stories worth photographing are those involving people. I got more interested in characters because there was more emotion there for me.”

AN AUSSIE IN L.A.

Shortly thereafter, Bradshaw packed his bags for a commercial retouching job in California. By now post-production was his expertise, and his work had gained traction on sites like Behance. About a year and a half later, he quit retouching to focus on shooting and editing his own work. It was a shaky time for Bradshaw, who says he was basically broke, but he stuck with the daunting task of building up a business from scratch, photographing willing friends to establish a solid portrait portfolio. 

“Being an expat, I think I have that immigrant drive,” he says. “You really push yourself because you’re starting from nothing, and I learned very quickly that one of the keys to success is developing a signature style.” For Bradshaw, that became conceptual and hyper-realistic with, he says, “an element of humor that comes from Australian culture—making fun of things is part of it.”

Taken for Bradshaw’s “Golden Years” conceptual series, featuring unexpectedly sporty senior citizens.

Bradshaw doesn’t pinpoint a big-break moment, but a year into going solo—after shooting for smaller publications and posting work on his website and social media—he landed an ad campaign for the sportswear company Star Trac, which got picked up and shared online, and eventually fell into the delighted laps of CPi Reps. 

BUILDING CHARACTER

So far Bradshaw has shot for a wide range of clients—San Diego Magazine, National Geographic, Asics, Wrangler Workwear and the London-based spirits company Diageo among them. He specializes in advertising and usually accepts one “big job” per month, filling in time in between with personal projects of all sorts. 

Taken for Bradshaw’s “Man of the Beach” series, which he says was inspired by the “sometimes strange and entertaining characters” who frequent these environments. As Bradshaw describes him, this is “the anti-hero.”

“I’m all over the place with projects—one minute I’m shooting a fat guy on the beach because I like the idea of it, and the next I’m shooting cowboys in Montana,” he says. “These ideas are different, but it’s what keeps me interested. If I did the same thing over and over again, I think I’d go mad. Photography, to me, is a passport to experience anything you want.” 

The concepts behind his personal projects just pop into his head, but sometimes he can trace their origins. The “Golden Years,” a series of sporty senior citizens, was, he says, a reaction to the “very dramatic, masculine heroes” he’d been shooting. “I wanted to turn that idea on its head and celebrate someone unexpected.”

Bradshaw goes all in for his conceptual projects, thinking up characters, casting actors (living in L.A., this is pretty easy) and building sets—though just as he felt a yearning to photograph animals instead of track them, and then capture people instead of animals, he feels a pull to pursue more documentary projects. Which is why later this year he is going to Mongolia to shoot nomads. “I’ve been creating all these characters and building sets,” he says, “but I want to get back to photojournalistic projects with a bit more meaning.”

ENGINEERING A DREAM

Bradshaw has discovered that his filmmaking style is almost polar opposite to that of his still photography; he takes a softer, dreamier, shorter-depth-of-field approach, versus the grittier, razor-sharp post-production touch he puts on most of his photography, and he finds his motivation behind making films to be different, too.

“I’m really inspired by motorcycle culture,” Bradshaw says of his “Man and Machine” series. This was one of the portraits he took at a motorcycle event that was raising money for the Keep A Breast Foundation.

“The video component is almost my hobby; I partly do it for my business, but I just really enjoy making these little films, because sometimes I’m not satisfied with the emotional impact of a still,” he says. “I mean, stills are great—in the world of Instagram, you can translate so much very quickly—but to really dive deep, nothing quite beats motion when you’re combining sound and really enveloping the viewer into a world. They’re like two different paintbrushes.”  

In Dean Bradshaw’s Gear Bag
CAMERAS: Phase One IQ180 with Hasselblad H4X body (medium format), Nikon D810 (35mm digital), Mamiya 7 II and Nikon F6 (film), Red Dragon (video) LENSES: Hasselblad 35mm f/3.5 HC, 50mm f/3.5 HC II, 80mm f/2.8 HC, 100mm f/2.2 HC (his favorite), 1.7X Teleconverter, Sigma 25mm f/1.4 Art, 50mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art, Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8, Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 L, Nikon 85mm f/1.4, Nikon 28mm f/1.8 G ED, Nikon 60mm Micro-Nikkor LIGHTING: Profoto, Arri, Kinoflo OTHER: Sekonic 358 light meter, X-Rite ColorChecker, Ona Camps Bay Backpack, Pelican and SKB cases