I was lucky enough to email Colin Gray. I had a few questions for him after 

I saw his images from Sandy in Wired Magazine.

 PIXFEEDLA: What City do you reside in?

 Colin D Gray: I currently live in Chelsea in Manhattan.  It is a beautiful area to live and close to everything and I can walk to work which is amazing.

 PIXFEEDLA: Where did you grow up?

 Colin D Gray: I was an Army Brat so moved around a decent bit.  North Carolina to Virginia to California to Hong Kong to New York to Virginia again, then down to Savannah to go to school.  I spent the majority of grade school in Northern Virginia, right outside of DC.  I consider Savannah, GA home though.  My parents live there now and a lot of my best friends still live there.

  PIXFEEDLA: When did you decide to photograph?

  Colin D Gray: When I first when to SCAD I was planning on majoring in Film & Video and a minor in Computer Art.  One of the required classes for Film students was Intro to Photography.  The teacher was very encouraging and I really liked the photos that I made in that class so I kept taking photo classes.  By my junior year I decided to do Photography as my major.  Ive been doing it ever since

  PIXFEEDLA: What are your favorite tools?

  Colin D Gray: I use a Canon 5D 2.  I love that camera.  Someday Ill get the 3 but prob not anytime soon.  For studio portraits I always use a beauty dish as my main light, and usually my only light.  Ive simplified quite a lot since living in new york and try not to use too much equipment.  

  PIXFEEDLA: Hurricane Sandy shots?

  Colin D Gray: That one was of the coolest shooting opportunities i could imagine.  I just went out to shoot because i knew that i had to.  I ended up staying up all night.  I wasnt sure what the shots would be for, but hoped that they could get seen.  By the end of the week i had a gallery up on my website, and shared the link on facebook, but that was about it.  A few weeks later i contacted Jakob Schiller who writes for Wired’s webpage.  I had seen a few other posts he had done and really like the work so shared my pics with him.  We talked on the phone for a while and the following week they featured the images on their site.  It was super awesome.  I would still love to get them out there even more.  I always thought it would be great to do a print sale of the images to raise money for some of the people that lost so much during the hurricane.

  Colin D Gray:I like my landscape work but it is more of a personal record of the places that I go exploring.  My portraits are what im most proud of.  Ive been working for Vh1 and MTV for the last year and have gotten to shoot so many cool people in such a short amount of time.  Ive always wanted to do portraits of celebs and musicians and this job as given me that opportunity.  For the first few years in NYC i assisted Victoria Will who is an awesome celeb portrait photographer and got to learn a lot from working with her.  The shoots go sooooo quickly which is actually a fun challenge.  Now I can get a good shot super quick.  I usually dont need more that 5 minutes, and many times i only have a minute or so.  Another project i have loved working on for MTV is shooting at the NYC Comic Con.  We bring the coolest costumed people into our makeshift studio and get cool shots of them for the website.

 PIXFEEDLA: 5 Years?

 Colin D Gray:  5 years from now i will most likely still be in NYC.  I miss Savannah and I’d also love to live in California at some point, but for now I am going to stay in NYC for my career.  I really love working at MTV, and like having a set schedule there and working around a lot of people.  So I would like to work there for a while.  Sometime soon though I need to get a rep who can promote my work more and deal with scheduling and pricing and all the business of photography which i really dont enjoy.  At some point I would love to shoot for major magazines like Vogue, W, Esquire, Wired.. etc. Ive also never had a gallery show with my photos, so that would be awesome. Im also getting back into shooting video.  And I do a lot of collage work.  So i guess in 5 years i would like to be doing what I’m doing now, just on a somewhat bigger scale and hopefully making enough money that I’m not living check to check.

To see more of Colin’s Work Please Visit I<3ColinGray .com