Behind the Camera: Chad Brown

Chad Brown is a photographer, filmmaker, creative director, advocate, and nonprofit leader. Much of his work centers around telling stories of underserved voices. He documents indigenous stories, especially up in the Arctic, and stories from the BIPOC community that revolve around their connection to the outdoors. Every email from Chad ends with the following message under his signature, “NOTE: Please be aware that I live the adventurous life that my work reflects. My responses may be delayed for a few days, as I frequently find myself in remote areas with limited connectivity.” Chad’s visits to Pro Photo Supply are beloved by the staff as they usually come with tales from his most recent adventure and the challenge of figuring out how to lighten his gear load without compromising the quality of the stories he’s telling when traveling in the backcountry of the Arctic Circle. But Chad’s own story has quite the story arc of its own.

“I've always been a creative, you know,” Chad remembers. “Even in high school, my mother had put me in different types of artistic magnet schools,” he continues, “and then I followed that path into college and ended up finishing off my grad schooling at Pratt Institue in New York and received my M.S.A in Communication Design. I went to Pratt for art direction, design, and branding and photography was what I minored in, school-wise.”

“Some people don't really understand the importance of teachers dropping some hard nuggets, it’s a framework within you that you can kind of never erase. Storytelling was taught to me in the form of developing concept, visual conceptualization, and then rolling that into telling your story through frames and sketching it out to a storyboard,” Chad says dropping his own knowledge. “When I'm telling a story, I'm still conceptualizing it into a storyboard. That's going to give me a direct path to the information I need to do and collect. When I’ve done that, I can come back and pick up some B roll, so my time is much more well spent on strategy, concept, and focus. I don't have to find my story when I'm shooting, it's already there. I know a lot of guys and women can run and gun. Running and gunning, I feel like you're wasting your time or you could be wasting a client's time. I can run and gun and capture everything, but my storyboard is my map of what I'm working with and allows me to not waste time.”

Read the full article here.