EMMETT SPARLING
The precocious talent on his incredible career and portfolio
LISTENING to Emmett Sparling’s story and looking at his portfolio, you might think he is a young man in a hurry. The self-taught photographer has already worked professionally in fashion, travelled extensively to shoot landscapes and cultural portraits, won commissions from blue chip brands to photograph cars, beer, airlines and hotel rooms, as well as produce videos for big ad
campaigns. On top of this, the Vancouver-based photographer is a budding film-maker with aspirations to direct feature-length movies. And did I mention his underwater photography? Yes, Emmett has even found time to learn freediving, so he can swim with whales. All this and he’s still only 22! Given what he’s packed into his life and career so far, you might think he’s perhaps a restless, hyperactive, fast-talking social media influencer, wanting to race through our time as quickly as possible. On the contrary, Emmett comes across as a very chilled and quietly spoken individual who speaks as he might when meeting a
long-absent friend for a drink in his local bar. This is your round Emmett…
So, where did it all start?
I started when I first picked up a camera. I was doing macro photography, just wandering around my back garden and trying to find bugs and stuff, then eventually taking picture of my friends.
My first professional gigs, where I was making money, was doing events and headshots, just being paid a couple of hundred bucks to take photos of an event.
Was there any sort of formal training or education?
No, it was learning as I went along and saving all of my money to get my next camera and a new lens. A couple of years later I took some photos of my friend who is a professional model, and she showed those photos to her agency and the agency really liked them. They reached out and started hiring me for test shoots and editorial work. That took off, but as Vancouver is not a big fashion scene, that helped me because I could get to become a medium-sized fish in a small pond! I got fairly well known in the Vancouver fashion model agency space, which isn’t saying much actually.
What sort of work were you doing?
I did editorial fashion for two years professionally. I was doing a shoot every single day with a new model every day, and I did a bit of work down in LA shooting the winner of America’s Next Top Model, and some other models down there. After two years of doing that it feels pretty repetitive, you have the same ideas, and you find new ways of executing the same ideas, or just creating spins on the same idea, and it doesn’t feel like anything new.
I guess there wasn’t much variety in locations either. Were you stuck in the studio a lot of the time?
Oh, absolutely. It became very tedious, exactly the same locations all the time. Then there’s the whole ego aspect where everyone in the fashion industry has an agenda and they all think they’re more important than you. Yeah, a lot of strange, interesting characters in the fashion industry! So, I saved up a bit of money, decided to drop everything and go backpacking through Mexico for four months! Then I flew from Mexico to Indonesia, and I went backpacking there for four or five months as well.
Brilliant! When was this?
This was the very beginning of 2017. When I was in Mexico I was with other backpackers, but they weren’t photographers, so if I wanted to wake up for sunrise to take a photo of a mountain, they’d be like, “What? Why the hell don’t we just go at noon or something?” So, for a while it was hard getting any photos.
Frustrating. What did you do?
When I flew to Indonesia, I reached out to
some friends through Instagram, as we’d been chatting about travelling around Bali, so we met up and travelled together. That was a huge learning curve as you get way better at photography when you’re bouncing ideas off one another and teaching each other on trips. You also have someone to get up with for sunrise for crazy photo missions!
Then you came back to Vancouver, but were soon off again…
I got back to Vancouver completely out of money, so I went back to shooting corporate videos, but I thought, “This is so boring, I can’t do this forever.” One of the contacts that I met in Mexico reached out and hired me to shoot a video of a tour company going through the Czech Republic, so I did that job for them and as I kept posting on Instagram I kept getting more and more opportunities.
Then when I went to Peru at the very end of 2017, the Rainbow Mountain at sunrise photos from that trip really took off, because I figured out my style a bit more and I had a better sense of editing landscape photos.
What happened in Peru that made such a difference?
This job in Peru was an expedition to Rainbow Mountain (left), a spectacular mountain in the Andes. I had to pay for my own flights to get there, but once I got there everything was covered through this expedition company. I was with one of my friends and we were like, “What if we did Rainbow Mountain at sunrise to get some cool photos?”
They said that was impossible, unless we were prepared to take four days to walk around the mountain. So, we had to trek four days to the other side of it, and then left our base camp on the last day at midnight, started hiking, got there for sunrise, and it was -20°C, 17,500 feet above sea level, just brutal conditions, but it was the most incredible sunrise and we got the first photographs of Rainbow Mountain at sunrise.
“I saved a bit of money, decided to drop everything and go backpacking through Mexico for four months”
“It was -20°C, 17,500 feet above sea level, just brutal conditions, but it was the most incredible sunrise”
How did they do on Instagram?
It took me from 40,000 followers to about 100,000 followers in two weeks, maybe a month. Those photos went everywhere. That was the first time I realized that if you do something original, then it goes a lot further and feels a lot better and looks a lot better. That’s when I started getting reached out to quite a bit more by brands.
The first was a blanket company called Sackcloth & Ashes, and they would give me a blanket to take on each trip and photograph it on the locations I was going to. The payment was maybe $1500 for a one minute video and a bunch of photos, so not a huge amount of money, but it was enough to pay for a trip.
How long a video are brands looking for?
The average length is around three minutes, but I’ve tried to master how to tell a deep story in that time. It’s challenging because three minutes can feel like a long time if you don’t do it right, but it can fly by if you do it well – you want the audience to forget about how long it is and just be immersed in the story. I think the most important thing for photography and video is storytelling.
That’s a good point, so what are the advantages of stills and video for constructing a story?
The advantage that photography has over
“Fashion has allowed me to get a way better sense of working with lighting and working with the subject, and knowing what makes an engaging portrait. Cultural portraits are one of my favourite types of photography, even more than landscape sometimes, because it feels more unique and more like a personal connection. When I see a cool portrait opportunity, it’s not only about seeing an interesting person, it’s the scene around them, something that looks cinematic. But it’s also about interacting with the person and having a conversation, because you don’t just go up to people randomly and take their photo. You need to talk with them. Every one of those shots on my website involved interaction, talking with them, hanging out and then getting their permission to take the photo. And if you’re really lucky they’ll let you use a reflector!”