Today we’d like to introduce you to Christian B. Meza.
Hi Christian B., please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
One look at me in high school and the LAST thing you thought I would be doing in a few years was managing two individual film production and photography companies.
I was that nerd character that you remember at school who was always big into astronomy, maybe watched a little too much Cosmos and the Big Bang Theory and was on my way to becoming a full-time dedicated scientist into – what would probably be – a career in planetary science or astrochemistry.
But even as I obtained my first intern career at the age of sixteen with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, something wasn’t fulfilling me, and it kept me awake at night.
Amongst a daily background of sixteen hours of school and homework, I decided to learn photography and do it my own way, despite the fact that it would surely be a long endeavor of learning optics, exposure, editing software, lighting, color science and application. But for once in a very long time, it felt like I had actually begun to take the first step on the right path, and I was immediately addicted.
The day I bought my first lens I walked across the street to Greg’s Camera Shop where I met two of the kindest and finest artists I know to this day and are still among my closest friends: Paul Kitzmiller and Guillermo Escudero. I couldn’t afford the beautiful Tamron 24-70mm lens I had wanted, but I had just enough to buy a cheap, plastic, Canon 70-300mm lens. I remember I let out a brief sad sigh, knowing that it would be a very long time before I could ever afford a fraction of the cost of that beautiful Tamron 24-70mm lens, but then as if snapping out of a bad dream, I was bizarrely inspired and pumped with immediate excitement!
I looked back at Guillermo across the counter, and I distinctly remember smiling and saying “I am going to learn to appreciate this lens, and I know there will be failures along the way, but I WILL get that Tamron 24-70mm lens one day.” I cherished that little lens, brought it everywhere I went, and did everything with it from portraits to nature photography and even long exposures. I had learned my own way, from making my own shoots, learning from Paul and Guillermo’s studio classes, and volunteering hundreds of hours as a novice shooter. I began to breathe my new hobby.
While my enterprise has changed drastically these past few years, my mentality has ultimately stayed quite the same, and I am still humbled by what I don’t know and what future challenges I am going to blunder and fail at next in the world of photography. I am still excited by the change of technology and teaching myself to relearn the craft as time pushes me from this new wind from beyond the valleys. And consequentially, it’s a life I enjoy living each day with a full arsenal of cameras and lenses, including that beautiful Tamron 24-70mm I promised myself I would buy one day.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
The road of a filmmaker is like those annoying washboard roads you find on dirt paths. You know exactly what I speak of: those gravel roads that have those weird, rough, washboard-like patterns on the ground that shake the whole car and make your suspension wonder if your Land Rover just turned into an A-10 Warthog at maximum gatling fire. Plus, it’s never just a few feet of jagged pavement as it can sometimes stretch for miles, shaking you more as you go faster.
I began taking the road to filmmaking slowly as there was practically no haze, and you could see the miles of washboard road ahead as the challenges of immense cost, long dedications, and exhaustive creative management dawned upon me in full grandeur. Naturally, the slow pace was a comfortable glide across the pavement, but when I had looked up to see my progress, I noticed that I hadn’t even truly begun my long trek. Since then, I have stepped on the gas and embraced the constant bombardment, facing my first challenges like the inability to pay for basic needs, footing the bills for projects that would begin to put me on the map, and learning the photographic arts my own way.
As humans are made to adapt to change, I was able to push on and I began to discover that I liked the rough road, because you are always fully aware of the chaotic track beneath your feet. I began to find excitement in the way it frequently threw me around, causing me to sometimes lose grip and tactically challenge myself to balance the day’s work.
But every once in a while, you get blessed with a stretch of clean, dark blue-black tarmac, which silences the noise, brings sweet euphoria, and can allow you to finally look back on the work you did and bring you sensations of the greatest pride imaginable. Artists live for those days, and we know that the grain gets at its roughest when fast open roads are just upon the horizon.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Exothermic Films?
I hate using tripods and will always trade up for a pair of knee pads any day; I am always in the dirt, running in the rain, and doing whatever it takes to get the shot. I am not the traditional set-up-the-camera-and-hope-something-comes-into-frame kind of filmmaker, but rather a hungry menace out to steal what I can at the risk of life, limb, and – perhaps more often than not – severe dehydration in this triple-digit heat desert.
My two photography and film production companies, Christian Meza Media and Exothermic Films, specialize in automotive commercial videography, aesthetic cinematography, “western-style” motion picture capture, glamor photography, wedding services, and ultra-high-resolution photography for extreme detail display and sizing up images to the likes of buildings, blimps, and billboards. I have had the great fortune to work with companies like NASA, Aston Martin, Cirque du Soleil, Amazon, Ted Talks and more.
But perhaps my biggest quirk, is that I have a voracious habit of jumping in headfirst into things I have never tried before. In the words of Herman Melville “As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”
The small city of Tucson, by sheer definition of population and size, might not appear at first to be a satiable place for this thirst, but it just so happens to be a haven for newfound artists, close communities who seek to ignite new culture, and has brought along – with what could only be described as – a new era of Renaissance for this dry desert.
Among the traditional work week of wedding photography and personalized portraits, I find time to seek out the sweet, bright-green roots of new vegetation growing between the masonry and finding ways to pour a generous amount of water on them to watch them grow. Metaphors aside, I love people, and I especially love handing my resources to those who might not otherwise have a voice or platform to share their ideas, artwork, visions, and talents. And so, if you yourself are one of those roots, I am always happy to bring out the best of my green thumb and add you to the beautiful garden, alive with the sound of sights of true artistic pollination.
What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
Everyone is a photographer. It’s true, and if you don’t believe me try counting the number of photos you have taken with your smartphone, one by one, and see if you can make it to the end. Photography is a staple of everyday life, and we as humans strive to archive our favorite memories and stories with it so we may remember them in future one day, to remind us of where we came from and how we have grown into the person we are today.
As a professional photographer, we have to live in and search among the seemingly infinite moments of our lives from years to seconds and capture one single moment to bring us back in time: to remember the scent of the tropical air, to relive the sensation of a symphony orchestra filling the room, to revitalize the legacy of a passed friend. And while we are enjoying the pleasantries of instantaneous photography at our fingertips, we have lost the artistic instinct of the true nature of photography. All forms of art have faced the advent of modernization, which helps bring the freedom of art to anyone who wished to behold it, but some have begun to devalue the importance of photographers and filmmakers altogether.
In the next five to ten years this trend will continue and we will begin to see photographers and filmmakers coming from a wider range of talent, ready to bathe in the beauty of the photographic arts, but I fear that the question of omitting our artistic resource will become more prevalent. In basic terms, it is slowly becoming harder for photographers to stand out and become a virtue that people are willing to pay for.
While we have to create a source of revenue to keep up with everyday life, if you ask someone who has been doing this for several years, you will discover that money doesn’t play a part in the reason they do it. Some want to become anesthesiologists and hedge fund managers to see the zeros and commas in their bank statements, but artists are fully aware of the sacrifice of profit for the sake of bringing their visions to life. And perhaps now, more than ever, the stage has become bigger for everyone to have a fair share of the spotlight, and with every new generation, we continue to advance and augment artistic styles into what will ultimately become a new form of creation. This is true nature of artistic evolution, and I can’t wait to see where it brings us next.
Contact Info:
- Email: christianbmeza@gmail.com
- Website: christianbmeza.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christianbmeza/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/electronegativity/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/christianbmeza
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_sq4SBsv10nHmuAb2l3bcA
- SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/christianmezamedia
- Other: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm8183597/
Image Credits
Ellie English
Marie Brogmus
Konstantin Moskalenko
Asucena Gonzales
Anyelo Gonzales
Janeth A. Villavicencio
David Lee Hoss
Antonio Fowl Stark
Giuliana Fusco
