Hey there! As this is the first post, let me introduce myself! My name is Charlie Thiel (pronounced like T-e-e-l). I am a photographer, husband, father, filmmaker, snowboarder, all rolled into one with lots of other stuff thrown in as well. And yes, everything is new! Seven months ago we moved to a new town and a new home. We left Charleston, SC, a great coastal town with rivers and beaches, great food, lots of mosquitos and plenty of heat and humidity to move to the high desert mountain town of Bend, Oregon. 2700 miles later and 3600 feet higher, we are now settled into our new home. It has been a whirlwind seven months! New schools for our girls, a new studio for my sculptor wife (you can see her work at www.kellythielstudio.com), soon a new business venture for my wife and three of her new friends, fantastic new friends, a new mountain lifestyle filled with outdoors stuff to do, snowboarding and skiing lessons for our daughters (3 1/2 and 6 1/2), a new office for myself, a newly formed photo business with a new name and new focus, new skills and gear added to my photo business, new business partnerships and opportunities, new clients already, and finally, here it is, the new blog!
Things have moved quickly for me and my new photo business. The photo business that I started seven-ish years ago, Charlie Thiel Photography, is now in the past and the new photography business here in Bend is Charlie Photo. Thankfully, registering an LLC and the name was fairly painless. I was able to find an incredible office much faster than I thought I would. The space was unattractive, but its the perfect size - small enough to work in, but big enough to shoot in - in an incredible building in downtown Bend. It took a lot of work to get it ready to move into, a project that took away from time spent working on the website and the blog, but it has been worth it!
This is the way it looked when I first moved in. What you can't really see is how dirty the carpet was. This photo also does not really represent just how dark this space was!
This is at the priming stage of repainting the place.
Here's me, having great fun spraying my new office.
The finished product! The new home of Charlie Photo!
I barely got settled into my new office when I began to get a few small jobs for businesses here in my building and for a local web design company. I'll post about some of those jobs soon.
I'll leave it at that for now, but if you have stopped by to take a look at me and my work, feel free to get in touch with me by text, email, phone, or whatever method strikes your fancy. I've spent a lot of my professional photographic time shooting weddings and designing albums, an aspect of photography I love, to commercial and editorial work, something I see being a much larger part of the equation for my business here in Bend.
So come back soon. I'll have at least one post a week, with topics ranging from life and parenting to photography, to why I really love what I do. There's more to come!
Charlie