I sat down with our Marketing Assistant, Ross O’Donohue, to get to know him a bit better and see what makes him tick
Let’s start out with the basics: name, age, and birthday.
Ross O’Donohue. I’m 25 years old and was born February 9.
What High School did you attend?
I went to Marblehead High School in Massachusetts.
That’s pretty far away. I expected it to be somewhere in California. Did you have a job during that time?
Yeah, I worked at a local skate shop called Brickhouse Skateshop for about five or six years and really enjoyed learning about the business aspects of running a shop. I would work behind the counter during the day and design graphics for them at night. I was getting paid about 100$ a graphic, which I thought was pretty cool at the time, considering each one took about 3-4 hours to make. It was more than I had ever been paid for anything!
How’d you get into making graphics for them?
I’ve been skating since I was about ten years old and that lead to my interest in the graphics done on skateboards. I started making my own graphics and stencils for fun. My friends liked what I was doing and started to ask me to design graphics for their boards, so it was kind of just a natural progression.
Did you attend college?
I did. I don’t know if this is a fun fact that should be included, but I didn’t graduate high school. I dropped out in 2002 and got my GED.
Yeah, I don’t see why that can’t be in there.
Cool. I started going part time to school for Graphic Design and Business at a local community college. I got frustrated with the business aspect because the focus was on accounting which simply wasn’t for me. So, I decided to attend school full-time with a focus on photography and see what I could do with that and how far I could take it.
What college was this?
MasArt. The official name is Massachusetts College of Art and Design. It was really cool because the first year you do all kinds of different types of art and learn a variety of subjects; drawing, photography, graphic design, color theory, and visual language which was an awesome mash up of media types.
So, you decided to fully focus on photography. That’s a pretty big shift from business. How’d your parents feel about that?
They supported the decision, as long as that’s what I really wanted. My mom is actually also a photographer.
That’s awesome.
Yeah, we had a dark room in the house where I learned a lot about the processes of film photography. We would work on fun projects like printing on eggs and different types of paper.
What kind of photography are you into?
I used to do a lot of black and white film…I still do mostly film but some digital too.
What kind of cameras do you use?
My favorite camera is my 4×5 Zone 6 (large format). The detail and quality you can get from that camera is really great and I’m a stickler for fine detail. I like the really large format. It can produce 30 x 40 prints easily. I also use a Rolleicord for my medium format.
For digital, I use a Canon Rebel T1I.
Do you have any photo projects that you’re currently working on?
Yeah, I’ve been working on a project for the past year. The theme focuses on the connection between animals and their environment. Part of it is taking animals out of their natural environment and putting them in a plain environment to see how they’re perceived, then patterning or creating a design with the images. I originally wanted this to be a large installation but I don’t know if that’s going to happen anymore. I’m on the fence if they will become stencils or stay as photographs.
It’s cool that as a creative type that’s interested in photography you ended up at a company like ScanDigital. How long have you been working here?
Since last March, so a little over a year.
What did you start out as and how did you obtain you current position?
I started as a scanner and was offered to either go down the technical route of things or take a position as day-time supervisor. I chose to go down to supervisor route because I like facing new challenges every day.
What are your responsibilities as a supervisor?
I basically oversee about ten scanners and they come to me with different questions. I’m also the person to go to if there’s a hardware issue they need help with.
What’s your favorite thing about working at ScanDigital?
The idea of preserving people’s memories is really cool. I like learning about the history and science behind all of the digital photography we’re surrounded by. The whole digital side of photography is somewhat new to me because I grew up with film and working in a darkroom.
Where do you see the company going?
I hope that the company starts to focus more on prints and preserving people’s memories in that sense, like calendars and photobooks. I believe that the in-house video will continue to be big for the company and that the large-scale prints and canvases that we started doing will do well.
Agreed. On a completely different note, what kind of music do you listen to?
Man…everything.
People always seem to have trouble with this question.
It’s hard to break it down and just list a few because a lot of it depends on my mood and what I’m doing at the time. Like, I’m not going to listen to mellow reggae when I’m on the freeway stuck in traffic. I’m really into the 70s and 80s, rock, new alternative stuff, rap, hip-hop…some new artists I’m into are the Raconteurs—Jack White’s solo career has been pretty awesome—Portugal The Man, and Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeroes.
I think that covers it. Thanks for your time man.
No problem.
Check out more of Ross’s artwork at: http://www.rossodonohue.com/
Ross – Footplant to fakie (that’s backwards for the less skate savvy) – Venice Beach, CA.
Animal Kindom Graphic
40oz Printed on Glass
Squid Digital Photo Collage
Tags: digital, digital photography, film, film photography, photography, ScanDigital, scanning
