Meet Aiden Franklin of Image Alive Studios in North Fort Worth

Today we’d like to introduce you to Aiden Franklin.

Aiden, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
My wife and I are from the Pacific Northwest. I have a music background in my younger days I toured full-time for about five years. It was a wonderful chapter but my wife and I decided to pivot and start a family. Out of the band, but before we actually did start a family, I found myself running a skateboarding ministry, recording bands and leading worship at a church up in Washington to make ends meet. Another beautiful time in our story but once my wife finally became pregnant I had found myself in another life of not being very present.

My uncle owns Saddleback Leather Company, my mother owns Chamberlain’s Leather Milk and they were both running their businesses out of Texas with a lot of our family members. They offered me a job posting leather bags to eBay so that we could move here and be closer to the family as we started ours.

I really enjoyed photography. The photos were pretty bad at first but it was technical and creative, similar to music. I started selling music gear to fund photography gear. I went from posting leather bags to eBay to product photography for their website. Next thing I know I have my own company and started gaining clients. Sometimes God moves in those ways that you can’t really stop and photography was one of those ways for me. Fast forward and in a few years I have employees, we are shooting for brands like Samsung, Motorola, and T-Mobile.

Our clients started asking us for video and now I found myself full-time in that space. We own crazy equipment and are rockin and rollin, trying to enjoy everyday of it. A new piece to my story is that I started leading worship for a church plant near my house called Tribes.

Seems like no matter what I do I can’t turn creative work off. I seem to always be busy creating, traveling, I can’t run from music or ministry; these things tend to hunt me down. The only difference now is that I have more freedom in it and my family is enjoying it with me.

Has it been a smooth road?
We lived in a 400-500sq ft home in Washington and would randomly have a dozen skate kids from our skate church sleeping on our floors. We were broke with no space physically and mentally to pursue the things we thought we should. That is why we moved across the country to Texas.

As I was shooting for Saddleback, my uncle was letting me shoot for them when I wasn’t awesome. Their management team didn’t like me very much. One of them was the former product photographer manager for Circuit City who once lectured me about how I would never be a professional as I was driving him back to the airport. I was constantly improving just enough to not get fired.

As we grew, people came in and our quality decreased. I became a manager and a trainer and was working super hard to pump out mediocre work.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
Product-focused digital assets. We are known for making products look similar to computer-generated renders but by repainting photos. We are known for saying yes to things that five studios before us said they couldn’t do. We once created a not so pretty contraption that allowed us to hang and spin 80lb chandeliers to create 360 views of them.

We endlessly pursue quality while keeping our overhead low so that we can do it at better prices. We have spent a week on one photo and also have had crews do 1000 images in a day.

Is our city a good place to do what you do?
Our city is one of the best places on earth to do this. Businesses are generally doing better here and there are less creative services around (less than places like Portland, OR where we are from).

Contact Info:

• Address: 600 Railhead Rd. #200
  Fort Worth, TX 76106
• Website: imagealivestudios.com
• Phone: 6827300100
• Email: aiden@imagealivestudios.com
• Instagram: http://instagram.com/imagealivestudios
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/imagealivestudios
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/image-alive-studios-fort-worth-2

Image Credit:
imagealivestudios.com

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