Pat Garvey
Welcome! I’m a professional content creator, specializing in the wine & hospitality industries. This site focuses on my photography. I do a variety of commercial work for my clients, including landscape (vineyards, etc.) photography, lifestyle/event photography, product (bottle) photography, and food photography. I also do videography, including drone work. Essentially, I do whatever it takes to visually convey the distinctiveness of my client’s brand.
I have an abiding love of street photography, which nobody pays me to do (so far). But my street sensibility informs all of my work. Street photography is a very demanding genre, and one which rewards preparedness, a keen sense of timing, and a willingness to freely immerse yourself in the surrounding culture.
I have a creative services company, Brand X Social, that provides a broader scope of creative services for our clients, including web design, graphic design, copywriting, email marketing, and social media management, among other things.
Email: pat@brandsocial.com
Photo by Steve Disenhof – on location in Nanyuki, Kenya
Getting to the Heart of the Matter
In my early career as a marketing professional on the strategy (aka “non-creative”) side, I worked for some of the world’s elite brands, such as Disney, Mattel, Electronic Arts, Mazda, and others. I was accountable for the outcomes of creative processes. I worked with art directors, writers, photographers…you name it. My job was to give the creatives a strategic framework and let them do their “magic”.
Then digital/social media blew up marketing. Social validation defined a new marketplace. Consumers wisely started ignoring well-crafted brand messages and started listening to each other instead. So began the age of content marketing. Creative storytelling ability is now the great differentiator. In an act of purely accidental genius, I had taken up photography over a decade prior, initially for business reasons. But it soon became a personal passion. Thousands of hours of photography reorganized my brain and rebooted my cognitive experience. l learned to speak with my instinctive voice, to be “creative”. And that, to my surprise and delight, was what the market needed and wanted. So I joined the artistic ranks. And I haven’t looked back.
And it turns out that creativity is simple. It is the ability to notice things that most people don’t notice, and the act of calling attention to them. It’s not difficult, but there is a good argument that it runs counter to human nature. So in that sense, it takes work, perhaps years of work. I now have enough work published that I can comfortably allow it to speak for me. Suffice it to say that if you want to be creative, its more about letting go than grabbing on to something.