Inspiring
Organization Background - Hale Productions is a San Diego based production studio that specializes in commercial and lifestyle photography/videography. The company started up about a year and a half ago, and is comprised of four people that handle photography, videography, styling, and editing. Kirk Hensler is the entrepreneur that started up the company and is the head photographer/videographer, and his wife, Alexis Asquith, is the head stylist and photographer. Rachel Esther Tate is another stylist and photographer for the company and Todd Jackson is another videographer. They all work together in the final editing of their projects. Project - Marina’s project entailed her taking full control over the planning, execution, and final touches of a photoshoot. She did initial planning to decide where, who, and what to shoot during the upcoming project. Marina decided on an 70’s style photoshoot with a muted/earthy tone color palette. With her plan for the shoot, she went to several locations around South Park, San Diego with co-workers/models Alexis and Rachel. She directed the models on what poses to use, and what emotion to portray. She ended up with 500+ photos, then narrowed that down to 200 to edit, and had a final product of 80 originally shot and edited photos. Personal Experience and Takeaways - Marina greatly enjoyed her internship at Hale Productions. One of her greatest takeaways was the experience of the real world. She emphasises her realization on the importance of human connection and collaboration. Marina has also furthered her passion for photography and Hale Productions has given her a chance to begin pursuing a career in photography. |
Mentor Interview with Kirk Hensler
Marina Castro: So I know you went to college in Michigan, what lead you to ultimately make that decisions?
Kirk Hensler: "Like the real answer? Okay, so, I come from a fairly conservative family and I had an opportunity to get a job where I grew up and my family though I could stay at home, work full time, then commute to a local college. I did that for a year and absolutely hated it. And then one day at lunch, a couple of my friends from high school came up and said they were gonna transfer to Western, its so much more fun... And I had a crush on one of the girls that said she was transferring, so I went home and said I was transferring to Western and I did. I had some scholarships to some pretty good schools, but ultimately, at that age I wasn't really aware of the value of college... I just wanted to go where my friends were going. I had scholarships to Loyola, I wanted to go to NYU, but I just got too scared that I was gonna be too different, too far away from home and too many new people. I didn't quite trust myself, so I kinda played it safe, which I still think about today."
MC || I know you switched majors during your time in college, what made you decide to make that change?
KH || "I always wanted to be a lawyer, and then I started studying law and realized it was entirely too much work. I mean the classes were insane, the case law studies, reading old case studies, writing your own opinion on them, matching that up against the Constitution, cause I was interested in Constitutional Law. It just required me to be so on, at the same time I was young and partying and meeting new friends, that I was like I didn't wanna work this hard. I went to an all boys prep school and had 4 hours of homework a night. All through high school I was captain of the baseball team, I played football, basketball, my dad was like a maniac, all I did was work hard. I finally got away and was tired of working so hard, so I switched from Pre-Law to Business because, honest to god, I new it was the most general thing that I could probably graduate with, with doing the least amount of work. I mean, I graduated high school with like a 3.9 and like a 30 on the ACT and was certainly smart and hard working, but I just got away and was like, just sick of it. The first 2 years of college I had like a 3.9 and then slowly I started getting into martial arts and other things, and actually, felt like what I was learning in school was so irrelevant to the world that I saw. I started running the business development of the martial arts studio I trained at and nothing I was learning in school applied at all to the customers I interfaced with everyday, so I felt like school was actually wasting my time. And maybe it's because I studied a broad subject. Like people who study a specific subject, like Engineering, they learn very specific thing, people who study Physics or Biology, study a very specific thing. To me business is always been about communication and if you have a knack for talking to people you would be good in business. So I just didn't have to work that hard and didn't..."
MC: Throughout the time from getting your degree to starting up this company, what obstacles and experiences did you face to get to this point?
KH: "So you pay a ton of money to go to college, you get a degree, you learn a few things that maybe you remember, maybe you don't, and then you go try to get a job... There are so many kids just like you who came from the same or better schools who are applying for the same jobs and you maybe get lucky making $25,000 - $30,000 a year, working full time, for some marketing firm doing the worst work ever. So, I looked at my prospects, realized I didn't wanna do any of that, so I moved to Taiwan and taught English for a year because I was like, if I was gonna go right from school to the work force, I need to have some life experience. I went and did that. Thank god you needed a degree to get that job because that is the one thing, I will say, that my degree did for me. I just opened up my mind and realized there was a lot of different stuff that I wanted to do and it wasn't all about business and being like my dad or whatever. I came back and go back into martial arts and was trying to be this more peaceful, zen person... Basically the opposite of how I was raised. I went through that phase and didn't have a strong connection to anything, but then realized I couldn't work for anyone... I just could not. Almost every job I've had has ended in some dramatic fashion, like me telling my boss that they're an idiot and thinking that I could do it better myself. So then it came where I got to California and started doing some side-hustle things. I was making my own furniture and selling it online, I started up a kick boxing group at my local gym, I tried to start a green smoothie company were I was making stuff at home and selling it to my clients. It just didn't have the access to capital that I wanted, and when they teach you about being an entrepreneur, they kinda glaze over the fundraising side of things... If you're not from a super rich family, if you're not connected to super rich people, starting a business is next to impossible. I mean there are local funds and credit loans, but the terms are awful, so to start your own things you have to get lucky. I knew enough about the fitness industry to where I started my own yoga and kick boxing studio, where I sold the green smoothies... Had to get that in there... Here I am, 25 years old, running this business, I had 12 employees, 150 - 200 members, but I had no idea what I was doing because in school you do maybe one simulation of a pitch. I'm going to college for 4 years, I do one fake pitch presentation and nothing else. Everything else trains yo how to be someone's pet and how to listen to instructions and how to fit in and how to get along with people, and nothing prepared me for the the sheer responsibility of managing my budget, interacting with people, HR things, how to interact with your clients and teachers. All these things you just don't know how to do, so you just have to trust your own instincts and that doesn't get you that far cause you're constantly doubting yourself the whole time, so just always feeling, as an entrepreneur that you're always well enough equipped to do what you're doing and just feeling everyday like you're making it up, stumbling, completely phony and fraudulent, until either it works or it doesn't. In the case of the yoga studio, it wasn't. I wanted to to give everything away for free, pay my teachers really well, it was kind of a middle finger to the other yoga studios that I wasn't a fan of and I just didn't make any money. So, I did that for 5 years, I think I lost 30 years off my life... Sold that business and in the meantime, picked up a pretty good hobby of photography and videography. Here you are and these people are like, 'Here's $1000, here's $2000, for a days worth of work!' and I'm just thinking, anyone can make this work, so I doubled down and rolled my experience to start a production company and the wildest thing is all my clients now, are from past relationships I had from the yoga studio. People reach out and tell me they see what I'm doing, they liked working with me, they liked my vibe, they liked my space...and they ask me to produce this commercial for their company! Back to the relationships thing, all I had to do was find a business where I could leverage my ability to get along with people, into something that was profitable... If i were to go back and teach a class about business at a university, it would be entirely about understanding communication, clients needs, listening (just being quiet sometimes and just listening), and then being useful, like determining what value you can add and finding a way to do it. For me doing photo and video has been so natural and easy because there is a market for it in San Diego, I had the network and the margins are absolutely insane. This is a 65% profit margin in business. So back to that question if obstacles, everything I have encountered has been an obstacle because I felt like I had absolutely no clue what I was doing. And to this day, we wrapped our first full year of business, like our first physical year of business and I think we made, in our first year, more than all 5 years combined of the yoga studio. It's just sticking in there, having the nerve or ignorance or something to keep trying stuff, and then eventually something clicks. I'm guessing every entrepreneur out there would say they just stumbled into something based on 50 decisions they made previously, that they never really knew what they wanted, or what they were doing. To me, I've just always tried to get a long with people and find a way to make money, not working for somebody else and that's how I've got to this point, today. It's very possible in 2 years I won't wanna do this anymore and I'll have found another tier to leveraging those relationships for income."
MC: What is the most rewarding part about your job?
KH: "I love teams, like poor Alexis. For the interview, I work with my wife, or rather she was forced an employment status upon our marriage. It happens all the time with friends and family, you just don't have the cash to hire anyone, so you use what you have. Alexis has had to put up with me, I'm a few years ahead of her in production and technical stuff, but I expected her to come in and produce at the same level cause I have no idea why... SO we got off to a rough start with that, feeling like we could do the quality of work we wanted and then slowly as we made more income we hired more people and I've put some time into training... I didn't even realize how much it was happening. Watching today, yesterday for example, we shot a commercial and we had a crew of 4 and it was pretty seamless. We had people taking behind the scenes photos for social media, we had people styling the shots, I had someone else making sure everything was logistically in order and giving me space to operate the camera and I was operating the camera, DPing. To go from having to do everything by yourself, to having a team that's doing something specific is mind blowing. In a sense, although they would've figured it out on their own, I have constructed an environment that allows people to somehow step into their jobs is very cool because now we are multiplying. I'm going out of the country for work for a few weeks, and I have half the team staying her and their gonna produce stuff with out me, which, if you talk to any entrepreneur-type, thats a panic attack or their work nightmare. But once I see the work they've been doing and have been seeing the work they've been doing, I feel so relieved because I don't have to do that. Like oh my god I don't have to edit those photos, I don't have to pull those shots, I don't have to write the story board. This is the best thing ever because I'm gonna go ride horses or play basketball and still make money. So, I think that's what I love the most, is seeing people work together to make good work."
MC: If I do decide to pursue a career in the photography industry, what advice would you give me? ( regarding college, job interests, overall experience opportunities)
KH: "I'm obviously not very 'pro-college,' like go learn, you'll develop relationships, you'll learn how to manage you're own time, and that's super valuable. But you could go and study music, it doesn't matter what you study, just the fact that you're away from home, on your own schedule, setting your own alarm clock, getting your own groceries, checking your own work... That's invaluable. The actual specifics to what you study, to me, are almost irrelevant. Unless you're gonna specialize in a certain skill, like you can't be a surgeon on instinct, like you can't be a doctor because you feel in your gut that they're sick. Certain stuff you have to know, most other stuff that people are doing, they didn't study, they didn't learn. They just showed up, used their skills, intuition, common sense, etc. and found a way to be useful. I just talked about this... Study something that you absolutely love. Study something that you want to learn about because otherwise those 4 years are gonna be long, monotonous. I mean, high school is already boring, and having to learn all this math that you'll never use in your life, and the fact that you still have to do it in college is almost insulting, so don't go to college and repeat that again. I took a Calculus 2 class just to flex my math brain and it was like why am I doing this? I could be studying dance, more photography, things that I absolutely love because I didn't think they would be useful. Being inspired is the most useful asset you could have. My advice to you is to study stuff that you absolutely love. I mean maybe have a general idea of what you wanna do, but like I've had maybe 7 full-blown careers in the past 10 years and none of them have anything to do with the other one. And that's fine, no one's looking at me like I'm an idiot. What you study is probably not what you're gonna do, so if you knew that, what would you study? In terms of a work place and general, my advice to you is to try to find more ways to add value to situations. Anywhere where you can be helpful, do it. Asking a ton of questions and taking the extra time to interrupt to make sure you understand is super important because it all comes down to communication, relationships, and if people like you. If people don't like you, if they feel like they don't know you, or don't trust you, then their not gonna go out of their way for you. So my advice is to be a happy, healthy person, that is studying what you love, and learning, excited to learn, excited to go to class, and hanging out with interesting people who are different than you."
Kirk Hensler: "Like the real answer? Okay, so, I come from a fairly conservative family and I had an opportunity to get a job where I grew up and my family though I could stay at home, work full time, then commute to a local college. I did that for a year and absolutely hated it. And then one day at lunch, a couple of my friends from high school came up and said they were gonna transfer to Western, its so much more fun... And I had a crush on one of the girls that said she was transferring, so I went home and said I was transferring to Western and I did. I had some scholarships to some pretty good schools, but ultimately, at that age I wasn't really aware of the value of college... I just wanted to go where my friends were going. I had scholarships to Loyola, I wanted to go to NYU, but I just got too scared that I was gonna be too different, too far away from home and too many new people. I didn't quite trust myself, so I kinda played it safe, which I still think about today."
MC || I know you switched majors during your time in college, what made you decide to make that change?
KH || "I always wanted to be a lawyer, and then I started studying law and realized it was entirely too much work. I mean the classes were insane, the case law studies, reading old case studies, writing your own opinion on them, matching that up against the Constitution, cause I was interested in Constitutional Law. It just required me to be so on, at the same time I was young and partying and meeting new friends, that I was like I didn't wanna work this hard. I went to an all boys prep school and had 4 hours of homework a night. All through high school I was captain of the baseball team, I played football, basketball, my dad was like a maniac, all I did was work hard. I finally got away and was tired of working so hard, so I switched from Pre-Law to Business because, honest to god, I new it was the most general thing that I could probably graduate with, with doing the least amount of work. I mean, I graduated high school with like a 3.9 and like a 30 on the ACT and was certainly smart and hard working, but I just got away and was like, just sick of it. The first 2 years of college I had like a 3.9 and then slowly I started getting into martial arts and other things, and actually, felt like what I was learning in school was so irrelevant to the world that I saw. I started running the business development of the martial arts studio I trained at and nothing I was learning in school applied at all to the customers I interfaced with everyday, so I felt like school was actually wasting my time. And maybe it's because I studied a broad subject. Like people who study a specific subject, like Engineering, they learn very specific thing, people who study Physics or Biology, study a very specific thing. To me business is always been about communication and if you have a knack for talking to people you would be good in business. So I just didn't have to work that hard and didn't..."
MC: Throughout the time from getting your degree to starting up this company, what obstacles and experiences did you face to get to this point?
KH: "So you pay a ton of money to go to college, you get a degree, you learn a few things that maybe you remember, maybe you don't, and then you go try to get a job... There are so many kids just like you who came from the same or better schools who are applying for the same jobs and you maybe get lucky making $25,000 - $30,000 a year, working full time, for some marketing firm doing the worst work ever. So, I looked at my prospects, realized I didn't wanna do any of that, so I moved to Taiwan and taught English for a year because I was like, if I was gonna go right from school to the work force, I need to have some life experience. I went and did that. Thank god you needed a degree to get that job because that is the one thing, I will say, that my degree did for me. I just opened up my mind and realized there was a lot of different stuff that I wanted to do and it wasn't all about business and being like my dad or whatever. I came back and go back into martial arts and was trying to be this more peaceful, zen person... Basically the opposite of how I was raised. I went through that phase and didn't have a strong connection to anything, but then realized I couldn't work for anyone... I just could not. Almost every job I've had has ended in some dramatic fashion, like me telling my boss that they're an idiot and thinking that I could do it better myself. So then it came where I got to California and started doing some side-hustle things. I was making my own furniture and selling it online, I started up a kick boxing group at my local gym, I tried to start a green smoothie company were I was making stuff at home and selling it to my clients. It just didn't have the access to capital that I wanted, and when they teach you about being an entrepreneur, they kinda glaze over the fundraising side of things... If you're not from a super rich family, if you're not connected to super rich people, starting a business is next to impossible. I mean there are local funds and credit loans, but the terms are awful, so to start your own things you have to get lucky. I knew enough about the fitness industry to where I started my own yoga and kick boxing studio, where I sold the green smoothies... Had to get that in there... Here I am, 25 years old, running this business, I had 12 employees, 150 - 200 members, but I had no idea what I was doing because in school you do maybe one simulation of a pitch. I'm going to college for 4 years, I do one fake pitch presentation and nothing else. Everything else trains yo how to be someone's pet and how to listen to instructions and how to fit in and how to get along with people, and nothing prepared me for the the sheer responsibility of managing my budget, interacting with people, HR things, how to interact with your clients and teachers. All these things you just don't know how to do, so you just have to trust your own instincts and that doesn't get you that far cause you're constantly doubting yourself the whole time, so just always feeling, as an entrepreneur that you're always well enough equipped to do what you're doing and just feeling everyday like you're making it up, stumbling, completely phony and fraudulent, until either it works or it doesn't. In the case of the yoga studio, it wasn't. I wanted to to give everything away for free, pay my teachers really well, it was kind of a middle finger to the other yoga studios that I wasn't a fan of and I just didn't make any money. So, I did that for 5 years, I think I lost 30 years off my life... Sold that business and in the meantime, picked up a pretty good hobby of photography and videography. Here you are and these people are like, 'Here's $1000, here's $2000, for a days worth of work!' and I'm just thinking, anyone can make this work, so I doubled down and rolled my experience to start a production company and the wildest thing is all my clients now, are from past relationships I had from the yoga studio. People reach out and tell me they see what I'm doing, they liked working with me, they liked my vibe, they liked my space...and they ask me to produce this commercial for their company! Back to the relationships thing, all I had to do was find a business where I could leverage my ability to get along with people, into something that was profitable... If i were to go back and teach a class about business at a university, it would be entirely about understanding communication, clients needs, listening (just being quiet sometimes and just listening), and then being useful, like determining what value you can add and finding a way to do it. For me doing photo and video has been so natural and easy because there is a market for it in San Diego, I had the network and the margins are absolutely insane. This is a 65% profit margin in business. So back to that question if obstacles, everything I have encountered has been an obstacle because I felt like I had absolutely no clue what I was doing. And to this day, we wrapped our first full year of business, like our first physical year of business and I think we made, in our first year, more than all 5 years combined of the yoga studio. It's just sticking in there, having the nerve or ignorance or something to keep trying stuff, and then eventually something clicks. I'm guessing every entrepreneur out there would say they just stumbled into something based on 50 decisions they made previously, that they never really knew what they wanted, or what they were doing. To me, I've just always tried to get a long with people and find a way to make money, not working for somebody else and that's how I've got to this point, today. It's very possible in 2 years I won't wanna do this anymore and I'll have found another tier to leveraging those relationships for income."
MC: What is the most rewarding part about your job?
KH: "I love teams, like poor Alexis. For the interview, I work with my wife, or rather she was forced an employment status upon our marriage. It happens all the time with friends and family, you just don't have the cash to hire anyone, so you use what you have. Alexis has had to put up with me, I'm a few years ahead of her in production and technical stuff, but I expected her to come in and produce at the same level cause I have no idea why... SO we got off to a rough start with that, feeling like we could do the quality of work we wanted and then slowly as we made more income we hired more people and I've put some time into training... I didn't even realize how much it was happening. Watching today, yesterday for example, we shot a commercial and we had a crew of 4 and it was pretty seamless. We had people taking behind the scenes photos for social media, we had people styling the shots, I had someone else making sure everything was logistically in order and giving me space to operate the camera and I was operating the camera, DPing. To go from having to do everything by yourself, to having a team that's doing something specific is mind blowing. In a sense, although they would've figured it out on their own, I have constructed an environment that allows people to somehow step into their jobs is very cool because now we are multiplying. I'm going out of the country for work for a few weeks, and I have half the team staying her and their gonna produce stuff with out me, which, if you talk to any entrepreneur-type, thats a panic attack or their work nightmare. But once I see the work they've been doing and have been seeing the work they've been doing, I feel so relieved because I don't have to do that. Like oh my god I don't have to edit those photos, I don't have to pull those shots, I don't have to write the story board. This is the best thing ever because I'm gonna go ride horses or play basketball and still make money. So, I think that's what I love the most, is seeing people work together to make good work."
MC: If I do decide to pursue a career in the photography industry, what advice would you give me? ( regarding college, job interests, overall experience opportunities)
KH: "I'm obviously not very 'pro-college,' like go learn, you'll develop relationships, you'll learn how to manage you're own time, and that's super valuable. But you could go and study music, it doesn't matter what you study, just the fact that you're away from home, on your own schedule, setting your own alarm clock, getting your own groceries, checking your own work... That's invaluable. The actual specifics to what you study, to me, are almost irrelevant. Unless you're gonna specialize in a certain skill, like you can't be a surgeon on instinct, like you can't be a doctor because you feel in your gut that they're sick. Certain stuff you have to know, most other stuff that people are doing, they didn't study, they didn't learn. They just showed up, used their skills, intuition, common sense, etc. and found a way to be useful. I just talked about this... Study something that you absolutely love. Study something that you want to learn about because otherwise those 4 years are gonna be long, monotonous. I mean, high school is already boring, and having to learn all this math that you'll never use in your life, and the fact that you still have to do it in college is almost insulting, so don't go to college and repeat that again. I took a Calculus 2 class just to flex my math brain and it was like why am I doing this? I could be studying dance, more photography, things that I absolutely love because I didn't think they would be useful. Being inspired is the most useful asset you could have. My advice to you is to study stuff that you absolutely love. I mean maybe have a general idea of what you wanna do, but like I've had maybe 7 full-blown careers in the past 10 years and none of them have anything to do with the other one. And that's fine, no one's looking at me like I'm an idiot. What you study is probably not what you're gonna do, so if you knew that, what would you study? In terms of a work place and general, my advice to you is to try to find more ways to add value to situations. Anywhere where you can be helpful, do it. Asking a ton of questions and taking the extra time to interrupt to make sure you understand is super important because it all comes down to communication, relationships, and if people like you. If people don't like you, if they feel like they don't know you, or don't trust you, then their not gonna go out of their way for you. So my advice is to be a happy, healthy person, that is studying what you love, and learning, excited to learn, excited to go to class, and hanging out with interesting people who are different than you."