Charlotte Photographer - Lenn Long
My photography education dates back to high school, where I attended The Career Center, a vocational, technical and trade school in Winston-Salem, NC. I studied graphic design, printing, and photography. In the afternoons, I worked at our local One Hour Photo in the mall right next to Merry-Go-Round and Chess King where you could find all the latest 80's fashions including neon parachute pants and jelly bracelets! Got to love the 80's.
After high school, I attended Chowan College. Chowan is in Murfreesboro, a small rural town on the east coast of North Carolina. Throughout my freshman and sophomore years, my photographic work was focused mainly on landscape photography and the serenity of the rural farmlands and coastal landscapes of eastern North Carolina and the tidewater areas of southeastern Virginia.
After leaving Chowan College with my Associates Degree in Photography, I transferred to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where I studied the various disciplines of fine art including drawing, painting, sculpture and design. It was through this process that I realized that about all I could paint was my dorm room walls with a roller, and about all I could draw was easy-to-read directions on how to get to the mall, but having a camera in my hand was like an extension of my own eye and I began using photographs in most of my art projects. This technique gave my work a unique mixed media appeal.
After graduating from UNCC I started working with a little known Charlotte glamour portrait photography studio called Glamour Shots. At the time, Glamour Shots Eastland was a small upstart retail business. The Charlotte studio was the eighth studio in the United States and after a half of a decade, we had grown to over 350 studios worldwide. That rapid growth gave me the opportunity to learn a lot about growing a business from a small upstart photo studio into a multi-national retail giant. It also gave me the opportunity to learn that with a lot of teasing and a couple cans of hairspray you really could get a clients hair to be twice the size of their head.
Over a half decade, and more trips around the mall than most 16 year old girls can do with their dad's Visa card, I gave up the life of big hair and feather boas for a job selling new and used camera equipment at one of the southeast's leading camera stores, Charlotte Camera. About the same time of my employment, Al Gore invented the internet and our owners decided that it would be my job to see if you could actually put cameras on this thing called the web and get people buy them. Keep in mind at the time, only about five people had even heard of this other small upstart website called eBay. So who knew if this idea was even going to work..... Well we all know how that went.
So with my successes in portrait photography, photography equipment sales, I found myself ready to open my first studio in the Plaza Midwood neighborhood near uptown Charlotte. For nearly a decade I had studios located in the Plaza Midwood area and then in 2008 the studio moved to the Dilworth neighborhood where it is today. As one of the top Charlotte portrait photographers, I handle clients of all types. I offer in-studio portraits for individuals as well as travel on-location where we can set up and photograph an entire office of employees. I also travel the state shooting corporate events that are used in all types of media including company websites, annual reports and corporate social media accounts.