Published: April 24, 2008 06:58 pm      

Business: Stephanie Clark

ASHLAND — “She’s part of our baby collection,” said Stephanie Gilmore Clark, tip-toeing her bare feet across a wooden floor while she adjusts lighting equipment in her photography studio.

Clark looks over and smiles at Huntington resident Dana Meeks and her 1-year-old daughter, Lilian — the subject of the Feb. 20 photo shoot. Lillian, too, is bare-footed on the wooden floor.

Clark announces that the photo shoot marks the fourth time that she’s taken pictures of the baby — the first photo shoot came when Meeks was still pregnant.

Clark plays with the baby, poses her, fluffs her hair and adds other embellishments as she tries capture the perfect pose.

“Oh, look how pretty she is. Oh, look at that,” Clark says, sitting in the floor with the baby. She takes a few shots and then adds a wide-angle lens to the camera. “That’s my girl,” she says, snapping her fingers to get the child’s attention.

Children are her favorite photography subjects.

“When I first saw her work online, I was just blown away by the pictures and the art,” Meeks said. “I was, like, ‘Oh, I have to go there,’ because she was, like, the best. It’s beyond words. Since we’ve been going there, it’s been worth every penny and the time that we put into it. We’ve been blown away by the pictures. Her work is so detail-oriented. Everything she does, she puts in so much time to make every little detail come out perfect.”

Clark doesn’t deny that photographers mold some type of relationship with their clients. The relationships somehow become part of the photo — something that is entwined and verbally untold, but is unmistakably seen in the picture frame.

She says she sees herself as synonymous to her work, so much so that she feels “protective” of the photographs she produces.

Clark travels all over the country and speaks to photographers affiliated with the Professional Photographers Association of America, but it’s hard for her to pinpoint what makes her pictures works of art.

“I get a lot of e-mails, asking me, ‘How do you do this? How do you do that?’” she said, “but that’s something that’s almost hard to put my finger on. I feel like what I do comes relatively easy to me. To put it into words, to say what it is or how it is I capture it, is rather difficult for me.

“It’s hard to put your finger on what makes a picture art,” she said. “I love faces, hands, close up shots of faces. I don’t like junk or unnecessary fluff. It’s about the person, not the fluff, unless I’m doing older people and I’ll put stuff in there that’s relative to them.”

Clark, 35, started her business on the third floor of her home, where she took pictures of friends and family members. When she outgrew the space, she “kicked” her husband out of the garage and built a studio. She decided to rent retail business space after one of her clients came in unexpectedly and found her in the kitchen, wearing only panties and a T-shirt.

“I was a little too accessible to my clients,” she said.

Clark, the daughter of Ashland Mayor Steve Gilmore, imagined renting a small house that she would convert into a photography studio, but her initial goals grew quite a bit when she and her husband decided to lease the historical Mayo Manor in Ashland. The hospital got the property as a “tax write off,” she said, and her husband, Brent Clark, who was on the health foundation at the hospital, negotiated a one-year lease agreement for the mansion.

“In July 2004, we moved the office here,” she said, “by October, we had the family here.”

Buying the mansion wasn’t a difficult decision, Clark said. She’s been working and living there for about six years now. The family lives on the second floor and she walks downstairs to work every day.

Clark said that living so close to work is convenient, but it can also be like “carrying a double-edged sword.” “It’s easy to work until 3 a.m.,” she said.

She does photo shoots Tuesday through Friday, but the most demanding part of her job is pose processing and retouching photographs — things that take up to eight hours of her day.

Her day usually begins at 6:30 a.m., when she wakes her children and gets them ready for school. Though her husband takes the kids to school every morning, Clark, declaring that she is not a morning person, makes picking up her daughters every afternoon a priority.

Her photo shoots usually start at 10 a.m. She usually does two photo sessions a day, but says she’d rather do only one session a day.

When the photography session ends, Clark’s real work begins. She crops and retouches the photos, works on her blog, Web site and marketing processes — work that often extends into late evening or early morning.

When asked why she is thought of as a leader in this community, Clark credits the mansion, a historical Kentucky landmark, and her commitment to the business. The mansion’s bottom floor is surrounded with examples of her work.

“Perception is everything,” she said. “This mansion has made my image a lot more positive than, perhaps, it was when I first started. The quality of my images haven’t increased, exponentially, but my overall image has. I have a strong brand, a strong commitment to marketing, and I have a clean, sharp Web site.”

Clark said she fell in love with photography when she studied graphic design at Marshall State University. There, she took a black and white photography class and “learned my way around a darkroom.”

She got a digital camera after her second daughter was born in 2001 and she became “obsessed with the instant gratification” of taking photographs and automatically viewing them and knowing what shutter speed and other techniques that were used in making the picture.

When her obsession with photography kept her busy at home either shooting pictures or perfecting them on her computer, Clark said her husband urged her to turn the hobby into a business.

The business “exploded,” she said. She now has clients all over the tri-state area.

When asked to describe her vision for herself, Clark is all about improving the business.

“I’d like to see myself get out of debt and pay for this mansion,” she said, laughing, with her bare feet crossed in the couch. “I want to continue to build my brand, continue to market to broader areas. I also enjoy working with charities in the community. I donate stuff to silent auctions, to different charities.”

She says she donates some of her work to improve community relationships and as marketing tools.

MARY MUSIC can be reached at mmusic@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2657.