Stanley flying in a helicopter in 2014 above Blessed Trinity. Photo by Craig Carden

In September 2014, I climbed into a helicopter to get aerial shots of Blessed Trinity High School for a recruiting campaign. The clock was working against me before I even left the ground — by the time the helicopter left the airport, flew to pick me up at the school, and accounted for the return trip, I had about 30 minutes of actual air time to stay under the one-hour billing mark. At $600 an hour, every minute mattered. I was shooting fast, shooting smart, and hoping I nailed the angles I needed on the first pass because there wasn’t time for a second guess.

That was the last time I ever needed a helicopter for aerial photography.

In June 2021, newly certified as a Part 107 drone pilot, I flew over Blessed Trinity again. The contrast could not have been more stark. A helicopter can’t legally fly below 500 feet. A drone can’t fly above 400 feet over most structures. That gap — the airspace between 400 and 500 feet — turned out to be exactly the sweet spot that opened the door to a completely different kind of aerial storytelling.

Today I fly a DJI Air 3. I charge a battery, get about 35 minutes in the air, land, swap in a fresh battery, and go right back up if I need to. No airport pickup. No 30-minute countdown. No $600-an-hour clock running in the back of my mind while I try to compose a shot. I can hover, reposition, wait for better light, and try an angle three different ways — options that simply didn’t exist for me as a working photographer seven years earlier.

Why This Matters for Businesses and Organizations

Aerial perspective used to be a luxury reserved for big budgets. Now it’s a practical tool that almost any business or organization can put to work.

Still images from the air give a business context that ground-level photography can’t. A school can show its full campus — athletic fields, parking, building layout — in a single frame that helps prospective families understand the place at a glance. A contractor or landscaper can document a finished property in a way that shows scale and craftsmanship. A church or nonprofit can capture an outdoor event from above and convey a sense of community and turnout that no ground shot can match. For real estate, construction progress documentation, campus recruiting, and event promotion, a well-composed aerial still is often the single most persuasive image in the whole set.

Video adds movement and pacing to that same advantage. A slow reveal that rises over a building or glides along a property line gives viewers a sense of place and scale in a way that feels cinematic rather than promotional. Organizations use this for recruiting videos, donor and fundraising pieces, real estate listings, and social content that needs to stop the scroll. A ten-second aerial establishing shot can do more to set a tone than thirty seconds of interviews or B-roll.

And practically speaking, the cost structure has flipped. What used to require chartering a helicopter and hoping the weather cooperated on a single expensive day can now be done on a normal shoot day, revisited if the light isn’t right, and repeated as often as the story requires.

Why It Matters for Storytelling

The bigger shift, for me, isn’t really about cost or convenience. It’s about vantage point.

Ground-level photography tells you what something looks like up close — the people, the details, the relationships. Aerial photography tells you where that story sits in the world. It shows scale, context, and connection: how a campus relates to its neighborhood, how a farm relates to the land around it, how a crowd fills a space. My mentor Don Rutledge taught me that good documentary work reveals people through their context and relationships, not by isolating them. An aerial shot is one more way to show that context — pulling back far enough to let the viewer see the whole picture before coming back down to the human details that make it matter.

That’s the real value of having this tool now accessible on a normal shoot budget. It’s not just a new camera angle. It’s a new way to open or close a story — to show someone where they are before you show them who’s there.

Marco Betti, owner of Antica Posta, a Tuscan restaurant and bar in Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood, plays tennis at Wellbridge’s Athletic Club Northeast in Atlanta, Ga., on September 22, 2009. Betti, who splits his time between the restaurant’s exhibition kitchen and its wine dinners, uses time on the court to stay active outside the kitchen.

Every gym has a wall of equipment. Not every gym has a wall of stories.

Back in the mid-2000s, I had the chance to work with Wellbridge on a project that’s stuck with me ever since — not because of the lighting setups or the shot lists, but because of who I met on the other side of the camera.

Wellbridge wanted to do something different with their marketing. Instead of another glossy mailer full of stock photography — the generic smiling model on a treadmill that nobody actually recognizes — they wanted to show the people who were already walking through their doors. Real members. Real trainers. Real results. The idea was simple: let the club’s own patrons tell the story of what membership had done for their lives, and back it up with photographs that felt honest rather than staged.

That’s where I came in.

Finding the Story in the Session

My approach to this kind of work goes back to something my mentor, the late Don Rutledge, drilled into me early in my career: you don’t find the real story by posing someone in isolation. You find it by staying close to the relationship — between a person and their work, their trainer, their routine, the thing that actually matters to them. So instead of setting up a sterile portrait station in a corner of the club, I spent time in the actual sessions. Step aerobics classes with steppers and hand weights. One-on-one training sessions. The unglamorous, sweaty, in-progress moments that don’t usually make it into a marketing mailer — because those are the moments that are true.

Over the course of the project, I photographed a wide range of Wellbridge members, each with a completely different reason for walking through the door:

• A Georgia Tech professor whose entire career was built on studying human performance — using his own training as a real-world extension of the science he taught in the classroom.
• A prominent Atlanta chef, whose long hours on his feet in a high-heat kitchen made his own health and stamina non-negotiable.
• An independent PR executive, whose days were built around client calls and deadlines, using her time at the club as one of the only hours in her schedule that belonged to her.
• Members connected to organizations like the CDC, along with entrepreneurs, parents, and everyday Atlantans — each with their own version of “why I’m here.”

What struck me, session after session, was how different the reasons were and how similar the result was. A professor who wanted sharper focus for his research. A chef who needed more energy to make it through service. A PR pro who needed one hour a day that wasn’t about anyone else’s deadline but her own. Different lives, same thread: showing up consistently changed how they showed up everywhere else.

Why This Kind of Work Matters

Mailers built around stock photography get glanced at and recycled. Mailers built around a neighbor, a familiar face from the community, someone whose kid goes to the same school — those get read. That’s the power of documentary-style photography in a marketing context: it doesn’t manufacture trust; it reveals trust that’s already there.

For Wellbridge, that meant a library of images they could drop into direct mail campaigns targeted at the neighborhoods surrounding each club — real members, photographed in real sessions, with testimonials that reflected their actual experience rather than a copywriter’s guess at one.

For me, it was a reminder of why I got into this work in the first place. Everybody has a reason they showed up. My job is just to stay close enough, long enough, to see it.

If you run a gym, studio, or wellness business and want to tell your members’ stories the same way — through real sessions, not staged portraits — get in touch to talk about a patron photography project for your own marketing.

In October 2006, Atlanta public relations professional Elizabeth Fairleigh committed to her health, joining Wellbridge to bring the same discipline to her own well-being that she brought to her clients’ success.

At the time, Fairleigh was building a reputation as one of Atlanta’s go-to independent PR professionals. She had spent years as PR director for two Atlanta-based tech companies — one of which completed a successful IPO during her tenure — before striking out on her own to found thE Connection, Inc., a firm specializing in thought leadership and public relations for entrepreneurial, forward-thinking companies. It’s a career that runs on juggling multiple clients, tight deadlines and constant visibility — the kind of demanding pace that makes personal health easy to put last on the list.

For a PR professional whose days were built around client calls, media pitches and staying “on” for everyone else, time at Wellbridge became a space to invest in herself.

That same commitment to consistency and follow-through — the traits that built her PR career — showed up on the gym floor too, and carried back into her work representing clients across the country.

Want a story like this for your gym? Contact Stanley Leary

Long before he was known as one of Atlanta’s pioneering farm-to-table chefs, Michael Tuohy learned an early lesson in his San Francisco kitchens: what you put into your body matters as much as what you put on the plate. Decades later, as the chef/owner of Atlanta’s celebrated Woodfire Grill, Tuohy applied that same philosophy to himself — signing up at Wellbridge Athletic Health Spa to get healthy, stay healthy, and keep pace with the demands of a chef’s life.

Tuohy arrived in Atlanta in 1986 and spent more than two decades building a reputation as one of the city’s most influential chefs, known for bringing a Northern California, farm-to-table sensibility to Southern dining. His restaurant Woodfire Grill, which he owned from 2001 to 2008, drew national acclaim for its locally sourced menus and open-kitchen energy — the kind of demanding, high-heat, high-stakes environment that makes a chef’s own health and stamina non-negotiable.

For a chef, the job doesn’t stop when service ends — long hours on his feet, early mornings at the market, late nights closing the kitchen.

That same discipline — sourcing the right ingredients, building something sustainable, showing up consistently — is what carried over from the kitchen to the gym floor, and back again.

Back in 2011, Georgia Tech psychology professor Dan Fisk walked into a Wellbridge location in Atlanta looking for one thing: to get healthier. What he found was a partnership with trainer Keith Walker that changed how he showed up not just at the gym, but in the rest of his life.

Fisk’s day job is studying human performance — as a professor specializing in engineering psychology and cognitive aging at Georgia Tech, he has spent decades researching how people function at their best as they age. Working with Walker gave him a chance to put that research into practice in his own life.

Under Walker’s guidance, Fisk built a consistent training routine — the kind of structure and accountability that turned a gym membership into a genuine lifestyle change. [Add specific details here: how often he trained, what the sessions focused on, any milestones he hit.]

The results went beyond the weight room. Fisk found that the discipline and energy he built at Wellbridge carried into his work at Georgia Tech — sharper focus, more stamina, and the kind of resilience that comes from showing up for yourself consistently. [Add a specific example: better energy for teaching/research, stress management, sleep, etc.]

That’s the kind of transformation Walker says he loves to see in his clients — not just a change in the mirror, but a change in how they move through their day-to-day lives.

Want a story like this for your gym? Contact Stanley Leary to schedule a client photo shoot and testimonial feature.

I spent a Saturday not long ago in Seth Gamba’s shop, watching wood shavings curl off a spinning block of box elder as it slowly became a bowl. Later that same day, I was in a different room watching him lock into a groove on upright bass while a new blues band worked out its first set list together. Same guy. Same hands. Two completely different instruments.

That’s the thing about Seth that’s hard to capture in a single photograph — he doesn’t really have a “main thing.” He has a way of doing things.

Seth told me he doesn’t buy his wood. Almost all of it — 85 percent, he estimates — comes from the street he lives on. A tree comes down in a neighbor’s yard, or his own, and instead of it becoming mulch, it becomes something. A bowl. A candle holder. A pet urn someone will keep on a shelf for the rest of their life. “I don’t go to the lumber yard,” he told me. He starts with a log and carries it, alone, all the way to something finished — something somebody else gets to use, enjoy, or hand down.

I keep thinking about that phrase: tree to finished. It’s not a bad description of how Seth approaches most things.

His friend Erik Herndon, who’s played music with Seth for close to twenty years, put it more bluntly than I ever could. “I don’t think there’s anything Seth can’t do,” Erik told me. “I know that’s getting harder to say about anybody these days — there’s just so much out there to learn. But this guy built me a guitar pedal from scratch. Soldered it. Did the circuitry himself. He wired up a whole recording studio and taught himself how to run it.” Erik used the word Renaissance man, and honestly, once you spend a day around Seth, it stops sounding like an exaggeration.

What struck me more, though, was something Erik added almost as an afterthought — that Seth has “a good moral and ethical compass,” that he “shoots straight.” That’s not the kind of line you get from an acquaintance. That’s twenty years of friendship talking.

Seth teaches strings during the week and plays professionally on the side, which means he’s the rare kind of teacher who’s still actively doing the thing he’s teaching kids to do. His friend and fellow music teacher Jay Champion talked about why that matters. “Music teachers have to keep themselves musically centered,” Jay said. “I can’t let middle school choral music be the only music in my life.” For Jay, and I think for Seth too, playing outside the classroom isn’t a hobby that competes with teaching — it feeds it.

I photographed the new blues band during one of their first practices together — Seth on upright bass, Erik on guitar, Jay on keys, Jacek Mroczka on harmonica and vocals, and Jay’s son Sam holding it down on drums. They’ve got their first show in August. Watching them work through songs together, trading looks when something clicked, I was reminded that this is really what all the woodworking and the teaching and the composing comes back to for Seth — making something, with people he loves, that didn’t exist before he started.

A bowl from a fallen tree. A song worked out in a garage. A kid who leaves his classroom knowing how to hold a bow. Different materials. Same hands. Same patient, deliberate way of turning something raw into something finished.

Roswell, Georgia, is one of the most highly educated cities in the state. Census data shows roughly 65% of adults here hold a bachelor’s degree or higher — nearly double the statewide rate of about 34% and well above the national average. It’s a community where parents think hard about what their kids’ time is spent on.

This week, many of Roswell High School’s students spent their days on the practice field instead of the couch, working through drill formations and sectionals for marching band camp. And talking to parents, students and educators, one theme kept coming up: band isn’t just fun — it’s preparation.

College Board data has long shown music students scoring dozens of points higher on the SAT than their non-music peers. Researchers debate how much of that is music itself versus who chooses band in the first place. But ask the people actually living it, and the case sounds less like a stat and more like lived experience.

“You get to meet all kinds of new people,” said Cooper Glaspy, a sophomore French horn player and section leader. “You can be in the leadership, learn how to lead, learn how to communicate. I think it helps with other things like school because you learn how to manage your time.”

Parents see it too. “There’s also just the discipline aspect — to be able to be on the field and march a show, you have to practice,” said Tara Glaspey, whose two sons play in the band. “You can’t just show up and make it happen.”

And for seniors like drum major Sydney Godoy, who plans to study music composition at UGA, the camp is where it all clicks. “I think everyone should play an instrument,” she said. “The way it makes you feel, the act of doing it — I fell in love with everything about music.”

In a town built on college degrees and long-term thinking, band camp turns out to be exactly the kind of investment parents here are looking for.

I’ve spent a career pointing a lens at people — in boardrooms, on porches, at parades, in the quiet moment before someone realizes they’re being photographed. Somewhere along the way, I learned that the real story isn’t the isolated subject; it’s the subject in relationship — to their environment, their people, their calling. You can’t understand someone by cropping everything else out of the frame.

I was reminded of that watching an ABC interview with Wynton Marsalis, recorded for America’s 250th birthday. He talked about growing up around musicians in his father’s band who never made it out from under addiction, about a mother who lived with mental illness her whole life, about a brother whose autism nobody around them had a name for yet. It would be easy to build a tidy narrative out of that — hardship forged the genius. Marsalis refused to let the story be that simple:

“You could grow up hard and not be able to play anything or you grow up easy and be great.”

Read that twice. He’s not saying struggle guarantees depth, and he’s not saying comfort guarantees shallowness. He’s saying the correlation a lot of us assume — that suffering is the price of admission for great art — doesn’t actually hold up. Some people are handed nothing and produce nothing. Some people are handed everything and go on to produce something extraordinary. And the reverse is just as true. Whatever creativity draws from, it isn’t simply owed to you or extracted from you based on how hard your life has been.

The Myth We Keep Telling Ourselves

There’s a seductive story in creative circles — that you have to have suffered to have something worth saying. I’ve believed versions of it myself, standing behind a camera at events where someone’s whole life visibly shows on their face, thinking that’s where the “real” photograph lives. But Marsalis’s own words push back on that instinct. He immediately widened the frame:

“Some people can paint flowers better than any person ever painted a flower. Some person only paints scenes of war.”

Neither of those painters is more legitimate than the other. The one who paints flowers isn’t naive, and the one who paints war isn’t more serious. They’re both just working from whatever true material they were given — and that material isn’t rationed out according to who deserves it or who’s earned it through pain.

Everyone’s Raw Material Is Different — Not Ranked, Just Different

This is where it gets useful for the rest of us who aren’t jazz composers. Marsalis didn’t romanticize struggle, and he didn’t romanticize ease either. He framed both as simply the material he was given — the way another person might be given a stable home, or financial security, or an easy relationship with the world. Different raw material, not a better or worse starting line.

That’s the thing I keep relearning behind the camera. Every person I photograph has a completely different set of raw material than the person before them. The retired veteran at an American Legion dance, the kid at a Juneteenth celebration, the pastor, the small business owner trying to explain what they do in thirty seconds — none of them are working with the same clay, and none of them had to earn the right to have a story by suffering enough first. My job isn’t to go looking for the hardship to make the photograph “real.” It’s to find the shape each person’s particular material already wants to take, whatever that material happens to be.

The Question Is What You Choose to Focus On

If neither hardship nor privilege determines what you’re capable of making, then something else has to be doing the real work. Marsalis pointed at it almost in passing. He said that when he visits people’s homes, someone — usually a woman in the family — pulls out the photo album and walks him through the family history. And he’s noticed something: nobody ever shows the worst pictures. We curate. We choose what to focus on.

He wasn’t being cynical about it. He was naming the actual skill underneath creativity, the one that has nothing to do with your starting circumstances: the ability to look honestly at everything you were given — the beauty and the ugliness both — and decide what the story is actually about. That’s a discipline. It’s learnable. It doesn’t arrive automatically with a hard childhood, and it isn’t blocked by an easy one.

That’s the whole job, isn’t it? Not just for musicians. For anyone trying to tell a true story about a person — including the story you’re telling about yourself.

Find Something New to Play

There’s a line in the interview I keep coming back to. Marsalis said his father used to tell him, instead of playing the same old stuff, why not find something new to play. Marsalis asked what that “new thing” even was. His father’s answer:

“Just listen to the person next to you for a change.”

That’s the entire discipline of documentary work in eight words. You don’t manufacture a new angle by trying harder to be original. You get it by actually listening — to the person in front of you, to what their particular gift is, to what they’re carrying that nobody else is carrying quite the same way.

Everybody’s got a flower or a war scene in them. The work pays enough attention to know which one you’re looking at and to tell it honestly.

Source: ABC News interview with Wynton Marsalis, recorded at Chicago’s Symphony Center for America’s 250th anniversary coverage.

Do you have an elevator pitch?

If you’re a business owner, chances are the answer is yes. You’ve trimmed it down over months or years — cut the fat, sharpened the hook, practiced it until it sounds natural instead of rehearsed. You can deliver it in the time it takes an elevator to climb six floors.

Here’s the question I want to ask next, and it’s the one almost nobody can answer yes to:

Have you ever turned that pitch into something visual?

Not slides behind you while you talk. Not a logo on a business card. I mean an actual visual version of your story — photographs, video, images — something a potential client can see, share, and remember after the elevator doors open and you’ve walked away.

Words Fade. Pictures Stay.

I’ve spent over 40 years telling stories with a camera — for newspapers, nonprofits, churches, and small businesses across North Atlanta. If there’s one thing four decades behind a lens has taught me, it’s this: people don’t remember what you told them. They remember what they saw.

A well-rehearsed pitch might land in the moment. But a month later, when that same person is trying to recall who you were and why they should call you, the words are gone. What sticks is a face. A moment. An image that made them feel like they already knew you before you shook hands.

The Gap Between Speaking and Showing

Most entrepreneurs have invested real time into their verbal pitch — workshopping it, testing it at networking events, refining the wording until it’s tight. Very few have made that same investment in a visual version of the same story.

That’s not a knock on anyone. It’s just where the work usually stops. The pitch gets written. The visuals never get made. And so the story that could be doing work for you 24/7 — on your website, in your proposals, across social media, in a client’s inbox — never leaves your mouth.

What This Actually Looks Like

Turning a pitch into visual storytelling doesn’t mean a slick corporate video with a voiceover. In my experience, the most effective visual pitches are the simplest ones:

• A short series of portraits and environmental photos that show who you are and how you work
• A few minutes of video — you, in your element, telling the same story you’d tell in an elevator, but now something a client can watch on their own time
• Images of your work in action, paired with the real story of a client you helped

The goal isn’t production value. It’s proof — visual evidence that backs up every word of the pitch you’ve already perfected.

A Question Worth Sitting With

So here’s where I’ll leave you: you’ve got the pitch. Have you told your clients’ stories, too — the ones about how you helped them, in pictures they can actually see? If the honest answer is no, that’s not a failure. It’s just an opportunity that’s been sitting there, unclaimed.

I help business owners across North Atlanta turn the story they already tell into something visual — portraits, brand photography, and short documentary-style video that outlasts a single conversation.

I recently went digging through the internet’s memory to piece together my own digital history — everywhere I’ve shared my work online since I first got a photo on the web. What I found surprised even me. Here’s the trail, in order, with links so you can follow along.

2001 — LearyPhoto on CompuServe

My earliest known web presence was a personal photography page hosted on CompuServe’s “Our World” platform, under the name LearyPhoto. The Wayback Machine has a capture from June 6, 2001 — which means this page, or one very close to it, was live right around the time web archiving itself was just getting started.

• LearyPhoto — Wayback Machine capture, June 6, 2001

I also later registered a dedicated domain, learyphoto.com, though it’s no longer live today.

March 21, 2006 — I Start Blogging

In February 2006, I began teaching photography to YWAM students in Kona. Seeking a way to share tips and lessons beyond the classroom, I started a blog on March 21, 2006. My earliest post I can find, titled “West Africa,” was published on Blogger under the name Storyteller:

• Storyteller: West Africa — March 21, 2006

That blog ran for a decade or more, covering gear reviews, technique breakdowns, and behind-the-scenes stories from assignments. A few favorites from along the way:

• Storyteller: Be a Joiner — December 2008
• Storyteller: Nikon D4: Breaking it in — April 2012
• Storyteller: TTL Nikon Off Camera Flash Kit — July 2013
• Storyteller: Fuji X-E2 at ISO 25600 — July 2014
• Storyteller: Why I bought the Nikon D5 — October 2016

2001–2010 — Building a Photo Archive

Alongside the writing, I was building out a professional photo archive on PhotoShelter, organized by decade. The earliest bucket covers 2001–2010, holding ten separate galleries from that stretch of my career:

• Galleries — Sorted by Years, PhotoShelter Archive

2009 — PictureStoryteller.com

By September 2009, I was writing regularly at PictureStoryteller.com, a blog dedicated to photography education and visual storytelling. My earliest dated post there:

• The Ten-Thousand Hour Rule: Key to Success in Any Field — September 9, 2009

That blog has grown into hundreds of posts over the years, covering everything from technique and gear to the philosophy behind the work — much of it shaped by my mentor, Don Rutledge:

• Don Rutledge Archives
• Photojournalism Archives

Present Day — StanleyLeary.com and Appen Media

These days, my main hub for client work is StanleyLeary.com, and I write and photograph for Appen Media, covering North Atlanta communities — Alpharetta, Roswell, Milton, Johns Creek, Sandy Springs, and Cumming.

• StanleyLeary.com
• Bio — StanleyLeary.com
• Appen Media — Community coverage
• Roswell man made history as baseball’s first designated hitter — Ron Blomberg feature, June 2026

Find Me Elsewhere

• Instagram — @stanleyleary
• LinkedIn — Stanley Leary
• Facebook — Stanley Leary
• Vimeo — Stanley Leary

Why This Matters

Looking back at 25 years of digital breadcrumbs, what strikes me isn’t the platforms — CompuServe, Blogger, WordPress, PhotoShelter, Appen Media’s CMS — it’s that the throughline never changed. Whether I was posting on a free CompuServe page in 2001 or filing a story for Appen Media this year, I’ve always been doing the same thing: finding people, learning their stories, and doing my best to tell them honestly. The platforms come and go. That part hasn’t.

If you’ve stumbled across any of my old work I haven’t mentioned here — an old print, a forum post, a guest article — I’d love to hear about it. Drop me a note.