Bruin-Owned Photography

Photo by Karina Wang

Photo by Karina Wang

T

hese Bruin-owned businesses showcase the work and art of Bruin photographers. Whether it’s for grad portraits or engagement shoots, corporate events or commercial ventures, you can support the arts and Bruin entrepreneurship by booking a shoot, buying prints or following them on social media to see their current and upcoming projects.

Antoine Delcayre '20

Current City: Los Angeles, California

Website: https://photosby.antoinedelcayre.space/

Social: @monsieurrr_delcayre

I bought my first camera the summer before my first year at UCLA and my camera guided me through most of my college experience. It was the creative outlet that kept me sane through my astrophysics studies. I'm thankful for all the opportunities it allowed me to pursue, such as being a press photographer for L.A. concerts and being hired as photo manager for UCLA Housing.

After spending four years at UCLA I've definitely found my home in Los Angeles. I decided to pursue a master's in computer science at Johns Hopkins, which I work on remotely from L.A., and I'm hoping to graduate soon! I see computer science as a happy medium between the quantitative technical nature of physics and my creative hobbies.

I still like to take photos when I have time, though I've preferred to take analog photos using my Polaroid these days. In addition to photography, I'm passionate about cooking and eating, playing soccer, and programming lightshows! I try to keep an online footprint of all my pastimes and you can find links to all of them through my Instagram.

Photo Showcase:

Description: This is one of my favorite image sets. There are a few things I like to capture in my photos and I think these photos encapsulate all of them. I like my photos to feel slightly surreal - I like quiet and empty spaces that invoke something between unease and serenity. To accentuate this I try to use a minimal amount of colors in an image. I want people to feel like they are looking at a memory or a dream; for there to be a softness and silence to my photos. I did this shoot at the Hitch basketball courts because I loved the plain blue pavement with the strong white lines.

Karina Wang '18

Current City: Los Angeles, California

Website: https://www.karinapjwang.com/

Social: @karinapjwang

My name is Karina Wang and I graduated in 2018 with a B.S. in microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics. My journey with photography began and has been influenced heavily by UCLA and the amazing people that I have met there. While landscape, greens and nature first gravitated me towards the medium, I initially gained courage to explore photography through portraits with a friend, whom I met at my first-year dorm floor. I owe a lot of gratitude to my friends who have helped me model for editorial projects, new friends who I have met through graduation portraits and to the many others in the UCLA/Westwood community who have trusted me with my vision.

Specifically, I am grateful for the UCLA campus and Westwood neighborhood for they have given me a beautiful space to simply explore and find my style. Since then, I am fortunate to have learned so much about the art, and it is something that I will continually grow with and always hold near and dear to my heart.

Currently, I am in medical school but continue to shoot in my spare time. I am constantly seeking indie BIPOC artists and/or small businesses that could benefit from a photoshoot collaboration. In my near future, I plan to take on more photo trips and to delve into photojournalism as well!

Photo Showcase:

Description: Pictured are the Dolomite Mountains of Northern Italy. While I love many genres of photography, my heart will always be with landscapes, specifically with the mountains and endless fields of green. Photo trips are my favorite, because they are a unique type of adventure. Right after graduation, my friends and I flew out and definitely had one filled with sunrises, amazing food and accidentally getting lost in these ranges!

Tia Liu '19

Current City: Los Angeles, California

Website: https://www.tialiu.com/

Social: @tea.ah

My name is Tia Liu and I am a portrait, wedding/couples, commercial and lifestyle photographer based in Los Angeles. I have more than 10 years of portrait photography experience and am a New York Times published photographer. As a self-taught photographer since high school, I have been involved in the influencer industry on social media, gaining the likes of YouTubers and "The Bachelor" contestants. I’ve also spent the last seven years shooting a full three-month (and year-round) grad season at UCLA and other SoCal campuses.

Photo Showcase:

Description: Many people in the UCLA network know me for my grad work of over seven years, but I also shoot couples and weddings as well! Hope to continue to connect with more Bruins and gain more alumni clients!

Jordan Angulo '18

Current City: Los Angeles, California

Social: @acideo

I am a queer Latinx photographer from Los Angeles with family descending from El Salvador. I have been exploring portraiture for over 15 years. My passion for photography existed ever since I was a child and wanted to use the cameras used by my father and grandparents. I purchased my first "professional" camera in high school and started shooting portraits of classmates and friends. I later learned my late paternal grandfather had his own collection of cameras and shot landscapes as a hobby, further cementing photography in my family history.

Photo Showcase:

Description: I created this image at the beginning of 2021 when the COVID-19 vaccine started to become widely available and it felt safer to meet in person for portrait sessions. I wanted to continue my work which allows people to escape and become someone else for a moment, taking on a character or adopting a person they otherwise would never attempt in their daily life. Decorative masks and head pieces have been a staple in my previous work and it felt necessary to continue their inclusion in our current moment. I enjoy combining elements of whimsy or beauty with lurid details or pointing at subversive ideas, to create a dissonant image that can be easily accessible, but also cause an uncanny feeling to the viewer.

Ruben Viramontes '19

Current City: Berkeley, California

Website: https://rubenviramontes.com

Social: @rubenviramontes_

In high school, I fell in love with music videos and the process of people making them. I started to take videos of random things, found beautiful music and started coming up with my own music video ideas. I created my own storyboards for a certain song and then filmed my videos. I learned a lot about video and color editing, and composition. At UCLA, I made a friend, Kelly Ma, who worked part-time as a professional photographer. I learned more about portraiture from her and finally bought my first DSLR, something I wanted to do since high school. Kelly taught me so much. I thought I was going to enjoy taking more landscape pictures, but I soon learned that I loved capturing people's smiles, people feeling joy, even if for just a moment. I begged my friends and family to let me photograph them, and most would begrudgingly agree, but they would be happy with the way I took their picture. And it made me happy to see that I was able to cheer up someone and make them feel confident in an image. I grew curious of Kelly's grad shoots and she invited me to one of them. I took pictures for free for the seniors. I had so much fun. Directing people, asking them to smile and try different poses, catching the right light for them, getting the exact setting I wanted (manual mode always) - all of it brought joy to me. Around this time, Karina Wang, another UCLA friend, was also beginning her portraiture journey. We eventually linked up, talked about photography and started modeling for each other. I learned so much from Karina. We have different styles and the way she chooses composition was never what I would first think to do; she has such gorgeous results. She was always down to take pictures and plan a shoot together. We also gushed over the highly requested UCLA grad photographers, and other L.A. portrait photographers. We always texted about photography, and we've grown so much since.

Photo Showcase:

Grad Photo-Ruben-Viramontes
Description: This was my first time taking grad pictures of a group with popping confetti! I was always in awe over all the beautiful grad photos with confetti from other photographers, and I was excited to finally have that opportunity with a group of people. It was a cloudy day, and I understand it's normally not ideal for most grad pictures, but I love the challenge of bringing warmth to grad pictures when it’s overcast. I'm proud of this image. It brings me joy that I captured this image, and I found the right coloring for it too.

Gavin Holt '03

Current City: San Dimas, California

Website: https://judyandgavin.com/

Social: @judyandgavin

As a computer science engineering major, I found out quickly that I was not happy as a computer programmer.  I had a side job capturing club videography, which turned into a small business for wedding videography.  Photography came soon after in 2006.  I have been self-employed since 2005 and run the business with my wife, Judy.

Photo Showcase: Remy Xmas

Description: This is what we did for our Christmas card with our first child (at nine months old). It is not Photoshopped. It was the first time our daughter saw a Christmas tree, and she was old enough to reach up and try to touch it.  I love the image for the wonder that it inspires, along with the deep personal attachment we have to that moment.

Luis Motta '22

Current City: Los Angeles, California

Social: @luisabndnher

My name is Luis Motta. I'm an artist born and raised in Los Angeles. I started taking photographs at Art Division, a nonprofit program located in the Westlake district. Then I started getting more technical in the darkroom while attending Los Angeles City College. Early on, I was very into the documentation of friends and would carry a camera at every party or band show. I started to invite friends into studios for portraits, and this transitioned into an interest in still life.

Photo Showcase:

Description: I created A fictional planet that has gone through a world-ending catastrophe. Planet "C" is made of concrete, barbed wire and fencing material. The items found are constructed out of the same materials. I've used family records like my mom's cancer test to create fictional documentation. This series of photographs comes from my experience of feeling lost and coming to terms with structures coming to an end. The series is also a meditation on how ruins of a past time and event create an identity. After many journeys and migrations, the few fragments we have through photographs and documentation are what we hold on to to define our present and can decide our future.

Jintak Han '20

Current City: Athens, Ohio

Website: https://www.jintakhan.com

Social: @jhancamera

I am a freelance photojournalist currently based in Athens, Ohio, as I pursue my master's degree at Ohio University's School of Visual Communication. You can find my bylines on news agencies around the world such as ZUMA Press, the Associated Press and the Denver Post, where I recently finished a summer internship. I have a strong interest in the topic of discrimination, especially among minority and immigrant communities. I started photography as a hobby towards the end of middle school, but it wasn't until college that I took up photojournalism, when I joined the Daily Bruin in my first quarter at UCLA in 2014. I started working as a photojournalist while in school in 2019, hungry for opportunities beyond the Bruin, with no formal education in photography. I spent the year after I graduated in 2020, photographing the racial injustice protests in Los Angeles and working in an internship at a daily newspaper in South Korea, but returned to school in 2021 to focus on my interest in long-form visual storytelling.

Photo Showcase:

Description: Guests pick out free flower bouquets at a Walmart in Uvalde, Texas, Thursday, May 26, 2022. The Walmart location offered the flowers to the local community after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at the nearby Robb Elementary School two days prior. Town residents placed the flowers at the school entrance and a memorial set up in the Uvalde town square. I was traveling through Houston when I received the alert about Uvalde. I immediately rushed over there, arriving a few hours after the shooting, and spent eight days trying to document the resilience of the small grieving Texas town that would soon send its children back to school. There are thousands of more dramatic and traumatic scenes that I documented in Uvalde. I chose this photograph instead because it tells the story quietly.

Chang Liu '17

Current City: New York, New York

Website: https://changliu.io/

Social: @shampliu

I'm a freelance creative developer who recently moved to New York from California. In high school, I would make skate videos with my friends and that transitioned into photography once I got a better camcorder that could take decent photos as well.

Photo Showcase: Maximalism

Description: This is a PhotoShopped image of a viewpoint from a bar in New York. I think this illustrates the kind of style I gravitate to - heavily texture-based, abstract landscapes that include some subject or subjects in the foreground. I like to emphasize the background/texture more and have the subject in a less prominent light so the photos can be more relatable.

Hon Hoang '14

Self-Portrait Hon Hoang

Current City: Los Angeles, California

Website: https://www.honhoang.com/

Socials: @honnnhoang

I was born in Vietnam and grew up in Los Angeles (Rowland Heights), California. Shortly after graduating from UCLA with a degree in psychology, I pursued photography and started making short films a few years after that. My experience in psychology has continued into my photography and films because of my curiosity in people and cultures. I create photographs to get a glimpse of humanity and pursue films as an exploration of it. Some of my previous short films include: “Taciturn Tango,” “Fall With Me” and “Calling,” which won Best Short film at ECAASU 2021 and the Audience Award at Viet Film Fest 2021. In between films, projects and photoshoots, I try to fill in gaps with moments in street photography - walking around Los Angeles or wherever I may be traveling, trying to capture beautiful moments within what seems to be a gritty landscape.

Photo Showcase: Fall With Me

Description: The photo is from a series called "Fall With Me" (2017). It was taken on set during the making of my first short film of the same name. I want to showcase this image because it represents a moment where my photography converged with my ambitions to make films. After a few years of learning photography, I knew I wanted to create more narratives so I started exploring filmmaking to tell these tales. It was helpful for me to use the years of experience with photography as it translated well to cinema. It was a small project, it was me, a buddy with a camera, another friend with a handheld light, and two actors/models. We just went out and filmed something. You can watch the short film at https://www.honhoang.com/fall-with-me/.

If you are a Bruin photographer, send us an email at connectfeedback@alumni.ucla.edu for possible inclusion into this page. Include your website, social handle, class year and a short one-paragraph bio. We will follow up to request additional info.

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