Jeff Hulton: Chasing your entrepreneurial passion
Kudos to Jeff Hulton for continuing to pursue his entrepreneurial passion, and in his words, “learn to make money from it.” Jeff was a long-term Mentor, for over 10 years at BC, and has now come over to BU to help work with my students. He just did a radio-style call in from Montana for my Entrepreneurship class on Thursday, describing entrepreneurship, mentorship and chasing dreams. His current start-up is Sporting Photo Art. Check out his INCREDIBLE Montana photos. Background on Jeff’s company follows below.
Photography and my love of art started early within my family. With a artist mother and a cousin as serious camera hobbyist, I was easily hooked. A lifelong passion for the shooting sports and fishing also developed early but the thought of the two colliding in my work never occurred to me at that time.
During college, I spent a year studying in Europe where my photography began to take on increasing importance. When I returned to New York I quickly exhausted all of the courses available and helped convince the college to expand their offerings. They brought in a legend in Saul Libsohn, one of the early Farm Security Administration documentary photographers and co-founder of The Photo League. Saul was an incredible teacher and inspiration; encouraging and insightful always. He drove all of us to find passion in our lives and expose it in our work.
After graduation I went to work for the Remington Arms Company. As the youngest sales rep in the field, I participated in hunting, fishing and competitive shooting all over this county. I was fortunate to be named 3 times to the Sports Afield Magazine “All American Trap Shooting Team” and continue to shoot and teach today. Still, the idea of combining my love of the outdoors and my image making eluded me.
In 1979 I left Remington and started a career in the early days of the PC revolution. I worked as an executive in 11 startup companies including the nations first Apple computer retail chain. During my high-tech career, I continued to pursue photography spending 5 summer workshops with Fred Picker and his staff at The Zone VI Workshop in VT. Fred was the consummate New Englander, artist, inventor and was a great influence with his “get one foot on a rock” strategy. Most of my efforts then were in large format black and white focused on abstract landscape images with inspiration from Brett Weston, Minor White, Oliver Gagliani and more.
In 2006 I decided to visit Montana to pursue some fly-fishing wanderlust. To say that this was a watershed event in my work is a giant understatement. I discovered how exciting the new digital camera technology was and pursued images of fly fishing and the great outdoors. But, after looking that the images I hung on my wall of the great sporting watercolorists, it suddenly occurred to me that I might explore combining my passion for hunting and fishing and the capturing live images in the field with a new type of digital imagery that I had in my minds eye that would render “watercolor-like” prints more in the genre of the sporting watercolor artists I loved and collected.
To make this transformation meaningful and unique, I charted a new path that I follow today.The artists that inspire my work include Andrew Wyeth, Winslow Homer, Chet Reneson, Peter Corbin, Eldridge Hardie, Lasell Ripley, Ogden Pleissner and so many many more.
I hope you enjoy the results of this incredible journey I am on!, Jeff Hulton
