About Red Raven Studio

Rick Gates

Rick is the owner and lead photographer at Red Raven Studio. He is a Louisville, KY native and has been creating art in one form or another since he was 5 years old.

By the third grade, Rick was already drawing, painting, and sculpting, even taking after school classes that would continue throughout his entire school career just to broaden and deepen his craft. Whenever his school needed a major art piece, he was involved: a poster here, a mural there, even a banner for a school event. This continued throughout middle school, where his drawings were submitted as part of a youth art exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States, resulting in his work being displayed in a Moscow museum, half way around the world, at age 13. Once high school came along, he began experimenting with photography.

His first camera was a Nikon-FG handed down to him from his mother during his Freshman year. After a couple of years of photography classes, shooting as a hobby and processing his own film, he set aside photography in pursuit of a new interest, creative writing, but never lost his eye for visual art. During this time, Rick also dedicated himself to learning about computer technology and programming from his engineer grandfather and any computer books, hardware and software he could get his hands on. He also took up acting and singing, participating in high school musicals and other dramatic and vocal performances.

After high school, worried about being just another starving artist, Rick attended Sullivan University in pursuit of a degree in Information Technology and began his career in that field. His hope was to make enough money supporting business' computers and users that he could enjoy creating his art without worrying about income. However, as time passed, he found himself living more and more in the world of technology and less in the world of art.

In 2008, at the age of 36, while listening to an NPR rebroadcast of a previously-recorded interview with Anthony Minghella, who had just passed away, Rick was inspired by how much Minghella was able to accomplish in his relatively short film career, having himself started in that field at the age of 36 and winning the Academy Award for Best Director for the 1997 film The English Patient only three years later. This similarity in age and his subsequent success reinvigorated Rick's interest in the arts and he began researching art colleges with renewed enthusiasm.

In 2011, Rick started attending San Francisco Academy of Art University (AAU) in pursuit of a degree in Screenwriting. At the time AAU did not have a specific track for Screenwriting, but instead offered a degree in Motion Pictures & Television with a specialization in Screenwriting. This simple distinguishing factor meant that he was required to take classes not only in Screenwriting, but also Cinematography and Lighting, Film Direction and Production, Non-Linear Video Editing, Acting, and Sound Design. Though overwhelming at first, these classes sparked an interest in all aspects of filmmaking and also renewed his interest in photography. As part of his school equipment purchases, Rick purchased a new Nikon DSLR and started shooting and editing digital photography. Soon after he established Red Raven Studio.

Rick is a current member of the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) as well as the Professional Photographers of America (PPA) and is a former Director of Electronic Communications for the Young Professionals Association of Louisville (YPAL) Board. He is also the owner and lead photographer at Bloodoir™ and director and host of Dinner4Five Networking.