NoBs Digital Dogbowl

NoBS Member of the Month: Neil Copeland

He's the Godfather of the Forum. Always quick to call a spade a spade, Neil Copeland embodies the true spirit of NoBS. He's loaded with experience, willing to share his knowledge, and ready to call you out if he sees room for improvement. That's why the Top Dogs of the Dog Bowl have selected Neil Copeland as the July NoBS Member of the Month. Here's Neil's story in his own words.

"Hodgy gave me an assignment to write a brief biography and I don’t really know where to begin. Those of you who know me KNOW how verbose I can be when I start typing, so adding the word BRIEF in there really throws me for a loop.

Well, here goes anyway…

I was born almost sixty years ago in the north Georgia mountain town of Dahlonega where the first gold rush in America began almost a hundred and twenty years earlier in 1828. I took my first breath in a little rock clinic next door the Holly Theater and…

…well, I guess I’d better skip ahead a bit. Moved down the road a few miles to Gainesville, GA where I attended elementary and high schools, played sports (though not very well), was active in school clubs and went steady with my high school sweetheart beginning in my sophomore year. (We celebrated our 38th year of marriage on Valentine’s Day earlier this year). I always considered myself an artist and won a summer scholarship to attend the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program in art the summer before my senior year of high school. It was a wonderful experience, but I got the big head BIG time and was told by some that I was sort of a jerk during my senior year (1966).

I attended University of Georgia for a couple of years and enjoyed myself (too much) being independent for the first time and nearly flunked out. Transferred to a local junior college to finish my sophomore year and decided to join the US Navy Reserve in 1968 to keep from getting draft notices from the Army during the Vietnam war. During the next four years I got married, worked awhile with my father-in-law doing masonry work, went on active duty, serving on a Destroyer out of San Diego and in Vietnam, became a father while I was overseas, finished my tour of active duty, came home, worked a while more with my FIL, and went back to college on the GI Bill. By this time I had matured a bit, stayed on the Dean’s List most of the time, and earned an Associate’s degree in Journalism from the local junior college I attended earlier.

It was during this time that I discovered photography. A future US Senator from Georgia, Sam Nunn was visiting campus on his first campaign and my media professor handed me a 35mm camera, a roll of black and white film, and told me to go take pictures. As a typical newbie (back before we all were called newbies), I had to go find a classmate who had a little experience with cameras to show me how to load it. This led to a partnership (that ended badly) but opened me up to a whole new world. I then discovered a major for college (after taking an adult night course at the local art center) and eventually earned my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Photographic Design from the U. of Georgia in 1975.

We moved to the Atlanta area the next year where I worked for the Georgia Power Company for the next four years, starting as a copywriter doing mostly photographic assignments in the Training section of the Employee Relations department. I quickly became the supervisor of AV Services, primarily operating the company’s internal television production facility. I loved the work for a while because it was a hands-on kind of job, working one day with a lineman on a power pole and the next day with the president of the company. Lotsa fun and a lot of challenges helping the department grow within the company. But then company politics crept in and more middle managers began being inserted into the process and I started pushing more paper and schedules, having less time to be a hands-on manager of my production staff, so I left the company in 1979 and didn’t have a clue about what I was REALLY going to do next, but it would have to revolve around photography.

I had been operating a part time photo business ever since I was in college, and had maintained it in various forms for about six years, shooting a little bit of everything. I kept doing that when I went on my own in 1979 but was lucky my wife, Jane, had a good job. I had gotten stupid during this period (early mid-life crisis (?) as it used to be called) and I jumped into local politics, getting myself appointed to a City Council position after a dispute with a city contractor building a bridge next to my property. One thing led to another and I wound up running for mayor and got elected for a term, then spent six years operating a local studio and later joining a college pal in a big advertising photo studio in downtown Atlanta for a few years that ended when another venture we partnered (professional photo equipment rental) went bust when the competition ate our lunch in less than a year. That was a case of inadequate market research and took several years to overcome.

Meanwhile, I ran for another term as mayor and had a great time over the next few years, getting a lot done in my community and enjoying my son’s high school and college football career. When my previous business failed, I had discovered that I needed to find a specialty and had honed in on youth sports team and individual photography, now called T&I, and became rather successful locally with it… finally! It made life a lot easier and I really enjoyed growing that business. My mayoring even fit in with my photography schedule and life was good. That is, until I got stupid again and decided to run for a third mayoral term. I won by eleven votes, but the campaign was a precursor to the dirty politics that seemed to begin in the early 90’s and the next three years were a constant battle. During that time my son graduated from college and I hired him to manage my business, so that helped a tremendous amount. We incorporated the business and began to reorganize everything. Eventually, I got fed up with the politics and gave it up in early 1994.

That’s when more good things began to happen. About a month after I resigned, a real estate agent stopped by our house with a client who offered to buy it and wanted to move in within two weeks. We got our asking price, but it took about a month for us to find another house. It worked out because the buyer needed extra time to arrange financing and we got lucky and found a five-year-old house that had been in foreclosure that saved us almost $100,000. We moved in a month before closing at the invitation of the mortgage holder and have been here (near Gainesville, GA) around family for just over 13 years. This was The Secret in action before we knew it was the Secret. I’ve always figured it was the Good Lord looking out for us. Once we decided to get out of a bad situation, good things began to happen.

For the next year, my son, Brett, ran the business from his new house in our old hometown (he moved in two weeks before we moved out of town) and the youth sports photography business continued to grow. That gave my wife and me some time to get used to our new surroundings and get to know some of our new neighbors. Not long after, however, Brett got married and left to pursue other corporate career choices and I returned to managing the business fulltime again.

In 1999 I discovered that digital photography had arrived, and that it was good enough to pursue further. I bought a turnkey system from Express Digital Software that included hardware and software, a Kodak DCS 620 camera, a 400Mhz laptop, and two dyesub Sony printers. I tried all sorts of ways to incorporate this into my existing youth sports business, some with more success than others, while still shooting mostly with medium format film cameras. The early transition was rough and the learning curve was steep, but I eventually came to embrace it. Around 2001, Brett returned to the business (after a divorce… his, not mine) and the next year we decided to lease/purchase our own lab machine because there weren’t enough digital labs around at the time to handle the kind of work we did. We changed the company around over the next few years, getting more organized and shooting less volume but making more money and diversifying our products and services.

A couple of years ago I decided to scale back a bit and look at my future with an eye toward less volume and more diversity again. We are really good at youth sports T&I, and most of our income still derives from that, but I’d like to get into some different areas to stretch my creativity a bit more. Brett now manages a business in South Carolina while Jane and I continue to run things here. I’d love to still have him working with me, but he really loves management work and ole Dad is just a bit hard to manage at times.

I’ll probably never retire from the business, but I would like to slow down the pace a bit and begin to travel more. If I can figure out a way to incorporate more vacation like travel into the business and still make money to pay the bills…then that’ll be my goal. Until then, I’ll keep on doing what I’ve been doing and keep on enjoying life and photography."

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