With a studio in Seattle, Washington, an office in Paris (France, not Texas) and a steady stream of photographic assignments routinely taking him to some of the most remote corners of the globe, Jarvis is a highly sought-after lifestyle, sports and popular culture photographer with an enviable client list that includes Pepsi, Nike, Apple, Volvo and Reebok, among many others.

But on top of the man-in-constant-motion physical Chase Jarvis, there’s also the virtual Chase Jarvis—the one who says he is seeing “millions” of views per month on his blog, chasejarvis.com/blog, thousands more on his Facebook page, plus equal numbers following the various musings and aphorisms published through his Twitter feed, and throngs more viewing the videos he shoots and regularly posts to Youtube, many of which provide an informative, behind-the-scenes look at the photographer at work.

Perhaps more than any other contemporary working photographer, Jarvis has embraced online social networking and is using it not only as a way to define his brand and make himself more transparent to potential clients, but also as a way of thinking out loud, of connecting visual and verbal ideas for himself and others, and of creating a virtual community that’s helping to connect individuals interested in visual art and visual communication in all of its forms.

Jarvis is no newcomer to the online world, however. “I was transparent long before it was cool to be transparent,” he laughs. His first Web site went live around 1998, and “it won awards, though I look back at it now and laugh at how primitive it was. A friend of mine learned Flash, which was brand-new at that point, and I ended up having the one of the first Flash sites of any photographer I knew of.” These were the first efforts in a step-by-step process of trying out new Web and communications technologies and applications as they became available, the audience for Jarvis’s online images and words growing larger with each step forward.

The venture into online social networkig seems natural, given Jarvis’s early adoption of digital photography. He jumped into the new medium in the late 90s “as fast as new cameras and technology were becoming available,” his first digital cameras the Nikon D1 and the D1x. But his advertising clients at the time still demanded images on film, so he took both film and digital cameras along with him on assignments. “I saw huge value in digital, in the instant feedback it provided and how that could help me not only see just what the images were going to look like right then and there, but also to help me learn more about taking pictures overall. I could try out new ideas on the spot, and know immediately if I was onto something. And I also slept better after each shoot, knowing I had it in the can.”

The learning element is important for Jarvis, as he is entirely self-taught as a photographer. A gifted high school athlete, he went to college at San Diego State on a soccer scholarship, with plans to eventually go to medical school. During his undergraduate years, Jarvis got sidetracked by art and philosophy and ended up studying for a master’s degree in art and aesthetics at the University of Washington. He left school before completing the program and spent some time traveling in Europe, then moved with his girlfriend (now his wife and producer) to Steamboat Springs, Colorado to pursue the life of a ski bum.

Always interested in photography, he had inherited a set of cameras and lenses from his late grandfather, and began shooting pictures more and more seriously. “It was in Steamboat that I really started using my grandfather’s cameras, shooting pictures that related to what I was doing—skiing and snowboarding. And I was lucky enough to meet and photograph some of the top professional athletes in the sport out there, whose sponsors needed pictures of them. That was my first foray into image licensing.” Jarvis’s first sale netted him $500 and a new pair of skis.

This was also how he found his niche in outdoor sports and lifestyle photography. Snowboarding, for example, was only then transitioning from a sport popular among a relatively small group of aficionados into the extremely popular and profitable business it is now. There were few photographers familiar enough with the sport to photograph it well, and Jarvis was one of them. He allows that his timing was very good, but even more importantly, he was photographing something he truly loved.

“It’s a process of finding where your attitude and aptitude fit best,” he explains. “You need to be taking pictures of things that you want to be taking pictures of and it comes through if you’re not. It’s much easier to make beautiful and compelling pictures, to speak visually, of something that interests you deeply than of something that doesn’t.”

Jarvis is as serious about his social networking efforts as he is about his photography, though he stresses that the quality of the photographic work is paramount, and a snazzy online presence is no substitute for boring pictures. But with both his early adoption of digital photography and his continued use of online social networking, “I’ve tried to make innovation part of my brand. The most important thing, of course, is this: How powerful are your pictures? But when I first began shooting digitally, and I could walk in and show a potential client digital images shot in a style or retouched in a way that they’d never seen before, it really helped set me apart from the competition. Not only were my pictures innovative, it showed that my whole approach was innovative.”

In addition to helping define define him as a photographer, Jarvis explains how he also found there to be a lack of community among photographers, and his online efforts are partly an attempt to address that. “I’ve always been very happy to share information,” he said. “When I started working digitally and having some success, I also began being asked to speak about my work at industry events. And as the Web matured, it was a natural transition to begin putting thoughts and images and videos online, and to go from speaking to a roomful of maybe 500 people to speaking to the world.”

Jarvis is not expressly trying to provide “how-to” information with his blogging and videos, though. “That’s there in the videos if the viewer wants to look for it, but I’m trying to talk more about what it’s like being a working photographer and an artist. My struggles aren’t just technical, they’re psychological and creative, and I’m trying to talk about that, about what interests me and what drives me.”

He takes a holistic approach approach to online community building. “The whole social media question is much bigger than just having a blog. As MySpace and Twitter have come online, I’ve tried to be an early adopter of those technologies and to mine them for the unique value that each of them offers in community building.” The chief idea behind all of these efforts, he says, is the continuing development of a “gift economy” that’s growing larger as the online community becomes more and more refined. “I’m creating information and images that have value to others and giving it all away. And there’s a wonderful reciprocation that happens in return, because the members of the online community take that information and use it and create things that they share, in return.”

For Jarvis, “It’s turned into this wonderful conversation that I’m having with the world. It’s a global cocktail party, and it never stops.”

Testing the Nikon D90—The Bleeding Edge of Stills and Video

As an early adopter of digital photography, Chase Jarvis has beta-tested several iterat-ions of Nikon digital cameras. He first began shooting digitally around 2000, with a Nikon D1 borrowed from a friend. Almost immedia-tely, Jarvis launched into a campaign to convince his clients that images produced digitally were every bit the equal to those produced on film. “With all my clients, I was trying to say, “Look at how powerful this is,” he explains, “trying to show them by putting the digital images along-side film images, shooting both on set and burning a disk of my favorites from the digital take and telling them to check the quality for themselves.” He later beta-tested Nikon’s D2X,which debuted around 2005. “Nikon took a long time to go from the D1X to the D2X, and during that time I was being approached by other manufacturers to test and use their equipm-ent. But I’d developed a real attachment to Nikon—their optics are so good, for one thing, and their cameras really are the standard. I had a lot of faith they would come through with a really great camera, and they did. Testing the D2X was a treat.” Jarvis recently tested the D90, not only for its still image capability but also its high-definition video. In addition to testing the camera himself, Jarvis asked Nikon for a number of additional cameras so his staff could test the camera as well. “I used the HD video feature to document us testing the camera and show how it felt to be using this new kind of feature and exploring its capabilities,” he explains. “Rather than create a static ad, we wanted to tell a story. Video and still photography are converging, and this camera is one big example of that. And being at the bleeding edge of shooting stills and directing videos is an incredibly exciting place to be right now.”

TECH BOX

Camera Nikon D3, Nikon D3X, Nikon D90 Lenses AF DX Fisheye-NIKKOR 10.5mm f/2.8G ED AF Fisheye-NIKKOR 16mm f/2.8D AF-S NIKKOR 14-24mm f/2.8G ED AF NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8D AF-S VR Zoom-NIKKOR 70-200mm f/2.8G IF-ED PC-E Micro NIKKOR 85mm f/2.8D Lighting Nikon Speedlights SB-800 and SB-900, Broncolor Scoro A4S Packs, Verso A2 Pack with Power Dock, Mobil A2R Packs, Pulso G heads, Unilite heads, 1200 HM Diffusion P70 and PAR reflectors, beauty dish, softboxes, Para 220 FB umbrella, Lightbar 60, various flags, silks, scrims, stands, booms, road rags Computers Four Mac Pro Desktops and Mac Book Pro Laptops, one Mac Book Air, Numerous 30”, 23” and 20” Cinema Displays, XServe RAID server, iPhones