Icon Digital Imaging

Description

Michael Chinnici Co-Founder & CEO Fashion & Lifestyle Photographer I started taking photographs when I was 11 years old. I used my dad’s Argus Rangefinder that he bought in Japan during his tour in the military. I shot only Black & White and developed my own film in a converted basement bathroom darkroom. It was 1969. The year of Woodstock, Jimmy Hendrix, the Camaro and the Mustang. It was a very creative time. Throughout high school and college, I did a lot of drawing and painting. I even airbrushed cars, vans and bikes, but I always gravitated back to photography as a way of expressing myself. I went to college for Advertising and Design. I started at the State University of New York at Farmingdale and then attended The School of Visual Arts in NYC. I entered the advertising world as an art director and fell in love with the art of brainstorming and creating ads. After just a few years I decided to branch out and start my own agency. By 1990, I had created a very respectable ad agency called Chinnici Direct with clients like American Express, AT&T, Chase and Ikea. Running an ad agency is fun and exciting, but your daily functions include new business, client relationship building and agency management. There’s no time for being creative. One day I picked up the camera and I thought to myself, with this camera I am the art director, the creative director, the writer, and the artist, all in one. I can art direct again!!! Only this time through the lens. I knew right then and there that photography would be with me forever. In 1995, I approached my friend and photographer, David DiMicco with the idea of starting one of the first Digital Photography Studios in NYC. Using the ad agency as a launching pad, we made the leap in 1996 and Icon Digital was born. The early years were more about educating the art director and art buyer about why digital was better and more cost effective than film. Today it is the mainstay of every photographer. In 2000, I sold my ad agency but stayed involved as CEO until 2005. In 2003, I expanded my role at Icon Digital and started shooting again on a professional level, utilizing the studio in my spare time. When I departed Chinnici Direct in 2005, my goal was multi-focused. Devote more time to my photography at Icon. And “change the face of the ad agency” by launching a new and very different kind of ad agency called Scuderia O2. Check it out when you have some time at www.ScuderiaO2.com To know Icon is to work with Icon. The excitement, passion and expertise we bring to the work makes Icon a very special place. The culture and the people are amazing. I hope you get a chance to experience it.

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