Tell me about yourself, your business, and what you do:
I’m Matthew LaVere, a freelance editorial and commercial photographer based in Livonia, MI. I specialize in environmental portraiture and headshot photography for individuals, magazines, and corporations. Some of my clients include Billboard Magazine, D Business Magazine, DFCU Financial, Howard and Howard Law Firm, HOUR Detroit Magazine, and Volkswagen, to name a few.
Why do you like what you do?
I enjoy what I like to do because photography is my passport to meeting new people. Sometimes I could be at home catching up on marketing or retouching. Other days I could be out at a manufacturing plant photographing a worker on the line for a small campaign ad or photographing a wrongly convicted individual starting a non-profit. It’s educational for me to learn from a variety of perspectives other than my own.
What is the biggest piece of advice you would give to someone visiting Korea for the first time?
While one might think you absolutely have to know how to speak Korean, you do not. I travel, on average, 75,000-100,000 miles a year both domestically and internationally. It’s best practice and courteous to try to speak some of the basic greetings and sayings to get around, but most will be accomodating. Korea is also safe for solo travelers.
What is your favorite memory of mathematics? It could be a story about your favorite teacher or activity you remember doing growing up.
My favorite memory was sometime in elementary school, learning multiplication. Every month our teacher would have two students go up to take turns going up against another classmate with two bells to ring. Whoever would win the correct multiplication problem, the quickest would get candy at the end we could eat in class.
How do you use mathematics in your everyday life and as part of your business? It could be calculating business costs, distances or time to get from one place or another, from angles to something else.
As apart of my business, I use basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division when I put together an estimate for a client. Some photoshoots might be multiple days, and crew members have overtime rates after a certain amount of time. Then I have to consider the number of people on set and how many mouths I have to feed, how many cars have to park and where, and how many photoshoot scenarios I can accomplish in a day with (X) amount of time given.
Where can people find out more about you and your business?
People can stay up to date on my Instagram at @MattLaVerePhoto or my website www.mattlavere.com.
