amber L. Canterbury

LA-BASED artist & photographer

With over a decade of experience working with clients including Blue Bottle Coffee, Hulu, Tatcha, Airbnb, Vogue, National Wildlife Federation, Estée Lauder, Elyse Walker and more — I’m open to collaboration on a wide variety of projects, but am especially interested in themes of conservation, sustainability, and social justice. 

Lately I have also been working with microscopy and exploring new ways to create imagery with plants and other materials from the natural world. 

Services:

Photo + Video

Creative Direction

Content Production

Retouching

still life & Product

I approach photographing objects much like I do cooking. I believe sometimes (maybe even most times?) simple yet effective is best. Blank space leaves room for thought. Let it breathe.

Botanicals & Microscopy

In another life maybe I’d be a scientist. In this one, I’m a photographer with a comically large microscope and I stay up until all hours studying everything I eat. It’s amazing what you notice when you’re paying attention.

people

Friends, loves, strangers. I learned to shoot portraits on my grandfather’s old Canon AE-1 35mm with a fixed 50mm lens and a shutter that only worked half the time. It taught me to slow down, and helped build a style of photographing humans that feels intimate and sincere.

Stories

Places I’ve been, a mix of work and pleasure. Documenting coffee farms for Blue Bottle, a fundraising campaign for an education-based nonprofit in DRC, peering into a lava lake from the summit of an active volcano, road trips across the U.S., two weeks crying my way through Japan after a breakup.

Motion

Work and personal. Visual meditations for Tatcha, microscopy, a study of transience — water evaporating from a jar shot daily for 3 months.