Chattanooga: Photographer adjusts his focus

In the past year, Garrett Nudd’s photography business has taken him to Switzerland, Anguilla and New York.

But with his new couture portrait studio on Main Street in the Southside, Mr. Nudd, 31 and wife Joy, 29, are focusing on their home in Chattanooga.

Putting their business in the Southside just made sense to them, especially after seeing the transformation under way in the neighborhood.

“We drove through a couple of years ago and Joy didn’t want to stop the car,” Mr. Nudd said. “We came back down here later, and so much had changed in a short amount of time.”

The native of Cleveland, Tenn., today celebrates the grand opening of Cobblestone Rue at 55 E. Main Street. His studio will focus on couture portraits, meaning the shoots are highly stylized and designed specifically to accommodate the needs of the subject.

When he is commissioned to do portraits of families or individuals, he’ll have someone come in and plan the session.

“We don’t just have you come in, take the pictures and leave,” he said. “It’s a relationship.”

It took an investment of about $25,000 to convert the 1,600-square-foot space to Mr. Nudd’s studio.

The couple received a $5,000 grant from the Lyndhurst Foundation to complete the renovations, which included adding a bathroom and removing several walls to open the space up and give it more of a gallery feel, Mr. Nudd said.

Mrs. Nudd also is enjoying the strong sense of community, she said. Until last year, the couple had been operating from a house on Tremont Avenue in North Chattanooga.

“We have been seeing positive results from having a storefront,” she said. “We wanted to take (the business) to the next level, and this is more modern, more us.”

Mr. Nudd graduated from Southern Adventist University in 2000 and began photographing weddings while living in Orlando, a popular spot for destination weddings, he said. The husband and wife began working more together on wedding shoots, and in 2005, both quit their day jobs to pursue the business full time. They moved to Chattanooga from Orlando in 2006.

“We were in Florida and we talked about it, and determined it was best to move back up here,” he said. “We were travelling so much for weddings with our daughter that it made sense to be near family.”

These days, 100 percent of Mr. Nudd’s wedding photography work comes from referrals, and they have taken him all over the world, from Jamaica and the Bahamas to Norway and Scotland. They even photographed the wedding of Lauren Weisberger, author of the book, “The Devil Wears Prada.”

In 2006, the couple photographed 45 weddings, making for a busy year with a lot of traveling. The two made a conscious decision to limit the number of weddings to 15 and about 50 to 70 sessions a year.

“It’s very important to us that we remain a boutique studio,” he said.