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My name is Robert Claus. As a kid, I wanted to be an artist—a painter or composer, or preferably both. Life has a funny way of redirecting and planing down these creative (and potentially very expensive) impulses. When I returned to photography as an adult, it was the perfect means of self-expression for me. I could then bring my other passions to bear, from lighting a still life like a 17th century painting, to thinking about sequencing images in a portfolio or collection like a piece of music.

Which photographers are your biggest influences?

On the internet, people like Gavin Hoey, Don Gianatti, and David Hobby taught me a lot of technique. Sean Tucker is someone I admire deeply for his ethos and flawless style. I owe a lot more than I can fit here to my two mentors: Gina Milicia, a top-level lifestyle and portrait photographer based in Melbourne, Australia (who was absolutely amazing—she gave me a lot of confidence), and Phillip McCordall, a retired commercial and advertising photographer, who taught photography—and especially still life photography—as if there was no such thing as Photoshop, which deeply influenced my way of thinking about capturing images. He did one shoot for Audi, which perfectly encapsulates his mastery of the craft; his was a profound influence that still guides me today.

In terms of historic photographers, I admire a wide range of masters: Eugene Smith, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Albert Renger-Patzsch, August Sander, Richard Avedon, Don McCullen, Annie Leibowitz—the list goes on!

From the brush and paint brigade, I would call out Caravaggio, but also Claesz, Breughels, Dürer, Vermeer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, El Greco, Georges de la Tour, Goya, Turner: again, too many to list here.

How did they affect who you are and how you create?

At their core, my “internet heroes” all shared an almost laissez-faire approach to gear—the emphasis was always on the craft. They would teach a technique and demand that we go out and practice! Gina Milicia in particular taught brilliant “little hacks” as she called them, that often didn’t even require a camera, but which pushed my photographic game to new levels. Case in point: you’re stuck in traffic, so look around you—what’s the light like? What kind of shadows can you see? That sort of thing really help to train the eye, and helps me to quickly recognize good light when I see it.

How long have you been shooting? How do you feel you’ve evolved since you started?

I’ve been shooting increasingly seriously for the past ten or fifteen years; I’ve evolved ever so slowly from gear-obsessed noob, frantically looking for the next “cool” thing to shoot (or buy, I’m sorry to say), to a much more conceptual and deliberate artist. Now, I will make preparatory sketches for particular shoots, and practice portrait sessions with a foam head at home. Photographing for a local youth Shakespeare group was also a real learning experience, whether I was doing headshots, documenting rehearsals, or shooting “editorials” for promotional materials. Each new shoot built directly on the lessons learned from the previous one.

Tell us about your photographic identity. You as a person have an identity that fundamentally makes you who you are. Tell us about that person as a photographer.

As I say, I always wanted to be an artist somehow. When my parents sent me to a fancy boarding school in England that viewed itself as a forge of prospective Oxford and Cambridge students, I horrified the Headmaster by saying I wanted to be a roadie for a heavy metal band. At that time, heavy metal best encapsulated the intensity of the artistic experience for me, and I knew full well that my guitar chops were not up to fronting a band myself—but as a roadie, I would at least get close to that experience.

That particular pipe dream never came true, of course, but as an artist, I always veered ...