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Why Your Process Doesn't Have to Look Like Anyone Else's

Cait Oppermann

Cait Oppermann is a photographer and creative director based in Brooklyn, and the founder of the creative studio FLOWERS. She's shot massive commercial campaigns, published her first monograph in 2025 after a six-year project, and built a pricing tool for photographers because she got tired of waiting for someone else to make it.

She's spent her whole career quietly refusing the standard playbook — figuring out that her best work only happens when she's having fun, that a portfolio is only as strong as its weakest image, and that her brain works best with a stack of index cards instead of another app she'll never open.

  • ADHD and the systems that come out of it
  • Why your process doesn't have to look like anyone else's
  • Leaving her agent to build her own thing
  • BaseRate — the pricing tool she built for photographers
  • Printing everything, and being "allergic to learning from a screen"
  • How AI lets creatives build the bespoke tools they used to need a team for

“You're really only as strong as the weakest link in your portfolio. So tighten up the edit. If someone only sees ten images, is every single one going to be like, whoa, that's amazing? Or are you just going to throw stuff in there because?”

“Your process, the way that you do things, does not have to fit into an industry standard. Sometimes you really just have to invent your own way.”

“I get into my best work when I'm having fun and I feel good at something. Usually the best of what I had is the work I had the most fun on.”

“I saw a need for this thing and I waited and waited for somebody else to build it. No one did. And I was like, man, I guess it's me. We're all an expert in something.”

“I'm not worried about AI taking my job, because my job is constantly evolving anyway. Every day I'm evolving my job. If I didn't, I'd still be working the same way I was on my very first photo assignments.”

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