Courtesy Stock Studios Photography
By Rod Bacon
One of the area’s premier photographers has relocated to downtown Saratoga Springs.
Tom Stock, owner of Stock Studios Photography, continues to provide clients with exceptional images from his new studio in the Shannon-Rose Design building at 65 Clinton Street after selling his building on West Street.
“I have the whole second floor,” he said. “It is exactly the same size as the main studio area of the building we just sold. It’s everything I could have asked for.”
For 35 years, Stock has been offering a wide range of services that include architectural, advertising, food, product, portraits/lifestyle, and aerial photography.
Locally, he has worked with all of the hospitals, banks, and law firms in the Capital District, as well as many area architects and building contractors. He has also provided images for the New York State Department of Health and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA).
He noted that he has worked with Saratoga Hospital’s marketing department for 30 years, shooting everything from staff portraits to operations.
From 1994-2024 he provided images for the Saratoga Business Journal.
During the past year he has photographed the renovations of four local hotels and has two more to do this spring.
He recently shot a series of photographs for a company that has a line of healthy protein pancake mixes, as well as shooting artwork for a high-end artist in the Capital District.
Nationally, among others, he worked with the marketing department of Nucor, North America’s largest steel manufacturer and recycler.
He estimates that 60 percent of his clients are from the Capital District to the Adirondacks and 40 percent are on the East Coast and nationwide.
“It’s mostly commercial, industrial, advertising, and business-to-business photography,” he said.
A Gloversville native, Stock enlisted in the United States Army after high school graduation, and was posted in Germany with the military police. He also served as a member of the Armed Forces Recreation Center (AFRC) ski patrol in Bertchesgarden, Germany.
Upon his return he took advantage of a veterans administration scholarship to attend Syracuse University, graduating cum laude in 1986 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography.
He then went to Key Largo, Florida, where he had hoped to do underwater photography, and worked as a scuba diving instructor.
“Underwater photography was going to be my thing,” he said. “However, there wasn’t a lot of need for it where I was and the scuba company I worked for had me working twelve-hour days so there wasn’t time for it anyway.’
He next moved to Delaware where he worked for a company called the Church Directory Service. He traveled up and down the East Coast with a mobile studio photographing family groups in churches. Within a year he had accepted a position as staff photographer at a commercial studio and lab in Wilmington, Delaware, where he made images for corporate clients such as DuPont, MBT Bank, and Gore-Tex. After three years he decided it was time to open his own shop.
He wanted to return to the area in which he grew up and chose Saratoga Springs because he felt it gave him the best opportunities for economic success.
At first, of course, he shot with film, developing the images in his studio’s darkroom. In the mid-1990s, one of his clients was Delmar Publishing, a representative of which suggested it would be more economically feasible to shoot in digital format because all film images had to go through a multi-stage process to become suitable for print and digital photographs would streamline that process. The next week he purchased a digital camera and Photoshop program suitable to meet the client’s needs and he has never looked back.
“It was cutting edge and it saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I became their go-to guy so it was a good business decision,” he said.
While Stock uses high-end equipment for his professional shoots, he says that advances in cell phone cameras allow users to produce only “good” images.
“Cell phones and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are the biggest disrupters of the photography business these days,” he said. “To produce great marketing images you have to learn about lighting, color and composition. Those things take time, commitment and expertise to achieve professional results.”
Stock is also a skilled craftsman who built his own house on 80 wooded acres in Greenfield Center. It is off-grid, powered by solar, wood heat, and wind power. Each year he hosts a party called Woodstock where participants help replenish his wood supply from trees on his land in exchange for good food and drink (after the work is done) and camaraderie.
He has been married since 2005 to Roberta (Fuerst) Stock. She owns and operates Roberta Stock Bookkeeping in Saratoga Springs.
Stock has no plans to retire.
“I will continue to provide my clients with high-quality digital photography, on time and on budget,” he said.
For further information about the services he offers visit saratogaphotographer.com.