Hi!

I’m Matt, from Smithville, NJ- the rural shadow of Atlantic City, NJ. It wasn’t until I moved to Los Angeles that I realized what an interesting place South Jersey is. Most of it consists of the Pine Barrens, which is essentially a federal reserve for pine trees. Atlantic City was 20 minutes away, Philadelphia was an hour away and NYC was 2 hours away yet I grew up in the middle of a bunch of trees and marshland.

As I’m writing this, my studio is now one of the hottest acting headshot studios in Los Angeles. The current wait, depending on the time of year, is 1-3 months for a session. It did really take too long to build my studio to that point.

The acting headshot market is notoriously tough to break into. It’s been dominated by a few key figures for decades, it feels. There’s been a solid pipeline of agents/managers who have their safe go-to people who’ve been doing the same thing for a while, and it makes it quite tough for anyone new to come around. I did. I didn’t come here to rewrite the script. I simply tore the script apart to start from scratch. I wanted to do things that worked; not bound by rules, and there's not a new script in place because I’m ready and willing to adjust at any point.

There was an interesting start to this. Out of high school, I jumped right into a completely different industry: The casino industry in New Jersey. Atlantic City is an incredibly gritty place. I kind of laugh when people think that areas of LA are dangerous because none of it really feels nearly as dangerous as some areas of Atlantic City (at that time). Atlantic County was one of (if not THE hardest it counties by the 2008 recession and that shaped my early life quite a bit). The personality of that city is much different as well. The emphasis is to show up, do your job and not complain. It was truly a 24 hour town, and you were expected to be available every hour of the day and not complain about it.

I learned, in great detail, what makes a winner and what makes a loser through tough times. I worked at the most incredibly successful casino in town (the Borgata) and I worked at the epic failure that was the Revel Casino, which may have been the biggest casino bust in the history of casinos, and one of the greatest business failures in modern history. I learned in great detail what works, and DEFINITELY what doesn’t. I had a short, but intense and impactful career while I was there. Here are the various jobs I worked, in order.

Security Officer- Atlantic City Hilton

Fire Command Officer- Atlantic City Hilton

Fire Command Officer/Surveillance Tech- Borgata

Emergency Fire Command Officer/Public Safety Specialist (Local 68 IUOE) - Revel Casino

Groundsman (Local 68 IUOE)- Harrah’s

General Maintenance/Fire Command Officer (Local 68 IUOE)- Caesar’s

It wasn’t until recently that I realized that this past career completely paved the way for my career here in Los Angeles. When I was 18 years old, I was guarding millions of dollars, making late-night money drops, protecting VIPs and high rollers, and learning exactly how the slot machines and table games were rigging the game. When I jumped into doing surveillance, it got even CRAZIER. I was tasked with wild assignments. I would need to spy on employees who had accusations against them, find stolen goods, do reports, and track and record incidents and injuries. It required an absolute eagle eye. I’d have to watch a camera for hours, with hundreds of people in frame and on an extremely grainy image find a subject/event that may have taken just a second (a pickpocket for instance). An eye for detail is hardwired in my brain from spending hours reviewing video at 3am in a state of the art surveillance hub.

Fire Command was a different beast, and this is what I was REALLY good at. This was also the highest stakes job. I had to learn the fire and life safety systems of some of the biggest and most complex buildings in the world. These buildings were OLD as well, held together by a patchwork of repairs and systems over the years. You not only had to learn and understand how each system worked, but how it was patched together and Jerry rigged through the decades. If there was any sort of public safety emergency, they required a response from the fire department, and I was responsible for the execution of that. I would have just minutes to decide if an alarm was false or not, and a mistake would cost the casino hundreds or thousands of dollars, OR at worst, somebody’s life. High stakes have been imprinted in my mind my entire adult life, and I THRIVE off of that.

It was serious. I was responsible for coordinating the response for some serious situations and still to this day I’m surprised that I executed virtually every situation I had to deal with flawlessly. You’d be surprised how often a life safety emergencies happen at a place like a casino. We’ve obviously had fires, but that’s not the only thing that can happen. I’ve had to deal with fire sprinklers busting over night clubs and flooding people out. I’ve had to deal with freak massive storms that were so powerful it literally ripped the doors off of the building and made the elevators bounce around in the shafts. I was part of a small team that stayed behind to make sure that Revel didn’t endure catastrophic damage during Superstorm Sandy. I once had a night where TWO elevators in a row got stuck in between floors with nearly THIRTY people inside. Being in between floors means the only way out is to be pulled out the top of the elevator by the fire department. That situation actually made world news.

You’d wonder; what do I do in that situation? I take the call, locate the physical location of the elevator, decide the fastest, most efficient path to getting the patrons out and if the fire department arrives I need to get them to the elevator control rooms and to the closest access point for the elevator. My speed and knowledge determines how long those people are stuck in there, and when people are having panic attacks and dehydrating every minute matters.

The same applies in the case of a fire; only it’s more time sensitive. Thankfully in my career I never had a major fire, mostly because I had every single one taken care of immediately before it had a chance to become something major. In each of those situations I was responsible for deciding if the casino, hotel or both evacuated. This sounds like an easy decision but it is not. If the casino is on fire, it could be a liability to evacuate people in a hotel because you’d be sending them TO a fire to the lower floors to leave a building. I was the point of contact for every department and person in the building and I decided what happened and executed the response to get the situation taken care of as fast as possible. When the fire department arrived, I worked with the battalion chief to get their men stationed where they needed to be as fast as possible and to brief them on every aspect of the situation. A casino is like a mini city. The fire department does not know the building and I need to let them know EVERYTHING. Where the fire sprinklers, detectors, valves and water connections are. An error is critical and I simply never made a mistake and became quite well known for that.

Unsurprisingly, that experience translated extremely well to headshot photography. Helping nervous clients doesn’t really faze me; the idea that it would is quite silly compared to what I was doing at 20 years old. I’m just realizing now that I built my studio to be EXTREMELY similar to a fire command center. There are set procedures (for me) to keep everything organized and running smoothly. Technology is state-of-the-art; I tether to a massive monitor, and I have an insane workstation on the other side of the studio. The workstation is even hooked up exactly like a fire alarm system terminal; it is plugged into a private server and backed up to an emergency UPS system. I also have the amenities to keep myself comfortable, exactly like at the casinos (a little workout area, small kitchen, water delivery, etc.). All shoots are logged, organized, and tracked through its own software. I even have a set schedule for myself that I do not stray from, and if I do, I see it as overtime. Clients walk into a space that feels very lived in, smooth, and easy-going because it’s quite literally an extension of what I’ve been doing my whole life.

Fire Command was a lifer job. Most people who got that job simply never quit. At every house I worked at, I was the youngest person to ever do it. AND I worked at FOUR different casinos; the most prominent casinos in town. I learned FOUR different systems, undoubtedly the ONLY person to ever work Fire Command at that many locations in that town. I learned the inner workings of four mini cities and the systems that ran them all in my early twenties. It was almost one casino every year in the beginning, an incredible mental workload. Just memorizing the hallways of a casino was quite a job, add to that memorizing the components of an entire alarm system- INSANE. It was an incredible mental workout for my brain, and it definitely primed me for learning photography and studio lighting. I’m thinking about my studio now, and it’s extremely complex compared to most. I have nearly 100 different backdrops and almost an infinite amount of lighting setups. My past career definitely made it so that that kind of complexity isn’t difficult; it’s comfortable and what I expect and want. Keeping a mental tab on everything in my studio is extremely easy; I know every backdrop and how it photographs at every angle and in every lighting condition. This is nothing compared to a state-of-the-art alarm system in one of the most complex buildings on earth.

Speaking of which, the alarm system at Revel was genuinely the most complex alarm system the alarm company had ever created. It was literally a custom job, something never done before. With that came massive issues, the opening of Revel was full of misfires and diagnosing problems. Almost EVERY night had some kind of emergency/false alarm. I had to be extremely vigilant because if there was a REAL issue and I just wrote it off, that was criminal negligence. I was under unbelievable pressure at 20 years old, and I thrived off of that. I taught myself to accept that and used it to build a little character.

By the time I was just 24, my resume was IMPRESSIVE. I could get hired anywhere I wanted to… and I did. I quite literally never interviewed for a job and didn’t get it. I never had to go beyond one interview. Towards the end of my career there, I actually didn’t have to apply anywhere; I was simply put into positions by my union. “Matt there’s a job here if you want it”.

Revel Casino was an extremely interesting part of my life. This was one of the BIGGEST casino projects ever conceived. The cost of construction was nearly 2.6 BILLION dollars (I personally think the number was WAY higher than this, as there were major accounting mistakes and they never really agreed upon what the actual construction cost was). I was one of the first employees hired there that wasn’t HR, a cafeteria worker, or an Executive. I was part of the “Safety” department and Revel Casino was the only casino in town that had something like that, so they hired people with a safety background. I was one of the ONLY ones who had Fire Command Experience, so at 20 years old, I was very responsible for creating all the procedures that the building probably runs by to this day. That was the 3rd building that I worked at at that point, and I saw two VERY different ways of doing things. I got to create my own procedures, EXACTLY how I wanted and how I saw things most effectiv,e and in a way that ensured our department had the utmost authority in the building. Looking back, I’m STILL shocked that at 20 years old I was able to project as much authority as I did in that building.

It was an incredible life lesson in so many ways. I was doing everything right on my end, and I quite literally got to build a job and my own rules. I LOVED it there, but the management of the building was just an epic distaster. After two years, the building declared bankruptcy TWICE and ultimately shut down. Even the night I shut down the casino was full of drama; fun fact, I was the person who made the announcement over the loudspeakers. I stayed AFTER the shutdown as well until I ultimately left. This was extremely disappointing to me, and it left me extremely annoyed that my life and future were so closely tied to others’ performance. Especially as I was doing stellar work.

At Revel Casino, we unionized our position, and I became a proud member of Local 68 Union of Operating Engineers. It was a grassroots effort that required 100% buy in- and we got that. ONE holdout would have messed it up, but we succeeded. Joining a labor union became a very transformative part of my life. I’m not sure many people on the West Coast understand the East Coast union tradesmen mentality, but it was quite simple and quite strong. You always show up on time, you always respect your union brothers, you take pride in your work, and you do the job right. Imagine that in LA.

Joining the union is what gave me the funds to start my photography career on the side, as my salary nearly doubled, and I began collecting a nice pension and annuity fund. My PTO also increased. I was working absolutely insane hours and rotating shifts, but on the side, I would go out and play around with my camera. I started posting on Instagram, and it didn’t take long for my profile to absolutely BLOW up. Around 2017-2019 there was a time where each post would get nearly 10,000 likes. It was pure insanity.

As my photography grew bigger, my hours and career ended up being more and more insufferable, and I was burning out MAJORLY. After Revel closed, I took a major step back in my career and started working random union odd jobs. The pay was the same because it was union, but I lost all my seniority and my hours were wild. In 2019, when I was 26 years old, I left the boardwalk of Atlantic City and headed west in my Camaro. It probably looked like something out of a movie. Moving to LA was NOT easy, I was just incredibly burnt out and unhealthy. It took almost a year just to feel somewhat normal again, and once I did, the pandemic hit.

The pandemic just didn’t phase me at all. It was actually an incredible opportunity in my eye. My life was built around chaos, instability, pressure and risk. That was truly nothing to me. I KNEW everyone else in LA had their tail between their legs at that time and had no idea what to do. June 2020 is when I got my first studio space. I simply saw the pandemic as a time where we had a LOT of free time, and I NEEDED a studio space to practice. At that time, to me there was no better currency than improvement, and as a big sports fan I knew that there was no better gateway to improvement than repetition. I used the time during the pandemic to shoot and learn as quickly and as rapidly as possible. I was already VERY good working with natural light, but working with studio lighting was a different beast. I didn’t want to just learn a good studio lighting setup and go- I wanted to learn studio lighting inside out. To use quite literally everything at my disposal and see how it ALL worked. In the first 5 years in a row at my studio I spent about $50,000 per year in JUST supplies. Lighting modifiers, cameras, lenses, you name it. I left no stone unturned. The goal of every shoot for years was to try something very slightly different.

This is how I ended up with the look I have now. I don’t even know how I’d explain it but it’s extremely versatile and it was a direct result of that effort. An easy example: just look at the theatrical and commercial portfolios. They’re drastically different, almost like a different photographer shot them. It’s because I utilize whatever I need to get the look that works. Very few photographers on earth can do that, and I’ve done that in a very short time period.

Currently, the studio is just simply a blast. Things run incredibly efficiently, I have the nicest clients on earth, Waylon runs the show and keeps things fun and the vibe is just great.

Since this is an about me, I’ll include some other random tidbits to finish it off. I absolutely love roadtrips and hiking. You’ll see tons of photos from those adventures on the instagram page @mattmarcheski. I’ve very into cooking and I go very hard with that. Clients never see this but I always have home cooked meals stuffed in the fridge. I’m a huge fan of country music- Tim McGraw, Dierks Bentley, Eric Church, Miranda Lambert and Keith Urban will always be favorites. And more recently Zach Bryan, Megan Moroney, Parker McCullum and Midland have been on the playlist. I’m also a big football fan, so when football season comes around I won’t stop yapping about that. And finally, as you can already tell I have the most amazing dog, Waylon. A 3 year old cavapoo who is probably smarter than all of us combined.

Matt