Mike Roemer is a commercial and editorial photographer based in Green Bay, Wisconsin. His professional career started with a ten-year stint as a newspaper photographer in South Dakota which involved meeting tight deadlines, adapting to curve balls and making the famous and the not-so-famous comfortable in front of his lens.
Roemer returned to Green Bay in the mid-1990s to start his own business, and now regularly travels around the U.S. and internationally for his clients. He enjoys the creative challenge of combining unusual angles, lighting and lens options to produce the perfect commercial image.
He has won first place awards in Pictures of the Year International, National Press Photographers Best of Photojournalism and National Headliners, along with being a three-time winner in the Pro Football Hall of Fame photo contest.
“When I’m not behind the camera you can find me spending time with my wife and our photogenic dog Chica. I also love boiling sap from the trees in our backyard forest over a wood fire into amazing maple syrup or smoking a perfect rack of ribs while enjoying a properly served German pilsner with friends and family,” he says.
Roemer is a member of PhotoShelter, the leader in portfolio websites, photo sales, marketing, and archiving tools for photographers.
How did your interest in photography develop?
I have worked in the photography business since childhood, first tagging along during my father's long newspaper photography career, before ever carrying my own camera gear. My interest grew as I watched the fascinating process of my dad making black and white images appear while shaking trays of chemicals under the red lights in a developing room. My professional career started with a ten-year stint as a newspaper photographer..
What do you enjoy the most in photography?
I love the variety of projects I get to work on, from working with healthcare organizations and on Foundations annual reports, to high-energy casino and gaming shoots, industrial projects at locations as diverse as cheese manufacturers and steel plants, to corporate culture assignments and documenting the Green Bay Packers.
You specialized in Industrial, Agriculture and Healthcare photography - how did you get introduced to each of them?
Early on in my commercial photography career I did a lot of healthcare work through the contacts I had made in my newspapers days. Slowly through contacts I made in the healthcare ad agency world, I started picking up industrial work and loved that since it was real people in real situations. I love the challenge of make some not so sexy industrial things look sexy. I got married ten years ago to a wonderful woman with strong agricultural roots from growing up on a dairy farm, and that exposed me to the wonderful day-to-day life of agriculture, which I’ve been trying to document.
