Oswaldo Cepeda is a Mexican-American photographer known for his surreal, emotionally driven portraits. Raised in Wisconsin, he developed a signature style using abstract lighting to turn ordinary scenes into poetic expressions of human feeling.

My specialty is portrait photography and what really drew me to my current style was working within the limitations I had when I first started. I didn’t have access to expensive lighting equipment so I just used normal everyday light bulbs to shape my lighting and because light bulbs are so dim I had to be very precise with how I lit my subjects. This extra attention to detail made me quickly learn how to shape light in a way that really highlighted my subjects while keeping a dark and moody look to the overall photo and even when I had access to better equipment I stayed true to my style because I just loved the way it looked.

If I could go back and do something differently I would definitely document my process more. There's a lot of photoshoots that I don’t have any behind the scenes for and parts of my life I wish I would have documented. Documenting every aspect of your life and your art creation is a great way to look back and see your own progress.

I was inspired to start my journey when I realized I wanted to become a photographer during quarantine. I knew to make it a reality, I needed eyes on my work. I didn’t have money for ads, so I used social media and fell in love with sharing my art.

My proudest moment as a creator was when I hit 24k followers as that is the amount of people that live in my small town. This was validating to me because no one believed in me when I first started and to know there was an entire town worth of people that enjoyed my artwork enough to follow me really made me feel proud and feel like I was doing something right.

I like to capture the feeling I get when listening to music in my photography. When I find a song I really like I can picture colors and compositions and that’s what I use as the base of my photoshoots for all of my personal work.