Sun Your Buns was never meant to be a thing. It became a thing anyway.
The Accidental Community Project
I've been involved with Creative Mornings for a while now, and what I love about that community is that it takes the implicit parts of creative life — the isolation, the hunger to connect with people who actually get it, and makes them explicit. It says: yes, you need this. Here's a room. Come in.
Sun Your Buns was that same instinct applied to a park on a Sunday. No speaker. No deck. No takeaways. Just a loose group of creatives and professionals and interesting people showing up to sit in the sun and see what happened.
What happened was: people actually talked. Not the version of talking where everyone is angling toward something. The version where you forget to check your phone because the conversation got real.
What This Taught Me About Building Community
Low stakes is the point. The picnic worked because there was nothing to perform. No panel, no pitch, no pressure to be the most interesting person in the room. Remove that pressure and real connection becomes possible.
I've been to a lot of events designed for networking. I've built lasting relationships at almost none of them. The connections that actually changed things for me were messier and more informal. A shared meal. A long walk. A blanket in the park with no agenda.
Community is less about the event and more about the repetition. Sun Your Buns worked because we kept doing it. People started expecting it. Newcomers brought friends. It became a rhythm, and rhythm is what turns a gathering into something that actually lasts.
What This Has to Do with Anything Else I Do
I think about this when brands ask me about building community around their work. Because they usually want to start with the architecture, the platform, the programming, the strategy, and skip the part where you just show up and let people be human together.
The architecture matters eventually. But first you need the blanket.
If you're a brand or creative organization thinking about what community actually looks like, I'd love to talk. Not about campaigns. About what it means to build something people genuinely want to be part of.
FAQ
What is Sun Your Buns? An informal recurring park picnic for creatives in New York City, connected to the Creative Mornings community. No agenda, no speakers, just a consistent, low-pressure space for people to connect.
What is Creative Mornings? A global breakfast lecture series for creative communities, with chapters in cities worldwide. Built around monthly themed talks and a commitment to making creative culture more accessible.
How can brands build authentic community? Start with consistency and low stakes. The most durable communities form around repeated, informal touchpoints — not one-time events. Give people a reason to keep coming back, and make it easy to just show up.
If you're a brand looking for a photographer who brings that same obsessive attention to your campaign, or just want to see what two decades of loving this craft looks like in practice, take a look at my portfolio or reach out directly.
Read more
/ How I Became a Commercial Photographer: From a Kodak Disposable to Shooting Global Brands
/ Sun Your Buns: What a Park Picnic Club Taught Me About Community
/ Recreating the Home Office: On-Location Product Photography for Logitech in Manhattan
/ Book Launch Photography and Corporate Headshots for Penguin Random House
/ How a TikTok Search Led to a Full Brand Shoot with Flewd Stresscare
/ Lifestyle Photography for Pacific Foods at People Inc.'s World Trade Center Office
/ On Location with Rifle Paper Co.: Photographing Travel Products in Manhattan
/ Multi-Week Shoots for Thymes and Capri Blue: Candles, Models, and Full Production
/ On Living in New York and Meeting the Most Interesting People
/ On Location with Hasbro: Photographing Play-Doh and Toys with Kids and a Video Team
/ Inside a L'Oreal Matrix Hair Shoot: Afters, Affidavits, and What It Takes
/ Shooting Dairy Queen's Social Campaign at K2 Studios: Mint Chip, Snowdrift, and Valentine's Day
/ The Outspoken Artist Podcast: What We Actually Talked About
/ Building Kaplan's Brand Asset Library: Employee Photography in Brooklyn and Fort Lauderdale
/ How TikTok Changed the Way Brands Find Photographers
/ On Location with Bissell: Lifestyle, Video, and UGC Photography for Pet Cleaning Products
/ Sparkling and Set-Styled: Social Content and GIF Photography for Waterloo Sparkling Water
/ What It Actually Takes to Run a Full Production Brand Shoot
/ On-Location Headshots for the Center for Reproductive Rights: Powerful, Real, and Human
/ On Being a Commercial Artist Who Keeps Thinking About Moving to the Woods
/ What Becoming President of ASMP New York Actually Means
/ Behind the Lens: Photographing Assouline's Archive Library in Manhattan
/ Long-Term Brand Photography for Caribou Coffee: Lifestyle, Social, and In-Store Campaigns
/ Speaking at Index Space: Creative Showcase V5
External
Sigma / Travel the Alps with SIGMA’s Lightweight 18-50mm & 10-18mm Zoom Lenses
Sigma / Behind the Scenes on a Fashion Shoot with the Sigma BF
Sigma / Why I Choose SIGMA Zoom Lenses for Studio Photography
Sigma / A Fresh Look at Berlin Through the Sigma 12mm F1.4 DC Contemporary Lens