Cait Oppermann
This conversation got me fired up. Cait Oppermann is a photographer and creative director in Brooklyn who runs her own studio, FLOWERS, and she's spent her whole career quietly refusing the standard playbook.
Why Your Process Doesn't Have to Look Like Anyone Else's
Cait moved to New York a week after turning eighteen, off a friendship she'd made on early Vimeo, and talked her way into the early days of tech and media in the city. She studied photography at Pratt, came up through editorial and commercial work, and eventually left her agent to build her own thing. Along the way she figured out that her best work only happens when she's having fun, that a portfolio is only as strong as its weakest image, and that her brain works best with a stack of index cards instead of another app she'll never open again.
We talk about inventing your own way of working, the pricing tool she built for photographers (BaseRate) because no one else would, why she prints everything and is “allergic to learning from a screen,” and how AI is letting creatives build the bespoke tools they used to need a whole team for. It's a conversation about owning your time, trusting your own process, and just making the thing exist.
Cait Oppermann is a photographer and creative director based in Brooklyn and the founder of FLOWERS, a creative studio and production company. She published her first monograph in 2025 after a six-year project and built BaseRate, a pricing toolkit for photographers. Her work spans editorial and global commercial campaigns.