Aaron Talks Life & Photography with Mama Nace!

Aaron Talks Life & Photography with Mama Nace!

In this interview-style episode, Aaron sits down with his mom to trace how he went from an industrial design student to the founder of PHLEARN, covering the family’s move from Massachusetts to Hawaii, his year-long Flickr 365 self-portrait project, and what he now believes actually makes a photograph great.

Meet Mama Nace

Aaron’s mom was born and raised in Massachusetts, later moved to California, and has worked as a dental hygienist for 45 years while raising three children, alongside hobbies like sewing, quilting, and baking.

From Massachusetts to Hawaii: A Family Origin Story

The family’s move to Hawaii traces back to a deal she made with Aaron’s dad: she agreed to move only if he married her, which he did, and the family settled there and raised three children.

From Industrial Design to Photography

Aaron originally studied industrial design in school, focused on product design rather than photography, with one standout school project involving building a car out of wood with a close friend. For a long time, both Aaron and his family assumed he was headed toward a career as an automotive or furniture designer rather than a photographer.

A Trip to South America Changes Everything

Photography entered the picture almost by accident, on a trip to South America taken with a simple point-and-shoot camera after graduating design school. The photos he brought back struck the family enough that many were blown up and framed, since they captured more than just scenic shots of mountains, they captured the actual feeling and flavor of the places and people he photographed.

Photographing People and Telling Stories

Among all of his early photography, the images of people stood out the most, and Aaron describes photographing people as genuinely difficult precisely because the goal isn’t just a likeness, it’s trying to understand and reveal something of that person’s actual personality through a single photograph. That interest in people and personality is also where his love of conceptual, story-driven photography originated.

The Flickr 365 Project That Started It All

A major turning point was Aaron’s Flickr 365 project, a self-portrait taken and edited every single day for an entire year while living back at home. Some of the most memorable results came from purely playful ideas, like sitting on the couch and compositing in a gorilla, or a panda, to make it look like they were hanging out together. Since there was no career or reputation riding on any individual day’s image at that point, an idea that didn’t work simply got dropped with zero consequences, which made it a genuinely low-pressure space to experiment freely and think of something different every single day.

Learning Photoshop by Necessity

The Flickr 365 project is also where a huge amount of practical Photoshop skill developed almost by accident: turning a genuinely fun idea, like appearing to sit next to a gorilla, into a believably realistic composited image forced him to figure out compositing techniques on the fly, purely in service of making a specific daily idea work.

Following Ideas Until They’re Done

A recurring pattern in Aaron’s personality, according to his mom, is picking up an idea or hobby, running with it intensely, and then dropping it completely once it’s fully explored, from mounting an extensive butterfly collection to briefly running a food blog together with her, called Come Eat, where she cooked and he photographed the results (photographing the food, it turns out, was consistently harder than making it). Photography and Photoshop are the rare interests that have stuck around through all of it for years, likely because photography is an art form flexible enough to plug into whatever else he happens to be interested in at any given time, whether that’s food, kombucha and fermented foods, or anything else that comes along.

What Makes a Great Photograph

Asked directly what makes a photograph genuinely great, Aaron’s answer centers on story above everything else: a photograph that makes a viewer want to know more, to understand the people or situation behind it, sticks with him far more than a technically competent but ultimately unremarkable image. Beautiful lighting, composition, and color all matter too, but they come after story, not before it.

A Design-School Eye for Aesthetics

Aaron traces some of this way of seeing back to his design school training, where studying aesthetics, how things look and feel, was a core part of the curriculum, and to an early habit of studying photographs he admired closely enough to work out how they were lit and what exactly made them effective, a practice that shaped his current perspective on photography considerably.

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Keep Building Your Photoshop Skills

The compositing skills Aaron first taught himself out of necessity during his Flickr 365 project are the same foundational Photoshop skills PHLEARN continues to teach today, available through the full tutorial library and subscription platform.

Final Thoughts

What comes through clearest in this conversation is that Aaron’s path to photography was never a straight line: an industrial design background, a spontaneous trip to South America, and a full year of daily, low-stakes self-portrait experiments all fed into the storytelling-first approach to photography and Photoshop that eventually became PHLEARN. As his mom points out, it’s one of the few interests that never got dropped, and the story-first philosophy it produced still shapes how he evaluates a photograph today.

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