Meet CJ and Leah Rivera | Photographer and Videographer

We had the good fortune of connecting with CJ and Leah Rivera and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi CJ and Leah, we’d love to hear about how you approach risk and risk-taking
Going all in on AIRN Media was a huge risk in our lives and our career path. Both CJ and Leah are Registered Nurses by background, however, they both got injured and sick on the job. Leah was diagnosed with a chronic pain condition that once left her on 20+ medications, bedrest and bleeding from random organs. After multiple doctors visits and flying to Alabama for further treatments, we came to the conclusion it was best for Leah’s health to step down from nursing and stay home with our son. CJ, just a few short months after Leah’s healing journey, was attacked by a patient that left him on 3 years of disability while he recovered from 2 spinal surgeries.

It was during both of our healing journey that we found our passion and love for photography and videography. We realized in our moments of sickness, injuries and recovery, that life is way too short and capturing every moment of joy, love and happiness despite the ups and downs of life truly meant a lot to us.

As a joint decision within our marriage and family, Leah decided to take the biggest risk of her life to resign from nursing in 2019 and go all in with AIRN Media. After all, AIRN stands for “All In Right Now” so we feel that taking a risk and leap of faith towards our dreams and goals plays a huge role in our family business. Without taking that risk of leaving behind the only career she knew, we wouldn’t be where we are today with our photography and videography business. With hard work and dedication, it is our hope and goal for CJ to work with AIRN Media full time within the next couple of years as well.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
AIRN Media is a photography and videography company that was founded by a husband and wife duo, CJ and Leah. We learned photography at first as a hobby to help us with our mental health while we healed from our individual health struggles. However, as we practiced, friends and family continued to ask us to capture their special moments, ranging from family portraits to birthday parties and more.

Our first fully paid shoot was a family who was planning a trip to Disneyland and hired us to capture their Disney memories together. After that shoot, we sat in front of the fireplace of the Grand Californian Hotel to edit their photos and thought to ourselves, “Wow, we really could make this into something.” From then on, we accepted family portrait shoots and some of those families still book with us today, years later!

Our photography style revolves around fashion inspired lighting and photojournalism to create bright, vibrant and magical portraitures. When learning photography, we knew we didn’t want to be limited by certain lighting conditions or only shoot during the one hour of golden hour. So in order to stand out from our peers, CJ learned how to manipulate light in certain ways or even learned to create new light depending on the environment. This allowed us to be more creative with what we capture and to shoot at any time of the day. Our style continues to evolve over the years, especially when we receive input and feedback from our past and current clients. When new clients come to us with their inspiration photos, we always find a way to add our “AIRN Media” twist to it.

Our videography style revolves around story telling. We understand that various trends come and go as time goes by. However, we want to focus on creating films that are timeless and evoke emotions, such as a hearty laugh and tears of joy through all the feel good moments of your event or wedding. All our films, from milestone parties to extravagant weddings, are very different from each other because we work with every client to make their final film unique to them and their life or love story. We don’t want our films to become predictable and most especially, we don’t want our clients to feel like their film looks very similar to the next bride or the client before them. However, the one thing all our films have in common is the story telling aspect of the films that we create.

We’ve learned so many lessons along the way, but the biggest lesson of all is communication and organization. It’s not easy building a business with your spouse. Not only do you live together, but you work together as well. CJ works better in one way and Leah thrives better in other ways so learning to communicate as husband and wife and as business partners has been our saving grace for both our marriage and family business. We also learned to set boundaries for our work. When you do what you love for your career, it’s so easy to feel like you’re “working all the time” because you love it THAT much. However, we’ve learned to put everything on a schedule so that we do make time for our kids, for each other and for rest. These changes have not only improved our relationships as a family, but we actually have booked more clients than ever when we operate from a state of peace and love rather than a constant state of hustle and grind. We grew our business fairly quickly in a short time span through word of mouth referrals. This quick growth for AIRN Media allowed us to learn these lessons early in our business, which also translated in learning about the various pressures that come with capturing and filming various events and weddings.

We want the world to know through AIRN Media that you can go ALL IN your dreams RIGHT NOW! Don’t wait for the perfect time to start. There will never be a perfect time because success comes from just starting and going for it. It can look and feel messy in the beginning, but our greatest lessons learned and victories we experienced were during the process and journey of building our business. So don’t wait. Go ALL IN RIGHT NOW just like what we strive to do every day with AIRN Media!

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Living in the LA area, there is so much to explore and capture memories in. If our best friend came to visit for a week, this would be our itinerary:

Monday to Tuesday: We would drive out to Big Bear to stay at one of our friend’s cabins and explore the mountains and the lake during an overnight stay. We would take our best friend to Tropicali, one of our favorite restaurants at Big Bear Village. Then we would drive back down into the city.

Wednesday: We then would take our friend to El Matador Beach for a hike down to view the rock formations. After spending the morning at the beach, we could have lunch and wine Malibu Wine Hikes for picturesque vineyard views. We then can end the day at Santa Monica Pier to play games, go on some rides and take sunset photos with the pier.

Thursday: We draw a lot of photography our inspiration from artwork so on this day we can take our best friend to a museum in Downtown LA, called The Broad. We love looking at various perspectives and different mediums of art and we can end that adventure by taking a photo in the Infinity Room. We then can take our friend to eat at Chubby Cattle, one of our favorite Japanese BBQ places. We then can end the night at Griffith Observatory for sunset views and photos of the entire city of Los Angeles.

Friday to Saturday: The weekends are quite busy in the heart of LA, so for these 2 days, we’ll take our best friend to our main hometown of Santa Clarita. Our town is more family friendly and less hustle bustle compared to the city. We would take our friend to Board and Brush Santa Clarita for a fun arts and crafts night. On that street of Hart and Main, there are also plenty of restaurants to eat and try. We could also take our friend to the many bike trails of SCV, with one of them passing by a popular bridge site that many families here love for their photoshoots. We can end the weekend feeding the ducks at Bridgeport while eating dinner at one of the restaurants in that plaza and have coffee at Makenna’s Coffee.

Sunday: On their last day, we would invite them to the beautiful monastery and mission in Santa Barbara and end our eventful weekend with a spa day, just like how we end our month of events and weddings!

The beauty of living in LA is that an hour to 2 hours in every direction is a new environment, view, and location to explore. We have snow and mountains a couple hours one way and then we have beautiful ocean views a couple hours the other way. No matter where we take our best friend around LA, there are always picture perfect places we can find to capture their one week adventure with us!

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
First and foremost, we would love to dedicate our shoutout and current success to God. We wouldn’t have surpassed any of the trials that life handed us if it wasn’t for having a strong relationship and trust in Him that His plans are greater than ours.

Secondly, we would love to also thank our parents for instilling a “never give up and work hard” mentality and attitude about life so that we could get to this point in our lives and business. Especially, Leah’s parents have played a huge role in taking care of our kids while we capture various events and weddings so we could not have built this business without them.

On a professional level, we attribute a lot of our success and mentorship from our business coach Dr. Lori Baker-Schena. Before working with her, we were booking maybe one shoot a month, if that. After meeting her and investing our time in our monthly meetings, she has helped us in the growth of our business. We are now able to book back to back shoots, events and even weddings almost every weekend. Sometimes, we book 3 or more events/shoots in a day, which shows the amazing growth that Dr. Lori has helped us achieve in such a short timespan.

Lastly, we would love to thank all of our family, friends and clients who have supported us since the beginning. Starting a business when everyone knows that we were originally nurses was not easy. Most people gave us a certain look of, “You’re really going to give up your stable career of nursing to take photos?” We’ve had so many internal conflicts about this as we built AIRN Media, but the family and friends who did believe in us and have stood by us and even continue to book their shoots and events with us is enough motivation and encouragement to keep going! So thank you ALL!

Website: www.airnmedia.com

Instagram: @airn.media

Youtube: https://bit.ly/AIRNMediaYouTube

Other: You can also find us on Google Reviews. If you search “AIRN Media reviews” on Google, you’ll be able to see what our past clients had to say about working with us.

Image Credits
All photos were taken by us, AIRN Media.