At first blush, there doesn’t appear to be a correlation between the arts of sound engineering and photography. As a talented and accomplished practitioner of both disciplines, Robert Feist would disagree with that assessment. “There are a lot of parallels between the two,” Feist says. “I think they play into each other, you know? Light is to photography what sound is to recording, and they both capture a moment in time, a sense of hearing and a sense of sight. We’re capturing them and then in a way that we can look at them again or listen to them again, we can kind of hold it in our hand and roll it around a little bit and examine it. And you know, that’s kind of magical.”
As a youth in his native Colorado, Feist was interested in music and photography. “I was lucky enough to go to a school that had a fantastic music program, a photography class and a darkroom,” he recalls. “My love for music led me to begin doing live sound, then I got a job as an assistant in The Recording Plant (not to be confused with the legendary Los Angeles Record Plant), a small eight-track Denver studio.”
That experience set the hook. Soon, he lit out for Los Angeles in his Ford Mustang with $300 in his pocket. “I just started knocking on doors and landed a job as an assistant at a studio called the Music Grinder. I started at the bottom and worked my way up.” The Music Grinder specialized in recording demos for musicians to use for booking gigs and trying for record deals. Big names such as disco diva Donna Summer would occasionally use the facility to flesh out songs and experiment with arrangements before finalizing recordings at more prestigious studios. Feist worked as producer, engineer or mixing engineer with many other musical luminaries in his career, including Stevie Nicks and Belinda Carlisle (including her hit “Heaven is a Place on Earth”). Ground-breaking virtuoso British fusion guitarist Allan Holdsworth became a close friend, and he worked with him for many years. The
engineer’s calm, relaxing demeanor allowed him to work well with sometimes temperamental artists.
Eventually, Feist opened his own studio, Ravenswork, in Venice, California, where he soon became a go-to guy for film, television and advertising work. “Clients included Toyota, Apple and Microsoft, and I always had one or two commercials on the Super Bowl.”
Throughout this period of his life, he was still pursuing his other passion, photography, pairing his images with thoughtful prose. “Ravenswork had a large Facebook following, and I started posting stories about my experiences in the studio,” he recalls. “Then I discovered that if I paired those pieces with photographs, it would give them more meaning and impact.” He eventually ran out of things to say about recording studios and began musing on topics such as the creative process, art and other subjects. “I kind of fell into this thing and I liked it.”
Following the sale of his studio, Feist moved to Monterey around 2017. Enamored of and inspired by the peninsula, he took up photography again in a more serious manner. “I realized what made shooting here so satisfying,” he says. “In addition to this area’s natural beauty, the marine layer constantly coming in and out and the fragmented clouds that we have dampen the sun and diffuse the light. The only place I’ve seen light like that is Florence, where the light has inspired artists for centuries.” He published a book of images paired with prose, “Fragments of Light: A Medley of Vision & Verse” in 2025. Beautifully rendered, the book is a maturation of that technique he developed for those Facebook posts earlier. Stunning images are accompanied by thoughtful and stirring prose, the subjects of which are derived from many seemingly stream of consciousness sources. “Sometimes, inspiration for the stories comes from random encounters. I was on a bike ride in Pacific Grove one day and saw a thin, gaunt older man walking along, gazing over the bay. His clothes were literally hanging off him. He had a huge smile on his face, his eyes all alive and sparkling. And I just knew that, you know, for him, life was short, and he didn’t have time anymore to worry about the world’s problems. He was just immersed in the pure joy of being alive.”
“When I released the book, it was accompanied by an exhibition of the photos, held at Temple Gallery in Sand City. The show was part of Carmel’s Center for Photographic Arts’ ‘PhotoCarmel: A Celebration of Photography on the Central Coast.’ That was a great honor.”
Robert Feist also exudes that joy the man on the beach had. He’s led a remarkable life so far in the recording industry and he’s excited to be on this new creative path.
For more information on Robert Feist, his work and his book, visit www.robertfeist.com.