Artist Feature | Pei Ketron

Chances are good that you’ve encountered the beautiful and diverse work of Pei Ketron. Pei’s compassionate portrayal of people and places around the world lets her viewers experience being present in a culture that might not look like their own. Among Pei’s many gifts is the comfortable way that she immerses herself into the everyday experiences of life in the places she encounters. This genuine interest and enthusiasm for other people and cultures translate into her photographs. Through Pei’s lens, she enables us to see that “normal” is many different things; we feel drawn into and part of another way of life, rather than just being an outside observer of it.

Pei Ketron is a photographer, educator, speaker, and traveler based in San Francisco. Pei was born in Taiwan and raised on the Navajo Nation in Arizona as part of a biracial household. As a child, she spent summers enduring the monsoons of the tropics and the remainder of the year running barefoot in the deserts of the American southwest.

After a decade teaching special education in the public school system, Pei now teaches photography classes privately and through companies such as Creative Live, the Image Flow, and the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops. She also serves as a photographic mentor for travel experiences with companies such as Passion Passport and has spoken at events such as Adobe MAX, SXSW, Alt Summit, and Start Conference.

In addition to her experience with DSLR and medium-format film photography, Pei is also an accomplished mobile photographer. She has amassed a following of nearly a million users on Instagram and was selected to be a part of Apple’s Shot on iPhone 6 campaign.

Pei specializes in travel and commercial photography in San Francisco and worldwide. Clients include: Adobe, All Nippon Airways, American Express, Apple, Canadian Tourism Commission, Carnival Cruises, Google, General Assembly, Mitsukoshi Isetan Group, Mercedes, Michael Kors, Pfizer, Save the Children, Travel & Leisure Magazine, Turkish Airlines, and UNICEF.

For more of Pei’s work, you can visit her website and Instagram.

“I find the Rebecca Lily presets to be a refreshing addition to my editing process. I love the wide variety of presets and clear options for tweaking them. The black and white presets are probably my favorite because it’s clear that a lot of time and attention went into customizing them to all be unique when Rebecca could’ve so easily just made two black and white versions and called it a day. As with any other presets or filters I use on my images, I generally apply them and then adjust accordingly to suit each image.”