60 PPMAG.COM
In 2002, after 22 years working as a photographer and graph-
ic designer, Erich Caparas walked away. “I was burned out,” he
says of his career in the commercial niche. He craved something
different, so he moved to Florida to become, of all things, a real
estate broker.
For nine years, Caparas built his brokerage business. But pho-
tography wasn’t done with him yet. In 2011, he picked it up again
as a hobby. “When I quit in 2002, it was the beginning of digi-
tal photography,” he says. “Even though I was doing digital from
1990 to 2002, I was doing film. We were scanning film with a
scanner and putting it into digital media. I was not doing DSLR.”
When he returned to photography in 2012, he invested in a digital
camera for the first time—a Nikon D3. And instead of returning
to his commercial roots, he delved into artistic portraiture, some-
thing he’d dabbled in previously.
Reinvigorated by his new work, he began posting his portraits