Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series of profiles on UNM alumnus who have started their own businesses. Follow the Daily Lobo for more articles in this series.
It’d be easy to underestimate Caleb Cobos if you ran into him at a coffee shop or in a Fortnite server. But from the moment he begins to speak, the passion and intellect this University of New Mexico graduate possess becomes abundantly clear.
Cobos is the 22-year-old owner and founder of Caleb Cobos Photography — his company specializes in the multifaceted challenge of wedding photography and portraits. By late June, he had shot or booked 44 weddings for 2018, which in the wedding picture business, is a lot.
To quantify Cobos as just a photographer would miss his more impressive ability to understand business.
“There’s a lot of photographers who are better than I am, but they don’t know how to run a business,” Cabos said.
Cobos graduated from Eldorado High School in 2014. It was at EHS that Cobos found a job with Kim Jew Photography.
“There was a double nose on each side of my face,” Cobos said referring to pictures of him taken at Eldorado.
Cobos then went to the Kim Jew studio, had new pictures taken, and struck up a conversation with a photographer who eventually hired him.
At Kim Jew, Cobos said he learned the technical side of photography, especially the use of screens, lights and the sun while taking sports-team pictures.
Cobos went from Eldorado to UNM, and shortly thereafter left Kim Jew after almost 3 years. He began his time at UNM studying engineering but found the program unsatisfying. He said it was like “working on a light bulb, knowing it will be in this building, but only ever working on that one light bulb.”
For the better part of his fourth and final year at UNM, Cobos traveled to Europe, only returning to New Mexico briefly to shoot a wedding in Durango, before jetting back to Greece. But more than anywhere, Caleb said he was most impressed with Tokyo, Japan.
He noticed that like everywhere in Europe, the people he met in Japan had their own way of doing things, but were very relaxed when it came to the ways others did things. That, and how many people worked hard during the day, “drank all night and did it all again the next day.”
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Cobos graduated from Robert O. Anderson School of Management in the Spring of 2018 with his degree in Management of Information Services.
Being out of UNM, he said the implementation of mandatory boarding requirements was a step in the right direction towards keeping people around campus.
“People have interactions more,” he said. “Before, people go to class and just leave. It's hard to get people who live at home to come and do stuff.”
Now that Cobos has graduated, he said he really wasn’t thinking about what was next. He said it was important to him to continue growing his photography business, but he was also looking to break into the retail space, specifically online retail.
He mentioned also keeping his eye on real estate and that by the time he was 30, he would like to own a couple rental properties. He said he really wanted to do something with impact.
On the way out, he gave advice to students like him to “just do it, but intelligently do it.” He said “you can wait around planning forever, but you're never going to get anything done. You’re going to learn along the way.”
Justin Garcia is a freelance reporter with the Daily Lobo. He can be contacted by email at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @Just516garc.
