Filler's long and winding road leads to pictures

David Filler is a master storyteller, but it's photographs, not prose that allow him to capture the snippets of people's lives.

Finding life's special moments and moods is what Filler does for a living as the owner of Stillwater Photography. It's hard to gauge, though, at what point his profession becomes his passion.

Photography is, quite simply, his life. It's also his second career.

Filler spent 20 years in the oil business before he veered into photography as a full-time profession. As a geophysical project manager, he worked in the seismic end of the oil industry, measuring and recording vibrations within the earth to determine the feasibility of drilling for oil.

"Seismic exploration did more than anything to prevent oil development here because it proved it was economically unfeasible," he said.

Filler's seismic work took him all over the world, to places such as Burma, Turkey, Yemen, Venezuela, Wyoming, North Dakota's Williston Basin and even a stint in the Kalispell area during the early 1980s.

"The whole time I was traveling, I was taking a lot of pictures," he said.

Back in Illinois, where Filler spent a "pretty unremarkable" childhood, a college art teacher had handed him a camera and said "try this."

He quickly discovered a natural affinity for photography, and for years, work in foreign countries provided a wealth of subject matter for his photographs.

When Filler and his wife Karie contemplated places where they could settle down and raise a family, he kept mentioning Kalispell. He'd fallen in love with the Flathead Valley during his time here in the early '80s, and wanted to return.

After a year and a half in Yemen, Filler moved his family to Kalispell in 1993, and continued working for a time for a Calgary-based seismic firm. The job involved moving to Denver in mid-1996, but the day he arrived there, his boss said he'd moved to the wrong city and should head for Houston instead. He declined the transfer to Texas, and the Fillers finished out the school year in Denver before returning once again to Kalispell.

Filler managed the firm's northern U.S. division for a couple of years from an office in Whitefish.

The opportunity to buy Lacy's Gallery, a longtime Whitefish business operated for years by the renowned Marion Lacy, came in 1999 when he bought the business from then-owner Ralph Burtsfield.

"Marion Lacy had a great reputation, and we never felt it was right to take Lacy's out of Whitefish," Filler said. "We wanted to make a clean break to start building our own reputation."

Three years ago, to create his own identity, Filler moved the studio to a scenic spot near Stillwater River bridge on U.S. 93 North, and Stillwater Photography was born. Filler, his wife and their three children, Lindsay, 17, Keith, 14, and Abbey 11, live next door to the studio.

One of Filler's civic duties, inherited from Marion Lacy, is to provide all of the photography for the Whitefish Winter Carnival at no charge. He takes portraits of the royalty and photographs all of the events, from the raucous Merry Maker to the carnival parade. The job has expanded to include taking photographs of all the participants of the annual Penguin Plunge that benefits Special Olympics.

Filler's community service runs the gamut. He provides the photographs and graphic layout for posters that area sports teams use as keepsakes and fund-raisers.

"Those kids are role models," he said. "It's a positive way to support them."

Whitefish Theatre Co. benefits as well from Filler's community service. He shoots photos of all the theater's major projections.

The Moose on the Loose fund-raiser a few years ago in Whitefish was another of Filler's service projects.

"I was overseas for a long time, and you're always a tourist," he said. "As a small business, we have a limited amount we can do, but we want to be part of the community here. "

The bulk of Stillwater Photography's business is senior portraits, family portraits, weddings and real-estate business portraits.

"For us, one of the best things is seeing your work on someone's refrigerator or taped to the computer monitor," he said.

Filler had no idea what to expect when he bought the business, but he's been pleasantly surprised how it's grown, largely by word of mouth. The only down side is the seasonal nature of photography - senior portraits crunched into the late summer and early fall and the flurry of summer weddings.

Photographing an event is much more than snapping pictures.

"There's a lot of planning," Filler said. "By the time a wedding takes place, we know everything, the conditions, the setting, what they want photographed. The next day we start dealing with all the images, editing and getting proofs out. A wedding is a week's worth of work."

Thoroughness is essential, he noted.

"We follow it all the way through, so they'll have a book they'll be proud of," he said.

Filler's wife is an integral part of the business, assisting at weddings and helping clients select the best shots from dozens and dozens of digital images. The couple met at the Denver seismic firm where they both worked in the early 1980s. They married in 1985.

Filler has a drawer full of awards, but points out only the "most important ones." He's won two Fuji Masterpiece national awards.

The Montana Professional Photographers Association also has taken note of Filler's work the past few years. He's been named to the association's Top 10 photographers for three of the last four years. Last year Stillwater Photography had the first-place wedding album and first-place group portrait in the state association's annual competition.

Filler's winning group portrait, "Desert Diamonds," portrays three Arab sisters in burka garments. It came about when Filler met one of the sisters, learned she and her siblings had grown up in Saudi Arabia, and then began speaking Arabic to her. Through his world travels, Filler learned to speak not only Arabic but also Turkish and Spanish.

As a portrait photographer, Filler takes on each assignment with the same mission: to tell someone's story.

"I figure out what's important to them, and then tell a story about how I perceive them," he explained. "If they let their guard down and can be themselves, I can capture a small piece of their story."

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com