#71 Chris Rippy | He Came Home From a Snoop Dogg Tour and Couldn’t Pay Rent
Chris Rippy got booked to shoot the opening act on a Snoop Dogg tour. Three hours later, Snoop’s own management called and booked him too. He’d never been double-booked before. He’d never shot in an arena before, either.
The Camera His Parents Almost Regretted
Chris’s parents bought him a Canon Rebel T5 for Christmas his freshman year at Western Kentucky University. He’d been hinting at them for a camera for about a year, mostly because he liked shooting sunsets.
“It wasn’t cool then to go out and shoot a high quality video and post it and birds flying in the background,” he says.
His parents figured he could at least take some pictures on campus. Instead, he started shooting anything he could point the camera at. He didn’t know concert photography was a job people got hired for directly. He assumed touring work ran through TV production. He shot college football at Western Kentucky. He shot small artists for free, just to get reps in and see what the work actually felt like, with no real plan for turning it into a career.
Then he sent a cold DM to Chase Matthew.
A DM to Chase Matthew
Chase Matthew was blowing up on TikTok off “County Line” when Chris messaged him on Instagram. Less than 24 hours later, Chase’s videographer had just quit, and Chase asked if Chris could be ready to leave by midnight.
Chris dropped everything, left college the following week, moved in with Chase, and spent the next year and a half living and touring with him, filming his day-to-day life on the road.
“I could be in the bathroom brushing my teeth and he’d come, hey, let’s record this video. That was my first opportunity.”
He shot 15 hours a day, edited for five, slept for a couple, and did it again. He wasn’t thinking about the arrangement. He wanted the opportunity more than he wanted rest.
Two Tours in Two Months
By 2021, Chris was meeting artists and managers through Chase’s network and through going out around Nashville. He was already turning down work because he was booked filming Chase full time. Eventually he left. Two days later he was on a bus with Cole Swindell for a four-week run, right as “Heads Carolina” hit number one. Two months after that, he got a call to shoot the opening act on a Snoop Dogg tour: Louisiana artist Justin Champagne, who Chris had met five months earlier while touring with Chase. Three hours after he was booked for Justin’s set, Snoop’s management called. They wanted him to shoot Snoop too.
“I might as well have been rich. I wasn’t, but I might as well have been.”
Backstage With Snoop
It was Chris’s first time shooting in an arena. Up to that point he’d shot mud-covered festivals and small clubs. Walking backstage before the show, he pushed through a set of double doors and Snoop Dogg walked past him.
“He’s like, thanks, dog, and gave me knucks. I was like, I’m supposed to be here.”
It wasn’t the most dramatic moment of the tour, but it’s the one that stuck. Chris says it told him he was on the right track, even without steady income and without knowing if the freelance work would keep coming once the tour ended.
Learning Not to Get in the Way
His biggest worry on that tour wasn’t the footage. It was staying out of the show itself. He didn’t know the full operation yet: where the cords ran, where the jumbotron camera needed a clear sightline, what he could do compared to the crew who’d worked with the artist for years. His approach to shooting live now is to test boundaries carefully rather than assume access.
“If I have the intuition, like, I’m going to run out on stage and get a shot right here, I’ll just test it. If it’s music, the tour manager is going to let you know.”
On the Darius Rucker tour this summer, a tour manager told him on the first night to stay off a certain part of the stage. By the end of the run, after weeks of building trust, the same tour manager waved him through to get a shot he wanted. Chris says that trust gets earned tour by tour. Hired for one gig with no relationship built, the answer is always no.
The Rent Money Problem
Coming home from the Snoop Dogg tour, Chris had no retainer clients and no idea what one was. Big-label paychecks took time to clear, and he had nothing lined up to bridge the gap. He had to ask his dad for rent money.
“I didn’t have any systems in place. Before that I’d Google, what is a retainer client, and how do I get one.”
He’d spent years building the creative and technical side of the job without touching the business side. He eventually set up an LLC on the advice that operating under his own name could create liability down the road. Before that, for a couple of years, he filed as a sole proprietor and hoped for the best. He says the gap cost him time and stress he didn’t need to carry.
Building a Brand Instead of Hiding Behind the Camera
For years Chris only posted the finished, polished work: the recap videos, the highlight reels. He never posted himself. That changed when he started sharing behind-the-scenes footage of what the job actually looks like. Other videographers and photographers started following him and asking questions. Clients started booking him because they could put a face to the name before bringing him on set.
He expected the opposite. He worried that showing his own process publicly would make clients feel less special, or make them think the work was easier than it was. Instead, artists and managers started reaching out because they’d seen him operate before they ever got on a call with him. Putting a personality behind the camera turned into more bookings, not fewer.
“I thought everybody knew that. Fourteen million people didn’t.”
AI as a Tool, Not a Threat
Chris uses AI daily, but narrowly, for problems he can’t solve any other way on-site. Shooting a client’s first pitch at a Nashville Sounds game, a stadium camera operator in a bright blue shirt stepped into his frame. He removed the camera operator with an AI editing tool rather than reshoot a moment that only happened once.
At Red Rocks, drone flights are restricted because the venue sits on protected land, and Chris isn’t a certified drone pilot. He climbed a hillside outside the venue, shot a photo on his phone, and used Higgsfield’s Seedance and Nano Banana Pro tools to turn it into what looks like a drone shot for the opening of his recap video.
“AI didn’t take the photo. I still went there. The moment still happened. It just made the process a lot easier.”
He’s clear-eyed about the risk, too. He got a scam call built to sound like a local sheriff’s office, and friends’ parents have received AI voice-clone calls asking for money. He doesn’t think the technology is neutral by default. He thinks the responsibility for how it gets used sits with the person holding it.
What He Tells People Starting Out
Chris’s advice for anyone trying to break into this work isn’t complicated. Post the work publicly and consistently, past the point where it starts to feel uncomfortable. Take opportunities that don’t come with a guaranteed payoff.
“Listen a little bit more to the delusional voice. In your mind, that’s the one pushing you to do it because that’s the correct one.”
He means the instinct that keeps pointing toward the work even when there’s no stable paycheck attached to it, the one most people talk themselves out of before they ever test it. He’s less focused now on chasing every big name he can shoot. What he’s building toward is the kind of trust that gets him invited back, tour after tour, instead of hired once and forgotten.
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