BCBusiness
Nicole Smith, founder and CEO of Flytographer, is a winner in the Innovator category of the 2025 Women of the Year Awards
Asking a total stranger to take a photo of you when you’re visiting a foreign country has its risks—and, often, not many rewards. Nicole Smith remembers getting a Parisian passerby to take snapshots of her and a friend during a visit to France and getting blurry, out-of-focus and unflattering results: “You don’t want to keep asking them to take it again, but they don’t really capture the spirit of the trip,” she explains. Those photos, while lacklustre, inspired her: what if there was a way for travellers to hire professional photographers, based in their intended destinations, to capture their vacation memories?
Armed with true 2013-era technology (she searched Craigslist to find photographers and interviewed them over Skype), Smith set up a test shoot for some friends who were travelling to Europe. “I gave the photographer some instructions, sent him the money and crossed my fingers that he’d show up,” she recalls. He did—and after recruiting a crew of 18 photographers, Smith officially launched Victoria-based Flytographer in 2013.
“Back then, there was no global marketplace for easily booking vetted local photographers—it just didn’t exist,” says the founder. Her revolutionary solution catered to a wide variety of travellers: friends looking for mementos, couples planning destination engagements, families wanting frame-worthy photos that included everyone (“moms are always capturing the photos of everyone else but are often missing from the memories themselves,” she points out). Flytographer connects travellers with reputable photographers (who are also location experts), coordinates shoots across different time zones and even takes into account optimal sunrise/sunset hours for photos that wow.
In 2024, the company introduced a one-step booking system that allows customers to instantly confirm their shoot. Smith’s team of 15 full-time employees works with over 650 photographers in 350 cities worldwide, and Flytographer has captured over 4 million photos and served hundreds of thousands of travellers. “I get to see stories of love and joy and hope and wonder—when the world gets heavy, it reminds me we’re all a lot more alike than different; we all want to capture memories,” says Smith. And she’ll never have to ask a stranger to take a photo of her again, no matter where she goes: “I feel like I have friends in every city around the world.”
Discover our full list of 21 BCBusiness 2025 Women of the Year award winners here.