Carving a niche

I’ve been shooting professionally for a while now. Figuring out what I shoot (or more accurately what I don’t) took some time and some failures. Whenever I took a job just because it paid, and not because I was excited about the opportunity to shoot the given subject, I could tell immediately that it just wasn’t working. Sometimes I could tell as early as looking at the LCD on the back of the camera. Other times when I got back to the studio and looked at them full screen. Probably the most telling symptom was how long it took me to get to the editing. But I noticed when I was shooting musicians and performers, I would walk in the door, get the images into the computer, and get immediately to the edit. Bags and coat thrown haphazardly on the floor, sometimes I forgot to even interact with my family before I dove in. And once I’m in, it’s impossible to pull myself out.

Relatively speaking, the self-discovery curve was steep, fast, and not all that painful. So musicians, actors, burlesque performers, magicians, anyone involved in the performance-based art forms, come find me (I’m already looking for you) and let’s work together. I find the performer segment of the population easy to work with despite repeatedly being told the opposite. For one, I’m a musician myself, so maybe I just understand them better than a non-musician photographer. Secondly, I’m trying to create images that imply a narrative or backstory. Performers are the perfect subjects since they are natural storytellers, and find it easy (actors more than musicians obviously) to jump into a role or persona in order to create the kind of storied image we were talking about before the shoot began.

Some recent examples:

Pianist Jody Deems

Jody is an accomplished professional pianist and Suzuki piano instructor. She wanted to do something funky for some PR images, so I said “why don’t you climb up on your piano and glare sarcastically at me?” To my surprise, she had never climbed on her piano before. Probably explains why the finish was in such good shape.

The Right Now

I want the first point I make is that the sky is not Photoshopped. But instead, I have to say the biggest deal about this shoot is that all eight of them showed up exactly on time for a 4am shoot! I have been told over and over again that musicians are notoriously late. That has not been my experience. More often, my experience as a musician was all of us showing up on time and waiting for the sound guy to show. But still, musicians or not, to get eight people to show up at 4am would be a stretch. Not with these guys. Total professionals, and not afraid to do what’s necessary to make a fun shoot. Even if that meant sitting in Lake Michigan in late September (water temp: 60 degrees. air temp: not quite that warm) and roll around in the sand afterwards to make sure their suits were properly caked with sand. I hope these guys need new photos every six months; they were THAT fun to work with.

So, Niche identified, clarified. Now it’s on to the networking, getting out there and meeting each and every actor and musician on the planet, and being living proof that professional photography is 80% marketing and 20% shooting.