In the United States, within 30 seconds of meeting someone new inevitably one person or the other will ask, "What do you do?" Meaning, clearly, "what business/industry are you involved with and what is your function in that business?"
I guess it's important in our culture to be able assign a new connection to an appropriate slot in the hierarchy of work. Easier to figure out what your relationship should be. Where you are on the pecking order. Etc.
When I tell people that I am a photographer they immediately head to the default pigeon hole and ask me about wedding photography. Or family portraits. Or.....high school yearbook photographs. Fathers might ask which kids' sports I like to photograph. And then they usually dig in for something more blunt. They almost always ask: "And can you make a living at that?" Or some variation on: "Is that a full time job or is it something you do around your regular work?"
I guess I should count myself lucky that most of my friends, as well as the members of my immediate family, are engaged in marketing, advertising or public relations and understand the enormous diversity of niches and specialities which exist in the field of photography. And most of the rest of my friends are actually....commercial photographers. Or swimmers. But swimmers are much more interested in how you swim, what stroke you favor, and/or where you swim.
A neighbor saw me loading gear into my car the other day. It was a Wednesday morning. He greeted me and stopped for a moment to chat. I'm sure I told him at some point in the last few years that I worked as a photographer and he remembers that but he seemed a bit confused. "Who has a wedding in the middle of the week?" He asked.
He was surprised to hear that I was off to shoot behind the scenes images, social media and some advertising images that were all about Texas beef. We chatted for a few minutes more and he asked me why I needed so many cases of gear. Most of the photographers he's seen on TV or in the movies were just carrying a camera or two around their necks and had some sort of distressed leather or canvas camera bag drooping over one shoulder.
I assured him that I needed the stuff in the cases to set up lights for celebrity style portraits. I needed stuff in the other cases to augment existing light in the kitchens and to use as fill light out in the sun. The other cases were full of different cameras and lenses because....I might need them for something the advertising agency and I hadn't thought about yet. He seemed to get it.
He would have been mystified had he been on the set of our project last week. I was a small part of the overall production. I was the still photographer on a video set. Sure, I had to set up and light a white background in our little makeshift portrait studio but all the heavy lifting for the live action video of a cooking show was done for me; at least a day in advance. That sure made my job easier and more relaxed.
I thought it would be fun to look through the files and find some of the BTS photos I shot in order to show just how weird it looks when you find yourself in a working video set for a while. I felt more like a tourist than part of the crew but, then again, our targets and goals were different.
Because I get bored and restless on 10-12 hour long shooting days (there's a lot of re-setting of multiple video cameras and lights between sections of the video production: dead spots, so to speak) I like to bring along a bunch of different cameras to see what works best and how different they can all look. It gives me stuff to play with during longer pauses.
On this project I shot with a Fuji GFX 50Sii, a Leica SL2, A Leica SL, and a Leica Q2. Each, in its own way, was interesting and good. Next time I'll narrow down to just the SL2 and the Q2. That will cover everything and keep the rolling case quite a bit lighter. Might sub an SL2-S instead; for the low light.
Interesting that so many think we're out shooting weddings all the time but instead we're spending full days making weird and wonderful images for advertising in its various forms. A lot has changed. Even more has stayed the same. It's pretty much always been this way in the minds of consumers. Muggles.
Here are some random BTS images from the shoot. File info where my memory allows....
Searing gorgeous medallions over a gas flame. Step one...
Leica SL2 + 24-90mm. Wide open...
Yvette. Our food stylist who duplicated some of the recipes so the in-house photographer
could do food "hero" shots for the web.
Leica SL + Voigtlander 50mm f2.0
The view from the other side of the counter. Big lights all around.
Leica SL + Voigtlander 50mm f2.0
One of our talents prepping a dish while a mobile camera operator gets ready to
do some close up footage of the dish being prepared.
Lead DP on the center stationary camera. Also calling out
camera direction to the two mobile and two other fixed location cameras.
Behind him an engineer is monitoring all five feeds on a series of monitors.
A shot of the team getting ready to video tape and photograph
the judges who are out of frame on the left...In this scene you have the two
mobile camera ops which EZY-rigs and peaking out of the left hand side of the big, white reflector
is a tripod mounted stationary camera as well.
A 90° angle from the shot one above. Little camera mounted monitors everywhere.
I should have brought mine so I could fit in...
Judges table in the background. Camera on "sticks" in the center of the frame, two operators
on the other side of the big, black panels, and another stationary camera
over on the far right of the frame.
Upstairs in the interview studio two cameras with two different focal length lenses
are trained on the interview subject to allow for quick punch ins during editing.
Sumo monitor to the left of frame.
Leica Q2.
Danielle searing fillets. In the kitchen. A clean background but if I flipped the camera 180°
you'd see at least three video cameras following her action.
SL2 + 24-90mm.
Miking up a judge for a sit down interview. Shotgun mic at the top right corner.
microphone reset after the still photographer stumbled into the boom arm.
No damage done to either....
fin.
Fascinating. Loved the inside look.
ReplyDeleteI am not a pro photographer, but I love reading your write ups.
re welch
I play guitar (poorly) but I always like to look at videos shot in music studios, even though it's sort of faked up (sometimes the musicians fingers are not playing the chords you're hearing and it's always great to see musicians with electric guitars playing in the rain) and I like it even better if there's s scene or two where you see the cameras moving around. I like to watch photographers and musicians work. It would be interesting to see if you were caught in some of that video, moving around the set.
ReplyDeleteJC, I tried hard to stay out of frame. But....no guarantees.
ReplyDeleteIt has been a while since you have posted images like these. Except that in the past you were part of the video crew. I’m thinking of a video you created with someone else for a high-end Mexican restaurant using m43s Olympus cameras.
ReplyDeleteIt is not unusual for people to think of professional photographers as being associated with weddings and portraits. This past year my son had high school graduation photos taken in a studio and on stage by photographers from a local company. Most of my encounters with professional photographers has been during portrait and event shoots - two types that you are rather familiar with.
Funny story - I was on Granville Island casually taking photos with my pro-level Nikon DSLR and a cheap used wide-angle zoom I had recently acquired. My daughter was taking a class at an arts school there. I walked into the school to pick up my daughter at the same time a dance student was walking in to get to her class. She looked at my camera and asked if I was the professional photographer who was going to be taking photos of her class that evening. I’m a pure amateur - but my camera can be deceiving.
Wow. Had no idea it was that involved.
ReplyDeleteI always imagined it was like when you do work for the theater, just a touch more people and equipment.
I can only imagine the planning and coordination that goes into something like that.
Thanks for sharing.
Is three video cameras normal for a professional production? For something longer like an hour tv show that's a lot of editing that somebody has to do.
ReplyDeleteHi Jeff, I've been on productions with up to ten live cameras on important scenes. With the editing software available now you can run five or six streams, all time sync'd, on your monitor simultaneously and switch from camera to camera as you perform the edit in real time. Makes things almost as easy as a two camera or three camera edit. A good editor has a scene he is editing set up so that his wide shot view is always in the same place on the monitor. Ditto all of the other angles. He watches and switches in to a different camera generally working to music or some other tempo. There is an audio track that is pervasive across all the camera view in the edit and the individual tracks are all sync'd to that sound track. At some point it's a matter of just pushing the right buttons to make the switches. But....I can guarantee that you won't be editing something like that on a ten year old laptop..... (wry emoji intended).
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed these photos and story about your neighbor. I’m a journalist at a national magazine and we have our own version of this phenomenon: readers think that writers just write—probably in a coffee shop somewhere—but in fact there’s a huge infrastructure behind the scenes that involves many people with many very specific jobs (editors, copy editors, fact checkers, legal people, art people, and so on), and in fact all of those very specific jobs in turn have various subcategories and levels. The whole team, however, works hard to conceal itself, presenting subscribers with just the end product: an article written by a person. It’s an illusion of simplicity.
ReplyDeleteJust curious since it was a cooking gig. Do people get to eat the food or does it end up discarded?
ReplyDeleteI don't see people's assumption that most photographers are primarily wedding photographers as a mystery. After all, where do most folks interact with them, particularly at the professional level? How many in the general public actually view your photo sessions? People don't know what they can't know.
ReplyDeleteHey, Anonymous. Do people not read? Nobody has ever heard of Annie Leibovitz? Ansel Adams? Do they think Ansel spent his weekends with Bridezilla? Presuming Avedon routinely showed up to work weddings?
ReplyDeleteNot in their daily lives, no. You're still dwelling in the arena of photo-centric thought patterns. Cognitive bias, perhaps. Most folks don't care a squat about photography.
DeleteRobert Roaldi, Since the food is being cooked for a competition it's not adulterated with anything you wouldn't want to eat. I'm sure the cast, crew and judges made short work of the dishes. Too yummy to discard. Me? Naw, I didn't stick around. I wanted to get home so I could cook dinner with B.
ReplyDeleteI have always envied your theatre episodes because it is something I think I could do, have always wanted to do, but never got around to trying. Gee, thanks for giving me something else for which to envy you. :(
ReplyDeleteI have also fantasized that I could do BTS shooting of video productions. But you have dashed my hopes. I never realized that it would involve bringing in your own lighting setup as well as use the existing production lighting. I'm not very experienced at artificial lighting. I thought it would just be like street photography, only indoors.
Oh well, I guess the closest I'll ever get to being Kirk Tuck is having done my first event shoot, which you may have heard about... :)
...an interesting experience...