The Trials and Tribulations of a Commercial Photographer in Austin

Following on the heels of my interview with Darren Carroll about using his iPad to supplement his printed portfolio, I asked him about the difficulties of living in Austin while trying to build more of a commercial business — and while most of the clients he’d like to work with are sitting on the coasts. I thought his methodical nature would provide good fodder and inspiration for other photographers trying to take it to the next level.

PS: You live in Austin, but you make a regular point of traveling to New York City to visit with agents, agencies, and publishers. Why?

Well, first of all, I grew up in New York, so I need my fix. Don’t get me wrong–Austin is a great place to be, but I miss New York sometimes. Eating at my favorite restaurants, seeing friends and family, running in Central Park. It’s always good to come home again every once in a while. But more to the point, I’m a face-to-face kind of person. While I’m ecstatic about how technology has helped  bring us all together and make it easier to find each other and communicate, it has kind of made us all faceless. I want people to know who they’re working with, and vice-versa, and there are just some aspects of that that a website or online portfolio can’t provide.

And I also want the people whom I see (or try to see) to know that I’m serious about wanting to work for them. While it’s true that I, like just about everyone on the planet, send out broad-based e-mail promos, etc., I only write to people whom I want to see in New York if they’re someone I think I’d be a good fit for, or would really like to work for, etc., after giving it a lot of thought. I don’t just send out a form e-mail requesting a meeting to a thousand people and hope someone replies. I want to show editors with whom I’d like to work that I’m serious enough about wanting to work with them that I’m willing to come see them in person. And I want to show my current clients that I don’t take them for granted, and express my appreciation for their confidence in me with a handshake and not an e-mail if I can.

Does that make me old-fashioned? Kind of sounds like it, huh?

PS: Do you think you’re taken less seriously since you’re not located in LA or NYC?

Not necessarily. With budgets the way they are, especially in editorial, I think people are looking for more local talent, so it can work to your advantage. In terms of advertising, I haven’t really seen enough to make a judgment one way or another. I’d like to think they wouldn’t, but I’m not naive, either…

PS: What % of your business is new clients in a typical year?

Probably about 25%. But at the same time, I’ve really only started pushing myself to make these trips, with redesigned portfolios, for about two years now. There’s definitely a lag time, a snowball effect, if you will. The first time I did it, I didn’t see any appreciable increase in new clients. But slowly but surely, the more I go and the more I get to know people and start to develop relationships, the more good things start to happen.

PS: What is the split between editorial and commercial? What would you like the split to be?

Right now it’s about 90% editorial. I’d like it to be more around 50.

PS: What do you find to be the hardest part about marketing yourself?

That’s easy. I hate talking about myself. I’m basically pretty humble at heart, and I have a hard time trying to talk myself up or make any kind of big deal about my abilities, such as they may be. I don’t want to tout myself as the next big thing, or some digital guru, or an expert on anything. I know it sounds like a cliche, but I like to go out, do my work, and let that speak for itself.

I’m good at what I do. I’m easy to work with. I’m not an arrogant, pompous pain in the ass or a prima donna; I don’t demand 400-count sheets at my hotel, $10 bottles of water on the set, or first-class plane tickets to get there. I don’t berate my assistants, I dress professionally, get along well with my subjects, and always remember that I’m representing my the client when I do a shoot. You give me a shoot to do, we talk about it, bounce ideas off of each other, and I go and do it. No fuss, no muss. And I don’t see the need to brag about any of that or make it out to be a big deal. That’s my job.

People who know me and have worked with me, know that already. The problem comes in letting people who haven’t worked with me know that. And that’s one thing that I think comes across much better in person; unfortunately I’ve found that the internet allows for a lot of somewhat talented (or worse) people to make a lot of noise, and it’s that noise that seems to be the yardstick these days. And I just don’t like to make noise.

PS: Do you feel compelled to change your style to the soup du jour to generate more work?

It’s funny; there are some pictures that I actually think look better when they’re desaturated or contrasty or converted to black-and-white or whatever. And when I do that to a picture, I do it for precisely that reason, in much the same way I’d run my Tri-X in Acufine for one picture but D-76 for another, or shoot Kodachrome for something but RDP for another, or make a black-and-white print on a warm-tone Agfa paper instead of cooler Ilford. I remember back when I was in grad school I discovered that if you used a Fuji NPS negative and printed it on Ilford multicontrast paper with a 5 filter you could get this absolutely killer, hard-edged look in a B&W print that was perfect–for some things. But I didn’t stop shooting TXP and printing on graded papers for others. I was even guilty of cross-processing a few rolls of film back in the day. Digital processing, and the things you can do with it, is a tool like anything else. Only now, film choice, developer choice, print toning choice has become a Photoshop action. There’s nothing wrong with that per se–where I feel things go wrong is when everyone from photographers to creatives, editors, buyers, etc. begin to confuse photoshop actions with a “style.”

I just want to show good, solid work–especially in the editorial market these days, where budgets are thinner than ever, I want you, as an editor, to know that I can handle a bunch of different things you might need or want to throw at me. If that means you want me to do a shoot and give you the flavor of the month in terms of vibrance, hue/saturation and unsharp mask settings, and toss a little high-pass on it to boot, I can do that. But I’m not going to insult your intelligence by using those tools to cover up any weaknesses in my work, or by applying that set of actions to every picture in my book and calling it a “style.”

And a lot of people want to see a “style” of work, which is fine–I’m sure I have one, and I’m sure that someone else can tell me what it is, because I don’t want to let that dictate the parameters of what I will or won’t shoot or how I do or don’t shoot something. But I’m not going to consistently apply 5 minutes of photoshop work to an otherwise average picture and try to convince you that I have some sort of unique artistic vision because of it.

So I guess the short answer is, I don’t feel compelled to, but I’m sure that I lose either work or even the ability to get some people’s attention as a result.

PS: You don’t have a heavy hand with the retouching. Do you think this is a disadvantage?

Only if I’m trying to present myself as something I’m not. I’m a photographer, not an illustrator. And I really don’t buy the argument that the changing nature of technology has made us all “digital artists” or whatever. At the end of the day, I make pictures. And when I do, I try to balance the ability and desire to make them look as good as I possibly can straight out of the camera with an editor or art director’s “concept” for the shoot. If that involves some retouching then fine, but I’d rather do as little of it as possible. I still like to approach assignments with the idea that the point of this exercise, regardless of the medium or materials, is to hand a client a sheet of 4×5 chrome straight out of the dip-and-dunk–even if that sheet of 4×5 chrome is now a raw file out of a DSLR.

For some reason there are people out there who think it’s okay, or a good thing, to hire a photographer whose work needs to be heavily retouched, manipulated, whatever, before it’s something that can be deemed an acceptable finished product–and I do see that happening a lot, especially now that the barriers to entry in this business as a whole have dropped so significantly, and it kind of scares me. But if my having the attitude that I, as a competent photographer, should be able to give you the images you want by a) actually lighting something properly, b) timing for peak action, c) exposing correctly, d) composing well, e) getting something in focus or f) all of the above,  puts me at a disadvantage with you as an editor then I guess the situation is pretty much doomed from the start.

PS: There’s been a lot of discussion about how sports photography is dying because so many people are willing to shoot for free for a credential. Is this a reality for the golf you shoot? What do you think your job will be like in 5 years?

In a larger sense, I think you’re right–sports photography is indeed dying in its current form. It’s become filled with people who think that just because they’ve gone out and bought a DSLR and some long glass they’re instant sports photographers. And unfortunately, over the past couple of years we’ve seen the rise of several sports-related “wire services” (yes, those should be interpreted as “air quotes”) who only encourage that, offering credentials in exchange for getting images for free which they may or may not later on be able to sell, and they may or may not reimburse the photographers for. It’s all really shady, if you ask me. It has several detrimental effects, not least of which is its effect on the price of stock imagery as it’s saturating the market with images, the production cost for which (at least, from the “agency” perspective) is close to nil.

But even worse is its effect on the conditions we work in, and not just in golf. Football sidelines are more crowded, now full of people with 70-200mm lenses and 2X converters on monopods who can’t possibly be getting very sharp pictures, but who are transmitting them (and in the process taking up valuable desk space and bandwidth in the media room) back to agencies I’ve never heard of.  At a golf tournament last year I watched one of these “agency” photographers, who was not getting paid to be there and who apparently had never been to a golf tournament before, take players’ refreshments from a cooler and hand them out to his buddies on the other side of the ropes. At game six of the American League Championship series in Arlington, Texas this year, on assignment for Sports Illustrated, I got booted from my assigned position an hour before game time by a Major League Baseball Productions video crew that just barged in unannounced, ripped the tape off of the spot that had been assigned to me by the team, and just took it without any further discussion. Since there were no positions left anywhere, I had to squirm and contort myself into a makeshift position for nine innings, which is fine–shit happens, and we all know that TV guys–especially guys who can take advantage of a league affiliation–are going to do whatever they want without any consideration for anyone else. But there were at least two photographers there, shooting unpaid for these “wire services” and with no real assignment other than providing free images from the game, taking up perfectly good photo positions. It’s not a good road we’re going down.

I may be overly optimistic, but I’m hoping that as more of these things start to happen, people in a position to do something about it, from the editors who enable these “agencies” by using their products, to media relations directors who credential them, to the leagues themselves, will start wising up to this crap and put a stop to it. Yes, it’s dying, but it can still be resuscitated. We can hope.

But I do honestly believe that as in every field there will always be room for, and work for, people who do good work, who act like professionals, and who have the talent that makes creatives want to actively part with their budgeted funds to hire them. Hopefully five years from now these “agencies” and “wire services” will have run out of photographers who fall for their b.s., and magazines will continue to see the value of well-made original (read: paid-for and assigned) content, and they’ll need more of it to differentiate their publications–both in print and tablet form–from their competition. Like I said, I’m an optimist.

PS: What’s your honest opinion about web-based marketing. Specifically (do you use it? Has it created new biz):
   – Facebook
   – Twitter
   – Blogs
   – Search Engine Optimization

I do use it, but probably not as much as I should. I have a blog, which I need to update more frequently. I have a facebook fan page, which I need to update, period.  I tweet with remarkable infrequency. And I do all of this with SEO in mind. So yes, I use it. And admittedly I need to be much better about it. I do get jobs here and there from people who say they found me online, but I’m certainly not confident enough to say that it’s because I use social media, even to the limited extent that I do. I shoot a lot. When I’m not shooting, I’m invoicing, or designing promos, or making phone calls or writing e-mails about portfolio visits or working on the portfolios themselves. And when I’m not doing that, I have a six year-old son that I love spending time with. And every now and then I need to sleep.  There are only so many hours in a day.