About LJ Master Photographer
The Road to Becoming A Master Photographer
So what constitutes a “master photographer.” Well, a master photographer is someone who has mastered the art and skill of photography. Some professional photographers achieve master status through college courses, some through years of experience, and some with both. I am the latter.
I started taking photography classes in high school over 30 years ago and became the high school journalism photographer (school newspaper) and yearbook photographer. I have always wanted to preserve the special moments and the beauty I saw in everyday life; to capture them for safekeeping forever. It didn’t help that I was born an artist. My mother taught me how to oil paint when I was just 6 years old, and I was good at it. I started out in life trying to capture my passion for everyday moments with oil paints and a sketchpad. In high school, I thought my profession would be as a creative writer because I had some aptitude for it. That was until one year, when I was 14 years old, and my parents gave me a camera for Christmas. Nothing much, just a 126mm point and shoot that was popular at the time, but once I started to delve into the world of photography, I had found my soul’s true passion.
I bought my first professional 35mm SLR when I was 18 years old and still have it to this day. It’s completely functional even though I once dropped it while photographing a waterfall where it fell quite a distance and landed on a large rock (that was back when Nikon still made their camera bodies out of Titanium). Do that today with the plastic-bodied digital SLRs and it will be laying on the rock in a pile of bits and pieces.
It wasn’t long before I decided I wanted to turn my hobby into a profession, I knew I was going to need a full-time job in order to save up enough money to send myself to college to study photographic communications, so I moved to a larger city and applied for a job at the local professional photo lab. To my amazement, they hired me, and that was the true start of my career in photographic communications. Starting with portraits and wedding photography, as well as nature photography whenever I had the chance, it was difficult to make enough money to support myself full time. I loved to dabble in the darkroom with special effects and became a custom color printer for a professional photo lab after moving to Boulder, Colorado when I was 22 years old. I learned a great deal from darkroom work and talking to the pro photographers who came into the photo lab. We had some great ones at the Boulder, Colorado lab. Big-name professionals who specialized in weddings , commercial real estate and wildllife photography.
At the same time, I started to dabble in Cibachome printing (prints from slides) because it was popular at the time and the photo lab needed someone to learn it to help out with the extra demand. I was totally emersed in shooting slide film then and swore there wasn’t anything better for quality and color reproduction. I loved it so much I became the top Cibachrome printing expert doing large 40×60 murals of a Boulder, CO ski team for the Olympics. However, as is typical of an artist, my love life with slide film was eventually replaced with some other passion. I started looking for more of a challenge in my work. I went through a black and white photography phase inspired by my lifelong mentor Ansel Adams. I couldn’t believe anyone could make black and white look so beautiful, so I had to try it for myself.
My entire photography career has been a progression through time and technology. I shot every type of film and genre of photography known to man. I gradually eased into real estate photography and weddings as a way to make some extra money, but could never completely rely on my photography income as being steady enough to support myself, so I continued to work in various professional photo labs for about 12 years.
After having mastered 35mm photography, I became interested in large format studio photography which became my biggest passion; specifically photographing food and product. Only large format studio equipment can give an image quality that surpasses any other, and my goal with my images has always been to strive for the best possible quality and effect.
You can study as many books on photography as you like , but nothing will give you the master status a photographer acquires through years of trial and experimentation. Different environments, lighting conditions, films, equipment, a look and feel for light, shadow, line and texture, and subject matter, all can only be mastered through years of being out in the field, learning from and embracing your mistakes . I was fortunate enough to have a plethera of venues to experiment in during my lifetime. I learned a great deal more from my life experiences than I ever could have learned from a book. Sadly, today’s photographers will not have the playground I had to learn in, since photo labs are a thing of the past and camera stores are quickly following. Today photography has become so mainstream and degraded with the popularity of cell phone cameras. Everyone with a cell phone thinks they are a photographer.
The Photographer’s Eye
You may hear people in the photography world speak of a photographer having an “eye” for what makes a good photograph. I will say this much; in all my years of being a photographer and being approached by would-be photographers who were in training, one thing has always been very apparent: a person either has an eye “gift” for what makes a good photo or they do not. They are born with this ability and it cannot be taught. Oh you can teach someone the technical skills of how to use photography equipment, and you can teach them composition to a degree, but you cannot teach that innate sense all great photographers have of what is going to make a once-in-a-lifetime shot, or will make the mundane everyday things in life look like a work of art. It’s the same with any artist. A person is either the artistic type or the intellectual type. And if they are born intellectuals with no artistic ability whatsoever, they cannot be trained to acquire it. They lack the ability to see things in life the way an artist sees them and visa versa. Most photographers/artists abhor paperwork and number-crunching. It’s the whole right-brained, left-brained conundrum. Some people straddle the line between the two, I consider myself one of them, but you will find that even if they do have some ability for both, one side is always more accomplished and prevalent than the other.
Photographic Style
Recently the buzz word with photography clients is photographic style. Clients looking for a wedding photographer will often ask me what my style is. Some photographers have a very distinct style, but just as with actors, a good photographer can photograph anything in any style the client wants, especially a photographer who has years of marketing experience as well, such as myself. A seasoned photographer has the experience to know how to manipulate light, shadow, composition and artistic style to achieve what the client is looking for. A photographer with marketing experience will know how to best represent a business or product to bring out its highest potential and appeal to the target market. THAT…is the difference between a professional photographer and someone who just takes photos with a cell phone.
I could fill a book with all I have done in my lifetime in regards to photography. From the moment my parents gave me my first camera for Christmas when I was 14 years old, I was hooked, and my entire life has been spent in the pursuit of achieving the ultimate in photographic perfection. To master every type of equipment, situation, environment and genre…there is literally nothing left that I have not done in the field of photography.
When film switched to digital I swore off photography for many years because digital images were so lacking in quality compared to film. I’m talking about 4 megapixels as being the best camera out there when things first went digital. The quality of the images was atrocious! I refused to degrade my profession, skill, and years of experience and knowledge with subpar-quality images. But as photography inevitably turned digital, more and more photo labs started to shut down, film was difficult to even get your hands on let alone get developed, and I had to restructure my career to find a more secure profession to pay the bills. I went back to college and got a degree in advertising design and spent the next 25 years working in graphic design and marketing. At the beginning of this career change I didn’t touch my photo equipment, so I sold my large format studio camera and heavy, enormous studio lights thinking I would never use them again. It broke my heart to sell it to someone who was so enthusiast about getting a good deal on it. It was like selling my right arm.
When I picked up a camera again about 7 or 8 years into my new marketing career, I was astonished how much I had missed the feel of it in my hands and using my photographer’s eye. Photographers literally see everything in life as if they are looking though a lens. They can’t help it, they see life differently than everyone else. I realized in that moment that I had to get back to the only thing in my life that has been a constant and that feeds my soul. Something I discovered about myself when I picked up a camera again. Marketing was paying the bills, but it was not satisfying my creative craving. Graphic designers are pretty much just puppets for whoever they work for. Rarely are they allowed any creative freedom whatsoever. There is always a sales rep, marketing director or some other intellectural dictating how a graphic artist designs every project. A life-lesson I am still struggling with. I always wonder why corporations hire graphic designers and then stifle all of their creativity. They have some corporate officer or sales rep telling the graphic designer how to design every project. If they knew how to design anything, they wouldn’t need a graphic designer, so why hire one and then destroy all of their talent by making them a puppet for someone who has no clue how to design.
Anyway, after being disillusioned by the marketing world for a few more years, I finally succumbed and bought a digital SLR, still not thrilled about the quality I was expected to accept, at least it got me back in the ball game of doing something I loved and had total creative control of. I started doing photography on the side again, realizing the market for photography was not what it was during the film era and I still needed a steady income.
As digital photography progresses and improves, I have learned to adapt with it. It will likely never compare to film in quality, but in today’s marketing world, it’s all about convenience, fast-paced turnaround, and cheap pricing more than quality anyway. However, that will not prevent me from constantly striving to achieve the best possible results with what I have to work with.