I’m a bit late with this one… we had to take the little one, pictured below, back to college on Friday. Still cute but not so little anymore.
It’s all Courtney’s fault! I was really really happy photographing executives, stomping around factories, and photographing industrial parts in the studio. But then she came along and changed everything.
When I first started in photography, I had a great passion for seeing things made. I loved the idea of photographing facilities so that I could look at the insides up close. My first photo assisting jobs out of college was working for a photographer in N,W. Indiana doing photo assignments in many of the steel mills and their supporting industries. I was in heaven. As my career progressed, I moved to Chicago and started assisting photographers who did not only industrial work but also advertising, catalog and corporate photography.
My biggest problem was telling friends and family what I did. When I said that I was a commercial photographer they would reply “what’s that?” I would then launch into a long explanation of the types of photography that I did and where the images were used. Sometimes the explanation still would not make sense to the questioner, and so I would default to saying “I don’t shoot weddings or babies.” It went so far that when a mutual friend of ours was working to set us up on a blind date, Elise asked what I did for a living and the friend replied that she wasn’t too sure, but she knew I didn’t photograph weddings or babies.
Fast forward six years to the birth of my first daughter. At this point I’m still in the city photographing commercial projects, what I didn’t realize was that my next photo project, the first of 3, just showed up. I started burning through film like it was going out of style…… and about four years after that it did…..
Above are the binders that hold the B&W negatives from Elise’s pregnancy through Courtney at age two and a half.
At this point, you probably have guessed that I was going to have to change my go-to explanation for what I did. My love of tromping through factories was quickly being replaced by playing and photographing little ones. Mind you I still love factories and learning how things are made, it’s just that getting a little one to smile is worth a million.
Did It! Leica M6 50mm Summilux Tri-X
