#11 Beyond the Brief: Twenty-something Years In. Here’s What I Know.
I was a young nineteen year old when I first grabbed my camera and thought I was going to be a photographer.
I was not prepared for what that actually meant.
Fresh out of college, I had started to develop the skills to become a photographer and try to make it in the world of commercial photography. What I didn’t have was any idea how to run a business. A small business management class my last semester just barely opened the door into entrepreneurship. Taxes, insurance, contracts, cash flow, managing projects, managing people, photo school didn’t quite cover that. Nobody warned me that some of the most important people on my “team” would never set foot on a production. My CPA, my accountant, the business mentors who helped me figure out how to actually operate a company and not just shoot for one.
I learned a lot of those lessons the hard way. The hardest one? I can’t do everything. I’m a great photographer and I’m pretty good with clients. I am absolutely NOT an accountant. I tried to cut corners early on and learned real quick: the cheap ones aren’t good, and the good ones aren’t cheap. Worth every penny.
If you had told 23-year-old me that running this business would require me to become a photographer, director, business owner, marketer, janitor, entrepreneur, drone operator, and leader all at once, I probably would have nodded and had no idea what I was actually agreeing to. But here we are.
I’d like to think I’ve come a long way since those beginning days as an assistant!
How the work has changed.
Early on, everything needed to be polished and perfect. The product was the hero and everything else was secondary to it. The spritz and ice on the cold beer was the highlight, the girl in the bikini holding it was there just to grab your attention. That made sense at the time and that’s how marketing was done. Now things have changed and it’s just not how I see it anymore.
The shift was happening gradually, then all at once, I felt like there was a sudden change. I started paying attention to brands like Yeti, who figured out something the rest of the industry was slow to catch up to. It was never really about the cooler. It was about the fishing trip, the hunting camp, the dog riding shotgun on a dirt road at sundown. The product just happened to be there. This caught my attention and resonated with me on a very real level.
That realization changed how I approached the images I was creating. I’m not thinking about the product from a glitz and glamour perspective, I’m thinking about the world the product lives in. The story of what someone actually does with it, or who they are because of it. To me this is a more honest representation of the product and we are seeing the powerful impact this has had on the world of marketing.
One of the earliest productions that cracked this open for me was a job for Monsanto, before they got acquired by Bayer. Big agency, global brand, my first real shot at that level. I assumed we’d be out in the fields, we weren’t this time, those jobs were yet to come. The campaign was about the people who worked there, who they were beyond their job title. They are the mothers, grandparents, adjunct professors, community volunteers who worked there but were also more than a job title. We made portraits that felt real and honest. Seven billboards went up across St. Louis and the feeling of seeing them across the city was a turning point in my career at that point. Plus I think my mom finally started to understand what the heck I was doing for a job!
What I learned on that job was this: just because a company does one thing doesn’t mean that’s the only story worth telling. Sometimes a photo of a young mother and her toddler, shot as a favor for a friend, is what gets you in the room with a global brand in the first place. Trust me, I was as shocked as you can imagine, you can’t make this up!
The job has changed me.
I’ve traveled the country and the world because of this work. Travel changes you. It opens your eyes to things you can’t unsee, beauty that exists in places you never would have looked otherwise. Travel has taught me that we are more alike than we are different despite what the media tries to tell us. A trip to Kuala Lumpur really opened my eyes to this.
This job also introduced me to people who became close friends. That part I really didn’t see coming, not to the extent that it has. These people just aren’t “work” friends, they are truly friends through thick and thin.
What I also didn’t see coming was the mental weight of it. I will say one thing I have learned is to stay on top of your mental health, this is a job and as important and demanding as it is, there is so much more to life than the careers we have. With all that said, staying creative, running a business, marketing the company, staying on top of trends, riding the roller coaster of busy seasons and slow ones, can take its toll. When we’re bouncing from job to job and working post-production in between, that’s where I’m happiest, in the chaos of it all. I’m with my crew and we’re making cool stuff. That part is easy.
It’s the slow periods that have shaped me more than anything else. The questions that come up at 2am. When’s the next job? How do I keep cash flow alive? How do I keep work coming to my team? Those nights are real and they don’t fully go away no matter how long you’ve been doing this.
In hindsight those slow periods made me tougher and more resilient. They made me want to help other people when I can especially when they’re slow and give them work. More than anything, they made me genuinely appreciate every single project and every single client. Without them, none of this exists.
The stress of being busy is nowhere near the stress of not being busy. That took me a while to really internalize.
Twenty years later.
I’ll be 65 in another 20 years. I’m not a young man anymore, but I genuinely believe the best work is still ahead, and I don’t say that in a pie-in-the-sky way. The past five years have been the best of my career. The focus is clearer, the crew is dialed, Danielle is helping to shape things to come, and I finally feel like everything is aligned.
Talking with big brands doesn’t intimidate me the way it used to. I’ve paid my dues. I know these brands will benefit from the work we do. It’s not just “them” giving us a job, it’s us creating the work they need. It feels good to be in a place where there is mutual respect for one another. It probably helps that I’ve also had my teeth kicked in a time or two and it’s not an ego thing, It’s just confidence that gets built over 20 years of showing up.
I’m an eternal optimist. The glass is always half full, and sometimes it’s whiskey, which is even better! I’ve had some great experiences so far but truly believe the best work is yet to come.
The conversations happening right now about AI and what it means for this industry, I’ve heard that conversation before. When I first worked in this business it was digital vs. film, or the collapse of stock being a viable stream of revenue. The industry is always changing. The ones who panic are the ones who weren’t going to make it anyway. Specialized Bicycle had a slogan I saw years ago that stuck with me: Innovate or Die. That’s it. That’s the whole answer. I was a kid with a camera that wanted to be a photographer, I now run a full service production company. Innovate or die.
The next 20 years will look a lot like the last 20. Full of challenges, full of growth, and most importantly, full of fun. My kids are getting older, my wife and I are in the thick of it together, and this year brought the biggest personal challenges we’ve ever faced. I’m grateful we had each other.
And somewhere in the next 20 years, hopefully a lot sooner, we’re finally getting to Italy. COVID got us the first time and shut down the country. It won’t get us again.