A Commercial Photographer's Life in the Fast Lane

 

 

One of my long-time commercial photography clients was a company that manufactured packaging for food. Carry-out boxes for fast food, pizza boxes, boxes for cakes and other bakery items --if it was food and could be put in a box, they made a box for it.

Officially, the client was the company. As a practical matter, the client was a short, slightly tubby man who was the company's in-house art director/graphic designer. Whenever he designed a new line of packaging he would bring it to me to be photographed for the company's advertising catalogs and flyers.

Sounds simple, right?

But no, not simple. He apparently had a mental image of how each product photograph should look (which is good, at least up to a point), and while I set my lights in position and stood by my camera ready to shoot, he would fuss and sweat over each tiny detail, sometimes for hours. And not just in the studio. For the photo at the top of this post we went to a fabric store and carefully chose the blue background material and other accessories.

For the photograph below we put a 4x8 sheet of heavy plywood on sawhorses and covered it with 4x4-inch white tiles. For the entire time I worked with this client I kept both white and deep green 4-inch tiles in my studio -- enough of each to cover that sheet of plywood.

 

When I first began working with him, I photographed everything on 4x5 sheet film in a Calumet/Cambo view camera. Later on, I used a roll-film adapter on the same camera. It gave 10 exposures, each 2-1/4 x 2-3/4 inches on a roll of #120 film. In the final, printed piece the quality difference between the 4x5 film and the smaller format was indistinguishable.

These were the days before digital photography, so frequently, after making some adjustment we would put a Polaroid adapter on the camera and make a Polaroid print that he could examine. Then more painstaking adjustments.

With all the Polaroids and continual tweaking of the setup, every session took much longer than it would have for another client, and I eventually had to start billing him for the extra time. But the man simply could not be hurried. It was frustrating, but we eventually arrived at the photograph he wanted.

For myself, I was glad to have the business. And we actually turned out some decent-looking work.

One of  the things that makes commercial photography so enjoyable to me is that it is an endless sequence of problem solving, but with manageable problems. If I fail to solve them the world will not end. (But the consequences for my business may not be good.)

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(Photographs copyright David B. Jenkins 2020)

Soli Gloria Deo

To the glory of God alone