It’s Her Fault

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…..