A few quick words about why sometimes it’s worth it to spend more time in the kitchen when working on a creative project.
I will be very brief with my essay today. In large part, this brevity is the result of me being thoroughly prepared for a commercial that I will be shooting in the next few days. The kind where even your approval is subject to approval. Legal teams as well as standards and practices watchdogs have as much influence as the client’s creative director. Or countless other ads from your team, agency team, client team and any other group that may be contributing to your commercial artistic masterpiece. When all these different parts are combined to form a cohesive whole, the amount of time you spend taking pictures is reduced compared to the amount of time you spend preparing. So much of my time and mental energy this week was spent making sure no detail got through the crack.
I love working with creative teams. But this fun is a bit ironic given the fact that one of the most important things I care about most about still photography is how efficiently one can work completely independently. Stumbling into still photography due to my work as a filmmaker, I’m used to having to assemble large teams, raise production funds, and manage a mountain of logistics every time I want to create Shortest movies. . So being able to pick up a still camera, walk out the front door and create a work of art in 1/8000 of a second is a huge boon. Of course, as my career as a photographer progressed and I discovered my niche would be working in commercials, I quickly realized that my genre of photography wasn’t much different. compared to filmmaking. Large crew. Extensive production requirements. Few projects come together so quickly without running some obstacles along the way. So my introvert’s dream of becoming my own island didn’t come true.
But here’s the thing. Taking into account all of these components, although they may seem like obstacles to your personal artistic expression, can often give your final work richness and scope. vi that you won’t achieve if you work alone. Everyone on set, from the creative director to the caterer, can contribute to your shoot in a meaningful way. I firmly believe that a good idea is a good idea, no matter who it comes from. And even if your own ideas are being challenged, this should be seen less as discomfort but as an opportunity to reconsider why you have chosen a particular path. I often have people ask me why I do something a certain way, only to find out that I chose that path purely out of intuition rather than an artistically motivated decision. My gut may have been right. But sometimes, my intuition is wrong, and having those second eyes can help alert me to a potential error while it’s still early enough to correct. Or, better yet, my mind can be opened up in a completely different and superior way to approach a scene.
Other times, the team you build, and the individual creativity each of them brings to your project, can be your latent superpower. Just yesterday, I was watching a short behind-the-scenes clip of someone talking about the famous “Midnight Cowboy” scene, where Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight are crossing the street in Manhattan and Dustin is almost run over by a taxi. take it outside. Apparently it wasn’t a stunt driver, and it was an actual taxi that nearly knocked the actor out. When Dustin, holding his character, banged on the hood of his car and exclaimed, “I’m walking,” that most famous line was not in the original script. That’s what Dustin advertises at the moment as well as his next line on insurance. Now Waldo Salt, the screenwriter of “Midnight Cowboy,” is an industry legend. But even he didn’t come up with the most perfect lines in that most perfect moment. Only because the entire team is bringing their own individual talents to the project and making the whole better than the sum of its parts does such a moment exist on film.
So the next time you launch a project, take a moment to appreciate the great contributions of the people around you. Our name may be at the top of the credit list as a photographer or director, but without the contributions of others to support our profession, it is often impossible to turn images that in your head come true.
