The Days Wind Down To A Precious Few

“Aren’t you going to tear down the Studio for me?” My former Manager says as I wrap up shooting the last sitting I will ever shoot in the Big Box Store.

“Why should I?” I say and shrug. But then take a deep breath and go through the fairly simple process of taking down the background, putting the ZII in it’s carrying case, stacking the boxes filled the toys we used as props, and loading up all the odds and ends of the tiny Assembly Line Portrait Studio.

The Manager makes a bit of small talk as I wheel the shopping cart out to her car and I stand around for a couple of minutes while she loads it all up.  I have no regrets in leaving this Company run by crooks and cheats-a Company that has since gone out of business.

It’s not over yet for me and the New Company, but it won’t be long now.  As I go through the process of sorting out my stuff from the Company’s stuff and thinking about where I will be going and what I will be doing, I think about all the other places I have said goodbye to over the years.  There’s only one company that I would seriously considering returning to, and I have made no move to contact them. Yet. Basically, every company I quit was a place that I had come to hate.

Those last few days are filled with thoughts like-I won’t miss this, I won’t miss that, I won’t miss working with this idiot, I won’t miss putting up with these damned people, and so on and so forth.

My first job saw me shooting mostly small children and babies-after a year of that I never wanted to see a two year old again.  Small children are still not my strongest suit and I still hate hearing those little screamers when they are drug in for a portrait.  But at least in directory work, you have Mom holding the kids.  The idiots that went to the Big Box store always wanted nothing but the kids-and they were always a 3 year old, a 2 year old, and a weeks old infant.  Posed on a small table four feet over a concrete floor.  Yeah, good times.

The second job was shooting in-store promotions at grocery stores-the big sales pitch at that Company was that you could have up to ten people in a portrait for one Sitting Fee-back in the days when we had sitting fees.  So just about every group we had was ten people.  The Company also wanted them all shot vertically.  This was a big shock after shooting kids for a year.  But I managed to learn how to do it, learned how to use professional lighting, and became the best photographer at that company.  I don’t miss shooting groups of ten, shooting a hundred sits a day, and making next to nothing in pay.

I worked at one Company where we shot portraits for composites.  This was rapid fire shooting where you would shoot 6 poses of anywhere from twenty or thirty to over a hundred kids in a matter of hours.  I don’t miss the smart ass kids who won’t do what you tell them.  I don’t miss the dumb-ass middle school kids who think everyone wants their body.  I don’t miss all the Ghetto schools where I felt like it was worth my life to go inside and take the portraits.

There was a High School Senior Studio where I hated the owner and the owner’s idiot son.  I was also not too fond of my fellow photographers, who were mostly a pack of jerks.  I didn’t like any of the office staff or the helpers they hired to show the proofs.  I was not happy having to sweep the floors and empty the trash cans.  I didn’t like a lot of the poses they shot.  But it was the only Real Studio I ever worked at and I did get a kick out of using high end pro equipment.  That was where I got to play around with Mamiyas and Hasselblads and it was the first time I realized that you could make ten thousand dollars in three hours shooting high school prom pictures.

The Company I loved and hated the most did Directory work.  For three years I traveled all over the country, got out of debt for the first and only time in my life, and learned to really hate old farts who ‘Just came for the Book.’  It was one of many times where The Wife and I almost went our separate ways.  Where the old pickup truck I was driving died on me many times.  Where I stayed in the worst motels I ever stayed at and had the worst meals I ever ate.  It was also how I happened to visited about 38 States and where I had hoped to visit all the rest.  But that didn’t happen, mainly because the people that ran the Company were complete and total idiots.

On very rare occasions I have found myself out of work and I have gone back to one or two of these places.  The first thing that hit me when I walked onto a Shoot was-Oh God I remember why I left.  I never lasted more than a few days and put a black line through those particular places.

My last days at all of these places were mostly happy ones-happy to be leaving, hopeful for something better at the next stop.

While I tend to think of myself as a Professional Portrait Photographer, most ‘Real’ Portrait Studios don’t share this opinion.  They usually want people with Degrees of one sort or another, years of experience using Photoshop, and often some degree of mastery using software I’ve never used and often never heard of.  And they want to pay $8 an hour.  Uh, yeah, right.

So I’m not too shocked when I don’t get call backs from the High End Studios, but I am genuinely shocked when I’m occasionally snubbed my some hole in the wall Assembly Line Portrait place.  Really?  You think I’m not good enough to do school pictures?  Or Composite pictures?  Or just plain old family portraits?  Well, the odds are good I would not have lasted long at those places anyway-we had fundamentally different philosophies.

I’ve never missed the people I worked with, since for the most part, the only people I knew where the biggest part of the reason I was leaving.  Even now, where I have worked with the same small group of people for the better part of six years, I have no plans to have annual lunches where we get together and talk about life after The Company.  There are one or two that I would like to work with if I ever get my business act together, but the rest-well, I can live without them and they can live without me.

As with the people I have photographed, the only coworkers I recall are the ones that were twerps.  Passers that hate my portraits and want retakes.  Trainers that know less about taking portraits than I do. PreSellers that lie to everyone about everything and then disappear leaving you to deal with the pissed off Subjects.

All Assembly Line Portrait Photographers think they are the best photographer of all time-better than Adams, better than Mapplethorpe, better than anyone you can name.  And the only reason they are stuck taking portraits of screaming babies and grumpy old couples is because they were dealt a bad hand, while every successful photographer has fame and fortune handed to them.  What this means is that any time two Assembly Line Portrait Photographers got together, we couldn’t agree on anything.

But it is all a little sad as well.  I’ll miss those rare trips to Colorado, or Kansas City, or Galveston.  So as the door slowly closes, I need to do some serious looking for that open window.