The Dream Job, well, Mostly

“Wow.” The Student I’m photographing says with a bit of awe in his voice. “You get to travel around the country? Cool.”

“Yeah.” I say and nod since smiling under my mask doesn’t convey much of a message. “It is.”

I started this kind of work some time ago. Twenty-five years or so ago. My dreams have changed just a bit since then. The money is good. The work is easy after doing it for all these years. The long drives across the country, well, they are a good deal less fun than they used to be. But that’s part of the job. The part that makes most people quit after a few weeks or a few days.

The Company is not as bad as others I’ve worked at. Uncle Olan had great pay, but pretty crappy travel. I was still on the road all the time but it was to places like Paris, Texas not Las Vegas, Nevada. Once they were bought out by Lifetouch, well, I was a bit surprised to find that all the other Companies doing what I do weren’t paying anywhere near what Olan Mills had been paying me. They also wanted me to sell portraits, which has never been my strong suit.

So I was ready to throw in the towel. I spent a lot of time delivering food with one Side Gig or another. One or two paid pretty good, but none of them were consistently good and all of them took up a hell of a lot of time. Then I found a couple of Help Wanted ads that sounded like my kind of photography. What I like to call Assembly Line Portraits, but what the is known in the Trade as High Volume Photography. The kind of thing you see at schools and churches and the DMV. There is some skill involved in this business, but not a lot of talent is needed. You set up equipment, boss people around, tear down the equipment and move to the next location. Sometimes several times a day.

There seem to be two kinds of people who do this work. Old farts like me who have been bouncing from one company to the next for twenty years, and kids who have never worked anywhere but the company where they are now. We all think we are the best at what we do and everyone else needs to step their game up. Most old timers nod while the young kids train them and then go out and do exactly what they have done for the last twenty years or so.

This is the first company I’ve worked at for more than a few weeks where I’ve not been handed someone to train. This is no big deal, training pay is seldom worth the bother anyway. And there is a lot of paperwork and texting and dealing with people where training is not as easy as sitting someone down and telling them to turn this way and that. My general hatred of all the detail work and all the grunt work would likely run off any newbies I happen to be around anyway.

On the plus side, there is a lot of the country to see. A lot of National Parks, a lot of great cities, and a lot of wide open country. My travels have often seen me in Maine in the summer and Florida in the winter. Who could ask for more? Well, I’m getting older. I’ve been home for a few days and I am still dead tired. Driving for several days, even with a couple of National Parks tossed in, is still driving for several days. I don’t know how truckers and Van Life people do it.

I stay at a lot of motels. Many of them have cut out the breakfast and the pools due to Covid-19. Though not all, so it is kind of annoying when some place that is part of a chain says they can’t do so and so because of State or Company policy when you have recently stayed in that state and that brand and not had the same restrictions. Some places will offer a grab and go breakfast, and one or two spots actually had the normal old style motel buffet. The gas and motels in California are back to their normal highway robbery prices, but it was never so much that I had to resort to staying in some dive where I would fear for my life.

I cooked my first home meal not too long ago. Just some sausage and potatoes. After three months of fast food and microwave dinners, it was nice to whip up something of my own. Having enough money to dine out all the time means I tend to dine out all the time. But I also like to cook once in a while. Being home lets me do both without too much trouble. Some of the places I work have their own Chefs and they almost always offer me food. It’s usually good, and sometimes, very good. In the Old Days, I was always hungry, now I’m trying to loose a few pounds. Not as bad as the first few times I went on the road. I packed on twenty pounds I never really got rid of again back then.

Still sell the odd Fine Art Print and once in a while I sell sometime I found in a thrift store, but for the most part, taking portraits pays the bills. Being a photographer has been in interesting profession. There are times when I get tired and don’t want to drive five hours to that next shoot, but I still go anyway. It’s not the dream job it would have been twenty years ago, but then, they wouldn’t have hired me twenty years ago. I should have a month or two to recover and then be out there again.