A couple of weeks ago I took my son and daughter to hear their mom play jazz at local restaurant’s Sunday Brunch. Teri has been a professional piano player and singer for basically her entire adult life, at this point she has been playing for a living for more than thirty-five years.
The two musicians working with her that morning carried equally impressive credentials. Between the three of them there was probably more than a hundred years of professional experience tucked into the corner of this small restaurant, swinging away while people ate and carried on conversations –and enjoyed the tunes no doubt – only a few feet away.
One of the hardest thing to do as an electric musician is play quietly. These three were playing passionate, AMAZING stuff at a volume level somewhere just north of a whisper. They traded solos, they swung the tunes up and down the chart and they never once, no matter intensely they were playing, got their volume above the quiet that the job called for.
Key words here ‘that the job called for’.
Pros understand that being creative is one thing and being professional is sometimes quite another. I am approached on a regular basis by young photographers starting out how want advice on ‘the business’. The truth is, the business of photography, much like the business of music, is a mix of the technical and the creative sides of your brain and true success comes mostly to the people who can balance them both and express them both equally well.
For example…we shoot a great many business head shots in my studio. One of the reasons we’ve been successful in this field is that, early on, I studied the technical aspects that make up a solid, professional head shot and have been using and refining them ever since.
Without, hopefully, boring anyone, a true corporate headshot requires a neutral background – black white or gray usually, and most importantly it requires four lights. Key, fill, background light and a hair light, all applied in correct percentages.
Sure you can take someone out in the sun and take a picture of their face and call it a headshot but when the marketing people in a corporation see the shot, you, the photographer, will go in the ‘doesn’t know what they’re doing’ pile and you will probably never get out of it, at least with that particular marketing pro.
It’s the one thing I run into most often with the new photographers. They are enthralled with the creative aspect of photography and unwilling or unable to put in the time to learn the technical and business side.
You can and should learn both. It is knowing the difference and knowing what a particular job requires, much like my wife and her trio playing wild swinging jazz at a whisper, that will help you pull yourself out of the throngs of amateurs and into the ranks of the pros.
The two pictures below might help. The first is a beauty head shot for a model. It dramatic and beautiful because that’s what she needed.
The second is a business headshot, again, it’s all about knowing and being able to get exactly what the job requires.
