I spent four years as a mason’s tender before I ever held a camera professionally, hauling brick and mixing mud on jobs around north Florida, and the thing that still bothers me about most masonry photography is that it flattens the work into wallpaper. A brick wall photographed at midday is a repeating pattern of […]
Most of my work is on municipal infrastructure jobs — pump stations, bridge deck repairs, water main replacements — and the paperwork for those is heavier than anything in private construction. It also taught me the lesson that saves the most time on ordinary commercial work: every question about permission has a right answer and […]
My father-in-law ran flatwork crews for thirty years and the first thing he told me when I started photographing pours was that concrete lies to a camera for about two weeks. He was right, and it took me a full summer in Jacksonville to understand why. A slab that looks perfect at four in the […]
The specialty subcontractors I shoot for all have the same complaint about photographers, and it is not price. It is that we ask for the site on a day that suits us. A waterproofing contractor in Poughkeepsie put it to me bluntly on a job two years ago: the membrane he wanted photographed would be […]
I teach a short documentation workshop at a community college two evenings a semester, and the exercise that produces the most argument is the simplest one. I hand out a one-line brief — “photograph the new retaining wall” — and send everyone to the same wall behind the maintenance building. Fifteen people come back with […]
I run the camera for a materials testing lab, which means most of what I photograph gets compared to something. Two specimens, two coatings, the same panel at day zero and day ninety. That job trained a habit that transfers directly to construction and cleaning work: a before-and-after pair is not a pair of photographs, […]
I came out of newspaper work and now shoot case studies for a couple of trade associations, which means a lot of my frames end up in publications where twenty projects sit next to each other and have to look like they came from one place. That pressure pushes every photographer toward a preset, and […]
A facility manager in southwest Atlanta called me on a Thursday and asked whether I could photograph a warehouse degrease “sometime next week.” What he actually needed was three separate visits at three specific hours, and he had no idea. I shoot monthly progress sets for property managers, mostly industrial, and the single most common […]
Ten years of shooting equipment catalogs taught me to light a machine so that a buyer can understand it, and that skill turns out to transfer directly to a working shop floor. A cabinet shop in Yonkers asked me for interior photographs last winter and had budgeted for what they called “a proper lighting truck.” […]
I got walked off a Bronx roof once at nine in the morning because I stepped over a rope line to frame a condenser against the skyline. The line was there because the parapet behind me was loose brick. The building super had told me about it at the door and I had already forgotten. […]