I second-shot weddings for six years before I moved into commercial interiors, and the habit I had to unlearn fastest was reaching for the widest lens in the bag whenever a space felt tight. At a reception that instinct is harmless. On a renovation handover it is a liability. A client once walked into a […]
Most of my clients are adjusters, and once or twice a year one of them calls about a claim where the only images available were taken by the contractor’s marketing photographer. Those files are always beautiful and almost always useless. A Nassau County water loss last spring is the case I keep describing: 240 frames […]
The in-house job at a regional general contractor means I am on a site four days out of five, and my gear takes abuse that no wedding bag ever did. In the first eighteen months I destroyed a zoom lens with gypsum dust, cracked a filter thread by setting a bag down on rebar, and […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
I spent eleven years as a retoucher before I got tired of the desk and started going to site, and the thing I carried out of the darkroom-adjacent world was an unreasonable interest in how files get handed over. A Brooklyn general contractor told me last year that the previous photographer had delivered 600 images […]
Before I picked up a camera for a living I ran print production for a commercial shop in Stamford, which means I spent a decade watching people be disappointed by paper. The job I remember best was a masonry contractor who printed 5,000 capability brochures and opened the box to find that every brick photograph […]