I came up shooting real estate interiors in the Hudson Valley, three houses a day, and the single complaint that followed me from listing work into construction work was the window. Expose for the room and the glass turns into a white rectangle with nothing behind it. Expose for the view and the room goes […]
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, […]
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. […]
The first plant room I ever photographed was a 1920s boiler room under a Tarrytown apartment building, and I ruined the whole morning because I lit it like a portrait. Soft, even, flattering — and completely useless. The mechanical engineer who hired me wanted to see weld beads on new header piping and the tag […]