Snapped.

By Gonzalo López Martí
LMMiami.com
@LopezMartiMiami

A few days ago I had drinks with a photographer friend of mine.
This gentleman is –or was- a very successful professional.
He shot hundreds of national campaigns for every blue chip brand you can think of in every category imaginable.
He used to be one of the four of five go-to guys for top echelon lifestyle shoots in the West Coast.
You know what I’m talking about: thirty-something parents with 4 beautiful children wearing color-coded sailing attire.
Pearl-white teeth, 6% body fat, flawless hair, pristine sunsets.
Idyllic, über perfect depictions of immaculate domestic bliss, professional success, impossibly chic vacations et al.
A photo shoot with this dude was akin to a Hollywood superproduction.
Gourmet food, five star trailers full of amenities, model-like male & female assistants catering to your every whim.
Unionized talent & crew.
A few Teamsters digesting the aforementioned gourmet grub with protracted siestas at the wheels of their union-sanctioned trucks.
Contracts that read like the fine print on The Affordable Care Act.
Weeks, even months of prep & casting calls.
Weeks of curating, post-production, retouching & optimization.
This guy was more than a photographer.
He was an artiste.
That was then.
This is now.
Now, my photographer friend exclaimed, third martini in hand, “any idiot with a smartphone thinks they are a photographer”.
You guessed it.
My star photographer pal is depressed.
His main source of income these days is catalogs.
Papparazzi style.
Guerrilla crew & guerrilla catering (meaning the kind of meals Fidel Castro & Che Guevara ate while hiding in the depths of the Sierra Maestra).
Full buyout of universal & perpetual rights for all media imaginable.
Bring a cashiers check to the shoot and you walk away with a portable hard disk full of ones & zeros.
He rarely shoots in studio settings anymore.
Too artificial.
Happenstance is what sells now.
Gonzo photography.
Impromptu style.
Snapshots in the most literal sense of the word.
Airbrushed perfection is over.
Raw reality is in.
Hey, he can’t complain.
The shift in his job description allowed him to unload his 12,000 sq ft studio conveniently located in a quickly gentrifying district of LaLaLand for north of three million dollars.
So.
Where were we.
Morale of the story: if you are a professional photographer, don’t shoot yourself yet.
You still have a solid competitive advantage.
Don’t hate Instagram, use it for self promotion.
The shelf life of a pop culture or marketing vehicle these days is seconds flat.
Why sweat the details?
Your clients need quantity, not quality.
They have dozens of digital and social platforms to feed content with.
They need inventory.
Lots of it.
They need to feed the beast.
The beast is hungry and has an attention span of a few seconds.
It is true that any idiot with a smartphone can shoot a decent photo from time to time.
But his or her hit to miss ratio will be very poor.
Give typewriters to a thousand monkeys, lock them up in room for 3 months and they will write a poem eventually.
User generated content is not steady nor is it realiable.
A professional, experienced photographer, however, can steadily, realiably and singlehandedly shoot 100 guaranteed good enough shots in two 8 hour sessions.
For an increasingly affordable yet still pretty profitable rate.
The ROI of using professional talent is still unmatched.

 

 

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