Latest / The Nerdy Photographer Podcast / 167 - Is Photography Still a Viable Career? The Shifting State of the Industry

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167 - Is Photography Still a Viable Career? The Shifting State of the Industry · The Nerdy Photographer Podcast

• 0:06
  Casey Fatchett: No queen, well, the rate is going to be higher
• 0:09
  for that. Oh, hey there. Welcome to the nerdy photographer
• 0:12
  podcast. I'm your host, Casey Fatchett. While you're here, be
• 0:15
  sure to subscribe to the show and join us for lots of
• 0:17
  interesting conversations and adventures, because in addition
• 0:20
  to giving you interviews with amazing photographers from all
• 0:23
  over the world and lots of informative and entertaining
• 0:26
  photography related information, I also go on adventures with the
• 0:29
  crew of the starship Fibonacci, who wouldn't want to stick
• 0:32
  around for that. At the moment, I'm negotiating a licensing rate
• 0:35
  for some images we created for a series of resort satellites. No,
• 0:42
  I'm not going to throw in the print licensing in perpetuity.
• 0:46
  On this episode of the podcast, I'm joined by photography icon
• 0:49
  Joe McNally. Joe has been at the top of the industry for decades,
• 0:52
  and we discuss the shifts that are currently changing the
• 0:54
  industry for better and for worse. All that after the break,
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• 4:02
  Hello and welcome to the nerdy photographer podcast. I'm your
• 4:04
  host, Casey Fatchett, and I am here today with five time cover
• 4:09
  photographer for National Geographic, seven covers of Life
• 4:11
  magazine. What is it? Five Olympics and author of many
• 4:16
  books, two of which are on my bookshelf behind me. Joe.
• 4:20
  McNally, Joe, thank you so much for being on the show.
• 4:23
  Joe McNally: Oh, thank you, Casey. It's fun to get together.
• 4:26
  I know we've kind of hashed this around a little bit for a while,
• 4:29
  and I apologize for being a bit of a moving target.
• 4:32
  Casey Fatchett: You travel a lot. You got a busy schedule.
• 4:35
  I'm just glad that we were able to work it out before we get
• 4:38
  into the meat of our conversation. We're going to
• 4:41
  start off with the dice breaker. It's an 11 Joe who would be your
• 4:47
  dream dinner party guests. She could have anybody living or
• 4:52
  dead up to five,
• 4:54
  Joe McNally: up to five, yeah, okay, all right, and they can be
• 4:58
  living or dead. Yes. All right. Well, let's see, let's, let's
• 5:03
  reach it to the Golden Age of Hollywood. And I actually take
• 5:08
  some of my inspiration from a very well known paparazzi
• 5:13
  picture. Paparazzi is not the right term, but he was a society
• 5:16
  photographer. Do you know the name slim Aaron's? Yes, yeah.
• 5:20
  And they had that wonderful picture at the piano with Jimmy
• 5:23
  Stewart and Clark Gable and Dan Heflin. And I forget the fourth
• 5:28
  but I'd like to sit down with those guys. That would be kind
• 5:30
  of fascinating.
• 5:32
  Casey Fatchett: I love that genre of photography. My
• 5:35
  grandfather was a bellboy in Hollywood around that period of
• 5:40
  time. And he had, where Billy Wilder's brother lived, people
• 5:46
  were coming in and out all the time. And he had like, a stack
• 5:50
  of like, starlets headshots signs in his possession.
• 5:58
  Just amazing.
• 5:59
  Joe McNally: That'd be fun. That'd be fun to sit down and
• 6:01
  just shoot the breeze with. But, you know, Casey, the thing is,
• 6:05
  you know, being a photographer, you have to be interested in,
• 6:10
  like, just about everything, right? Because you get assigned
• 6:13
  to all sorts of people. I've done, you know, I've done movie
• 6:17
  stars. You know, had had photo sessions with movie stars,
• 6:20
  celebrity portraiture, but also scientists. I shot a lot of
• 6:23
  technology for the National Geographic. So I think one of
• 6:26
  the things that you have to be or remain is curious, and that
• 6:32
  makes sort of, I won't say anybody, but that makes a wide
• 6:36
  range of folks who would be fascinating to sit down with at
• 6:41
  dinner.
• 6:42
  Casey Fatchett: Yeah, I think that the curiosity is one of the
• 6:47
  I think, not just photography, anything, just in general, in
• 6:50
  life, if you're not curious, you're you're leading an
• 6:54
  unexamined life. And there's a, I mean, the reason this is
• 6:59
  called the nerdy photographer, is just because there are lots
• 7:01
  of things that I can nerd out over. It's not just photography.
• 7:06
  It's, you know, I started out as a scientist, so it's,
• 7:10
  Joe McNally: Oh, what did you What was your field of
• 7:13
  Casey Fatchett: research, physics, okay, and I worked with
• 7:16
  one of Richard feynman's students. Is my my professor. He
• 7:22
  used to work at Fermilab, and it was so it was just, like,
• 7:25
  amazing stuff. And I got to a point where then I was like, Is
• 7:28
  this gonna is it gonna be any different from this? And he was
• 7:31
  like, No, so you can, you can change your mind if you want. So
• 7:35
  that's good. And I decided to go in different directions. But
• 7:39
  there's, there's just so much out there. And I agree with you
• 7:44
  completely that there's you find, if you find things to find
• 7:50
  interesting, you have better connections,
• 7:55
  Joe McNally: sure, and it's actually a strength, I think,
• 7:58
  really, you know, just speaking of photographers and my my
• 8:06
  method, if you will, not that was always consistent like this.
• 8:09
  But when I would get a story for the National Geographic, say,
• 8:13
  for instance, on giant telescopes, I shot two stories
• 8:16
  on giant telescopes for them, very difficult to do, very
• 8:19
  difficult to light, all that sort of stuff. When they gave me
• 8:22
  the job, I had no idea, you know, what giant telescopes did,
• 8:27
  or what they looked like, even I was, you know, complete babe in
• 8:30
  the woods when they gave me the job. But I actually regard that
• 8:33
  oftentimes as a strength, because that puts me in league
• 8:37
  with most of the readers who probably don't know that much
• 8:41
  about giant telescopes, either. So if I go out there as kind of
• 8:44
  this inquisitive person who's never seen this before, and find
• 8:48
  it exciting and different and cool, and I hopefully make some
• 8:52
  pictures that are along those lines, then I've done my job,
• 8:55
  because then that potentially intrigues somebody to get
• 9:00
  involved in the story who might not otherwise be interested in
• 9:03
  telescopes at all. So when you jump into a story again, your
• 9:08
  curiosity plays a role, but also your naivete. I think about
• 9:12
  like, walking into a world you haven't seen before and
• 9:14
  photographing it in an exciting way.
• 9:16
  Casey Fatchett: Yeah. I think it's about having fresh eyes in
• 9:20
  a sense of, like, you know, not going in. And I think it's
• 9:23
  something that can hinder photographers and all genres. I
• 9:28
  mean, I'm primarily, throughout my career, been a wedding
• 9:32
  photographer, but it's sort of, I think it something that
• 9:36
  wedding photographers can get into where they're, like, go
• 9:38
  into it like, thinking, I'm going to get this shot and I'm
• 9:40
  going to get this shot and I'm gonna get this shot and it's,
• 9:44
  it's sort of, it handcuffs you in a way that you're not open to
• 9:51
  the experience of what you're covering, whatever it is,
• 9:55
  Joe McNally: sure, yeah, yeah, flexibility, curiosity, all
• 9:59
  those things. Don't get talked about all that much, but they're
• 10:02
  really essential elements of being a good photographer.
• 10:06
  Casey Fatchett: Yeah, and I mean you more so than i By the way,
• 10:09
  when I started out shooting film, that we've been through
• 10:14
  some sort of large changes in the in the industry, and going
• 10:22
  from film to digital and now to a space where AI and image
• 10:31
  manipulation is taking over a lot of the conversation. How do
• 10:40
  you compare like, the current state of photography with those
• 10:46
  other shifts, like, from, you know, film to digital, and you
• 10:49
  know more, from print to online and etc, those those changes to
• 10:55
  like, what we're going through now in photography.
• 10:58
  Joe McNally: Yeah, you did me the good favor of sending me a
• 11:01
  couple of questions. And you mentioned in your line of
• 11:04
  questioning, you refer to as as disruption. And that's a an apt
• 11:10
  term. And I think that the creative life is it's a good
• 11:18
  thing for the creative life to experience disruption. I mean,
• 11:21
  you mentioned it yourself, you know, if a wedding photographer
• 11:24
  get one shot, this shot, etc, so to be disrupted every once in a
• 11:27
  while and kind of look around and say, Oh, wow, I have to
• 11:32
  reinvent myself, or I have to figure this out. That can be,
• 11:36
  you know, concerning, for sure, but it can also be kind of fuel
• 11:40
  for the fire. Okay, what do I have to do to keep doing this? I
• 11:44
  love doing this. So okay, when we went from film to digital, I
• 11:49
  was like, Yeah, all right. I mean, I don't know exactly
• 11:52
  what's happening inside this camera, but it's still a camera.
• 11:55
  It feels the same way, and now I can actually see the pictures
• 11:58
  that I'm shooting. So that's cool. I shot the first all
• 12:02
  digital story in the history of the National Geographic. You
• 12:04
  know, it was on aviation, and all sudden, I was backseat and
• 12:08
  and fa 18, and, you know, I had,
• 12:13
  you'll chuckle about this. I had a one gig card.
• 12:16
  Casey Fatchett: That's huge. That's a lot. That was a big
• 12:18
  card back in the day.
• 12:19
  Joe McNally: That was a big card back then they cost over 700
• 12:21
  bucks. Yeah, back in the day, but I always remember this it,
• 12:26
  it could hold 119 neffs, Nikon electronic files. And I thought,
• 12:32
  That's cool, you know, because I don't have change film four
• 12:36
  rolls. I've got the equivalent of three rolls of film in this
• 12:40
  one tiny little chip thing here, and I need the first experience
• 12:44
  I ever had in a tactical aircraft. I dropped a roll of
• 12:47
  film, and that's a no no, you know, because it classifies as
• 12:51
  fog for an object debris, yeah, and that's a real No no, and one
• 12:56
  of those tactical aircraft. So all of a sudden I was like,
• 12:59
  Well, this is, this is better, right? I don't have to reach
• 13:02
  into the chamber the camera and switch things out while I'm
• 13:05
  experiencing G forces, okay, all right, so I'll take it, you
• 13:09
  know, I don't really get troubled over much by the by the
• 13:14
  tech of it. All right. Pictures are pictures. The D 1x was the
• 13:18
  camera I shot that story on, and it was the first camera I felt
• 13:22
  came close to the quality of Kodachrome 64 which I shot 1000s
• 13:28
  of rolls for, for the geographic and then, of course, rolling
• 13:31
  forward, and from there into mirrorless. And from leaving
• 13:35
  publications I had grown up with and shot for. I mean, if you had
• 13:40
  told me back in the 80s or even the early 90s that we'd live in
• 13:43
  a world that really just doesn't have Sports Illustrated anymore,
• 13:47
  I would have told you you were crazy. But change is upon us,
• 13:52
  and you have to adapt. And online publication, you know,
• 13:57
  shooting for the web, shooting for my own my own self on
• 14:01
  Instagram, my own account. You know, all of that was brand new,
• 14:05
  but actually kind of fun to do. So here we are at the dawn, or,
• 14:10
  well, not the dawn, really, AI, is very well established, and
• 14:15
  there's a lot of buzz about it, to be sure. But in this
• 14:19
  instance, you know, I and I'm not naive to the fact that I'm
• 14:22
  already using AI. There's algorithms in the camera, etc,
• 14:26
  that are driven by AI. But I firmly believe, and will hold
• 14:32
  fast to this, that the power of an image created in real time in
• 14:36
  the field, a truism, if you will, recorded pictorially, will
• 14:41
  remain the mainstay, and a, I don't know, a benchmark, I guess
• 14:46
  you could say, of who we are and what we do.
• 14:50
  Casey Fatchett: I think it's the element of truth, yeah, to it
• 14:53
  that this really happened, and there's, and I've talked about
• 14:57
  this briefly a couple times before. I don't know if you've
• 14:59
  heard about. This, but there's a precedent, and legal precedent
• 15:02
  set that, where they argued that you couldn't trust cell phone
• 15:08
  photo cameras in in court
• 15:12
  because they automatically do so much processing,
• 15:16
  like there's automatic with it, that it couldn't necessarily
• 15:19
  depending on the photo. It wasn't necessarily just
• 15:23
  considered automatically, like proof of what actually happened,
• 15:26
  because they're they can have so much done to it without even you
• 15:30
  trying to do anything to it. Just like taking the photo with
• 15:33
  your you're not necessarily applying a filter or anything,
• 15:35
  but it's just the computational photography, as opposed to, you
• 15:40
  know,
• 15:42
  a negative image.
• 15:44
  Joe McNally: Yeah, I don't have a problem with anyone's art
• 15:48
  form, as long as they're true to that art form and explain it the
• 15:54
  you know, there is a very famous Photoshop expert named Bert
• 15:59
  Monroy who would spend weeks assembling images, literally
• 16:04
  weeks to make these giant panorama, you know, huge files
• 16:08
  that ultimately got printed as panoramas. More power to him. He
• 16:12
  was he was an artist in his own right, and that was his medium.
• 16:15
  So you get used to the fact or understand that there's
• 16:19
  photographers out there now for whom the click of the shutter is
• 16:22
  just the beginning of the process, and that's fine by me.
• 16:25
  It's not my strength. My strength is pretty much to
• 16:29
  regard the click of the shutter as the beginning and the end of
• 16:32
  the process, albeit knowing that digital needs a measure of
• 16:37
  retouching in any case. But, yeah, I think you know, folks
• 16:44
  who want to experiment with computer driven technology and
• 16:49
  CG stuff and extensive post production, it's all fine, as
• 16:55
  long as the intent is declared, as long as the method is
• 16:59
  declared the the idea. Of AI is not going away, you know, and
• 17:07
  there will be things I'm sure in the future that we'll get upset
• 17:11
  about, and people will use it to potentially nefarious ends. I
• 17:15
  mean, look at the the political theater that we find ourselves
• 17:18
  in with manufacturing images. It's, it's awful, you know,
• 17:23
  truly awful. So, you know, at this stage in my life and my
• 17:27
  career, I'm going to grab that camera, Casey, hang on to it.
• 17:32
  I'm going to look through a lens and keep looking at the world.
• 17:34
  And what I come back with is what I come back with,
• 17:37
  Casey Fatchett: yeah, I think that I share a similar sentiment
• 17:40
  and that it's I try not to do. I understand that there's like
• 17:46
  all, just all the stuff that's just ingrained into even the
• 17:49
  editing programs is just, it's there and but I try to do a
• 17:55
  minimal amount of post production, just kind of like I
• 17:59
  refer to it as a special sauce, to borrow a term from
• 18:04
  advertising. It's just, you know, like, this is just my
• 18:07
  little special sauce on it to, like, make it pop a little bit,
• 18:11
  but I want it to be as true to life
• 18:13
  Joe McNally: as possible. I refer to it as basic darkroom
• 18:16
  work. You take a file, you apply some clarity, some contrast,
• 18:21
  maybe a little bit of saturation, but nothing that's
• 18:23
  in the picture really changes or it nothing is eliminated. I
• 18:29
  mean, we've seen that for years. I mean, I'm sure you're familiar
• 18:33
  with the Kent State Pulitzer John Philo shot that very
• 18:39
  memorable, awful moment, you know. And behind the young lady
• 18:44
  in the picture there, in the original there's some telephone
• 18:46
  poles. And even back in the day, certain news organizations, you
• 18:51
  know, basically sprayed out those telephone poles. So I
• 18:56
  mean, alteration has been with us forever, but the
• 18:59
  sophistication and the speed and the incredible power that
• 19:03
  computers have now is potentially a danger.
• 19:07
  Casey Fatchett: Yeah, I think of, I mean, I get into more
• 19:11
  conversations probably than you do online about with people
• 19:14
  trying to, like, explain things that historically, when they
• 19:17
  say, like, oh, well, you know, back when people shot film that
• 19:20
  there wasn't this much, you know, manipulation of like, Have
• 19:23
  you ever seen Ansel Adams mock ups of his, like, markups of
• 19:27
  his, you know, Prince, like, how much dark room work was done?
• 19:31
  And that's like, their editing has been around for a very long
• 19:34
  time. It's, I mean, even look back at like, spirit photography
• 19:38
  in the 1800s like, Let's do like, a double exposure, you
• 19:42
  know, whatever to like, create this look of whatever, like,
• 19:45
  it's a, yeah, it's been around. It's just, it's a different and,
• 19:49
  like you said, the bar has been lowered to be able to do
• 19:53
  Joe McNally: it true. I mean, I, in fact, I mentioned it when I
• 19:56
  had a group critique yesterday, a bunch of folks who. Our site,
• 20:01
  and I mentioned W gene Smith and the walk to Paradise Garden. And
• 20:08
  W gene Smith was a brilliant photojournalist, but he was not
• 20:11
  an impartial observer, and he was a master printer, and he
• 20:16
  could take a print and manipulate it in the darkroom so
• 20:20
  that you would look at what he wanted you to look at exactly
• 20:24
  and truly, and no place else. And so he manipulated the
• 20:29
  reality he observed in his black and white image. He manipulated
• 20:33
  that in the dark room, and I would say, sometimes even
• 20:36
  extensively. So yes, we, we have been our eyes have been pushed
• 20:41
  and pulled in many ways that, you know, a lot of people might
• 20:46
  not even be aware of for many years, but, but now it is a
• 20:50
  different ballgame.
• 20:51
  Casey Fatchett: Yeah, that's why media literacy is really
• 20:54
  important. But like I said, the the bar, I guess, has been, has
• 21:01
  been lowered as the ability to manipulate images, or whatever
• 21:06
  you say, but also in the sense of, just in the barrier to entry
• 21:11
  is to photography and image manipulation is so much lower.
• 21:16
  Like, what do you think separates professional
• 21:23
  photographers today beyond just like I'm technically competent.
• 21:31
  Joe McNally: Yeah, I mean, there is that, that level of technical
• 21:33
  competence that is expected when you slap the, you know, the
• 21:37
  professional moniker onto your, you know, your front door.
• 21:43
  But I think there is
• 21:46
  things, again, that don't get often talked about. There is an
• 21:50
  element of durability, the fact that you are willing to stick
• 21:54
  this out through thick and thin. There is also an element,
• 21:59
  really, I mean, durability and tenacity are somewhat
• 22:02
  interchangeable terms, but there also is the notion of
• 22:07
  reproducibility. In other words, there's a lot of pictures out
• 22:11
  there. I mean that. Let's face it, you know, folks put the
• 22:15
  camera on program, and then lot of cameras can make pretty good
• 22:18
  pictures, and that's great. I enjoy all of it, really. I refer
• 22:23
  to it as the democracy of digital. Digital has made
• 22:28
  picture making available to so many more people than used to be
• 22:32
  involved, you know. And the you know used to be somewhat
• 22:36
  arduous, you know, you'd have to give over one of the bathrooms
• 22:38
  in your house to become a dark room, or whatever, you know. And
• 22:42
  so now it's like, click and drop and, you know, send it, you
• 22:46
  know, I can, we can make a picture right now, put it on
• 22:49
  Instagram, and somebody in Beijing, or, you know, Delhi
• 22:52
  will see it in a matter of literally minutes. So that's all
• 22:57
  amazing stuff, but you have to really love this to stick with
• 23:03
  it for as long as you need to be to be called a professional. And
• 23:11
  there's a, there is that element of durability and also
• 23:16
  reproducibility that, you know, I got off on a tangent there but
• 23:20
  the cameras, but the camera will make a good picture for you. Can
• 23:23
  you do that tomorrow? Yeah, that's the thing, you know. You
• 23:27
  you make a photograph today, and it's all simple and wonderful
• 23:31
  and nice and fantastic. And then tomorrow you get into a
• 23:34
  difficult situation where, all sudden, the client looks at you
• 23:36
  and says, Oh, by the way, I'd like you to make a group
• 23:38
  portrait of a eight of my staff. And you're like, okay, yeah, all
• 23:43
  right, can you do that? That's where the that's where the
• 23:47
  professional aspect of this comes in.
• 23:49
  Casey Fatchett: Yeah, I think it's, it's when somebody will
• 23:51
  ask me, like, oh, how do you get more corporate jobs or
• 23:54
  commercial jobs? And I'm like, Well, you have to have a level
• 23:57
  of just knowing how to be consistent, that they're not
• 24:03
  going to keep hiring you or hire you if they don't see like,
• 24:06
  consistency in your work, that's a big thing. Like, I have a very
• 24:10
  good friend who does almost entirely corporate work, most of
• 24:15
  which never gets seen publicly. It's all for, like, internal
• 24:19
  communications and whatever. It's just they, they knew, they
• 24:23
  know that he is consistent in his work that and they it's not
• 24:27
  necessarily the top pinnacle of creativity, but they know that
• 24:32
  it's can be, he can come in and reproduce it, that quality and
• 24:38
  deliver their timeline. And that's, that's a huge part of,
• 24:42
  like, how he gets the job. I think another thing, I mean, I
• 24:46
  always mentioned, like, people as well, make somebody a
• 24:49
  professional and like, it's behaving professionally. It like
• 24:53
  having, you know, the knowledge of what a professional should
• 24:58
  provide, as far as, like. Having just things like insurance or
• 25:02
  like, you know, like the sort of things where you behave in a
• 25:05
  professional manner and you are protecting your clients as well
• 25:09
  as yourself,
• 25:11
  Joe McNally: for sure. And let's face it too, if, as you go into
• 25:15
  this field, what you just mentioned about demeanor, you
• 25:19
  know, professional, you know, approach to other human beings.
• 25:25
  Because, you know, unless you're a still life photographer,
• 25:27
  probably most of your work will involve human beings on the
• 25:31
  other side of the lens at some point. And you have to remember
• 25:36
  they are human beings, and you have to be the Good Shepherd of
• 25:39
  those pictures in the aftermath, and you also, depending on the
• 25:43
  area of photography you get into, can occasionally get into
• 25:46
  something that's truly emotional and very, very powerful. It
• 25:50
  could even be the result of a disaster. It could be sorrow
• 25:53
  involved. Could be all the gamut of human emotions is, is what we
• 25:58
  can possibly be witness to when we go out there with a camera,
• 26:02
  and you have to be very, very professional and very, very
• 26:06
  careful in terms of taking care of those moments and those
• 26:09
  people,
• 26:10
  Casey Fatchett: yeah, you're the caretaker of the Yeah, of the
• 26:14
  image, the people in it. It's, I think that that is something
• 26:21
  that I fear can get lost in the rush to go viral these days, or
• 26:32
  I'm gonna try to like, you know, have and not necessarily think
• 26:36
  about how much of like, how to properly approach distribution
• 26:44
  of images.
• 26:45
  Joe McNally: Yeah, and I feel too for, for, you know, there's
• 26:49
  groups of young photographers, and there's tremendous talent
• 26:52
  out there. There really is, and I see it all the time. I'm a,
• 26:55
  I'm a Nikon ambassador, and there's some, there's a crew of
• 26:59
  younger ambassadors coming along who are really formidably
• 27:02
  talented, and they are going to go forward and be the next wave
• 27:05
  of storytelling, and they will be accompanied by astonishing
• 27:09
  technology that's going to enlarge the envelope of what
• 27:12
  they're capable of, that is for sure. But there are also young
• 27:17
  photographers out there who are getting some attention, perhaps,
• 27:23
  you know, on, you know, Instagram or, you know, likes
• 27:27
  and social media, etc, but they're also operating kind of
• 27:30
  without an editor. You know that there's, there's no mentor, that
• 27:36
  is potentially looking at them, looking at their, I almost said,
• 27:40
  looking at their film, looking at their images, and saying, you
• 27:45
  know, go this way, not that way. This is mentorship and editing.
• 27:51
  Or editors in your life and your photographic life, for sure, are
• 27:56
  extremely important. They put up signposts for you when then show
• 28:00
  you when you you know when you Zig instead of zag. You know you
• 28:03
  should have gone this way, but instead you went that way. So
• 28:07
  there is, I think, a real serious need for people to seek
• 28:10
  out a collective voice and opinion, to go to someone and
• 28:16
  say, What do you think, apart from the likes, apart from all
• 28:20
  the frenzy of the internet, and that is the way you grow as a
• 28:25
  photographer. So, yeah, I think there's an isolation that's
• 28:29
  that's a bit of a problem out there that people are getting,
• 28:32
  you know, routinely in there, they're accepting or being
• 28:37
  honored on Instagram or getting accolades and likes, Oh,
• 28:40
  fantastic, fantastic. And I, I would say to some of them,
• 28:44
  anyway, hey, wait a minute. You know, you really have to look at
• 28:48
  what you're doing. Seek out a good mentor or a good editor,
• 28:52
  and that person, whoever it is, will push you forward in a
• 28:56
  positive way.
• 28:57
  Casey Fatchett: Yeah, I think that there's to kind of echo
• 28:59
  what you're saying a younger generation of photographers are
• 29:03
  incredibly visually literate, and like, there's, there's just
• 29:06
  a natural like visual literacy that I don't think and possibly
• 29:13
  because we're they've grown up just bombarded by Video and
• 29:19
  imagery of all kinds, everywhere, but yeah, that
• 29:23
  direction lists can be a pitfall, and that there's just
• 29:29
  having not someone to tell you what to do, but just sort of a
• 29:33
  trusted guiding hand, someone that you You know you trust to
• 29:39
  have your best interests in in mind. Who can say like, Hey,
• 29:47
  let's angle this way. Let's, let's, let's take this fork in
• 29:52
  the road instead of just like, yeah, like you said, what kind
• 29:55
  of I don't want to say wandering, but just like. Just
• 30:00
  not having a direction.
• 30:04
  Joe McNally: It's very important, Casey, to not believe
• 30:06
  your own press notices.
• 30:09
  Casey Fatchett: It's true. As a former actor, it's never, never
• 30:12
  read, never read the reviews.
• 30:15
  Joe McNally: Keep your feet on the ground, keep working. Yeah,
• 30:17
  but what
• 30:18
  Casey Fatchett: skills do you think photographers now need
• 30:22
  that weren't as critical in like the beginning of your career.
• 30:27
  Joe McNally: Well, I think obviously social media,
• 30:29
  savviness and awareness that you know, with the stroke of a
• 30:34
  button, you know, an image that you made could go everywhere. So
• 30:39
  that's a real cautionary thing to be very, very careful. Around
• 30:43
  here, we view social media as kind of a almost a live hand
• 30:48
  grenade. You know, it's like, okay, let's be careful with what
• 30:52
  we say and what we do and and think about it, write it,
• 30:56
  rewrite it. All that. I think business knowledge is extremely
• 31:01
  important now, because things are complex. When you when you
• 31:06
  create a set of pictures, you know the rights to those
• 31:10
  pictures, the complexity of a contract, all of those things
• 31:13
  come into play. I don't think it was as important as it, as it
• 31:19
  was, it's more important to be aware of business. Now, that was
• 31:23
  back when I started. Because I don't mean that, you know, just
• 31:29
  could be naive about it, but there were jobs. Yeah, I was
• 31:34
  kind of minted to become a newspaper photographer Syracuse
• 31:38
  University, the Newhouse School, the photojournalism program, you
• 31:41
  know, with just churning out people who got jobs at
• 31:44
  newspapers, which was a very viable entry point because there
• 31:47
  were jobs. There were many, many newspapers, and they had staff
• 31:50
  photographers, and you could sign on with the staff, and
• 31:53
  you'd get a schedule, a salary, equipment, etc, all of that, you
• 31:58
  know. And so some of the worries about sort of running your own
• 32:01
  shop, were not necessarily present. So there's that for
• 32:07
  sure. There was a nurturing that occurred via the the home base
• 32:13
  of publications, be they newspapers or magazines. All of
• 32:16
  that was a powerful thing that you could enter into there was a
• 32:21
  viable sort of, you know, power to the idea of publications,
• 32:26
  photography, and as you maybe grew out of newspapers, as I
• 32:30
  did, and became a magazine freelancer, you would almost
• 32:34
  invariably have an agent, you know, sigma, gamma, you know all
• 32:40
  the agencies that have been around since forever, you know,
• 32:43
  and contact, etc, Magnum and photographers who would join an
• 32:48
  agency, then would have almost like a parental figure in their
• 32:51
  life that you know, would gather assignments for them, handle
• 32:55
  their stock sales for them while they were off and gone, you
• 32:59
  Know, on various kinds of assignments. So that was a
• 33:03
  nurturing that is kind of not really all that available
• 33:06
  anymore. There's not that many staff photography positions
• 33:11
  available and in any way, shape or form, you know, not just
• 33:15
  newspapers. So photographers really have to look to their
• 33:19
  flanks, build a solid business. Be aware of what they're doing.
• 33:24
  Make sure that that they, you know, have have money that is
• 33:30
  not directly involved in the business. You know, it's very
• 33:32
  tempting to be involved in this and say, Oh, I got to get that
• 33:36
  next lens. Oh, I got to get this, oh, I got to get that. And
• 33:39
  before, you know, it's like, oh, where's the money for the rent,
• 33:42
  you know? So we can run headlong. I'm guilty of it to be
• 33:46
  sure, I've veered all over the economic landscape, you know,
• 33:50
  having good years, bad years. I've chased pictures that
• 33:55
  probably a smarter person would not have chased. Let's put it
• 33:59
  that way. So because it is a passionate thing to do, and we
• 34:05
  do have to approach it in a very childlike, enthusiastic way, but
• 34:09
  that can translate into our professional business demeanor,
• 34:14
  Casey Fatchett: yeah, I think that there's a sense of like the
• 34:16
  business part of it, I think is super important, especially for
• 34:21
  photographers these days. I mean, I My parents always would
• 34:25
  complain, like, Why didn't you take any business classes? And
• 34:29
  since I have, like, since I started running my photography
• 34:32
  business like I did when I started, I had no idea what I
• 34:35
  was doing. And like, oh, you need to business account to keep
• 34:39
  your like form the business, keep it separate for like, you
• 34:43
  said, like, there before, there were all these things that sort
• 34:46
  of, like gathered assignments for people like, you know,
• 34:49
  whether it was at a publication or through an agency or
• 34:52
  whatever. Like people have that that opportunity, and now it's
• 34:55
  they have to be able to kind of go out and until they asked.
• 35:00
  Establish a name for themselves. Be like trying to find the jobs
• 35:03
  for themselves. Yeah. I mean, do you see that this sort of like,
• 35:09
  like social media, we kind of mentioned there, like that. It's
• 35:13
  become and one thing I try to tell people is, like being
• 35:17
  professional and running a business is having some sort of
• 35:20
  portfolio that is not social media, because a you don't
• 35:25
  control it, somebody else does. But the sort of social media as
• 35:32
  portfolio in the sense is shaping the kind of work that
• 35:39
  photographers make it is that that influence of like, the
• 35:45
  likes and, you know, comments trying to like, get, get the the
• 35:53
  feedback via social media, as opposed to Like, building a
• 35:56
  portfolio
• 35:58
  like an actual, you know, yeah,
• 36:03
  the book of work is, is that influencing us for better or for
• 36:07
  worse? As in this industry,
• 36:12
  Joe McNally: most photographers, I think, still have, you know
• 36:16
  the notion or the the drive to create a portfolio, you know, a
• 36:22
  something to present to a client. It's logical. It's
• 36:24
  necessary. I still feel it's necessary, though, there are a
• 36:28
  lot of photographers who are pretty active on social media
• 36:33
  and say, Oh, that's an interesting image. So click on
• 36:36
  their you know, their links, and it's a website, but their
• 36:41
  primary drive seem, in certain instances that I've observed, is
• 36:46
  to sell plugins, or sell lessons, sell workshops, etc. So
• 36:51
  the first thing that greets you when you go to their site is not
• 36:54
  necessarily a portfolio of work that's that's not all that
• 36:58
  typical, but I've seen it where people are seemingly using
• 37:04
  Instagram as their public portfolio to get people to come
• 37:08
  to their site and get involved with other things that they are
• 37:11
  doing. And that's all fine. We have, obviously a website. We
• 37:15
  have categories on the website that you know, we've developed
• 37:19
  over time, and I resolutely believe that you have to
• 37:24
  continue to do that. You have to display your best work. And it
• 37:28
  goes well beyond social media, the the importance of a print
• 37:33
  portfolio, which used to be hugely important in the
• 37:36
  commercial world. I at one point, I think I had eight
• 37:39
  portfolios, printed portfolios. They were all, you know, and
• 37:44
  matted prints, and they were in Portfolio cases that were
• 37:50
  designed that matched our stationery, our business cards,
• 37:56
  our leave behinds, you know, for for images and cards, etc. That
• 38:01
  was all a big effort, you know, if you were going to be serious
• 38:05
  about hitting the advertising market to present a very
• 38:08
  seamless, polished performance, if you will. Yes, that, I think,
• 38:14
  has diminished a bit in importance, to be sure. So
• 38:19
  online delivery and online presence, you know, very
• 38:23
  necessary, but I think a portfolio and an established
• 38:27
  website that looks cool, clean, presentable, eye catching, all
• 38:34
  of that is very, very necessary still.
• 38:36
  Casey Fatchett: Yeah, I think that it's it blows the minds of
• 38:39
  younger photographers when they asked me, Well, what did you do
• 38:42
  before websites existed? Like you showed people your work in
• 38:47
  person, you showed them a physical copy of your work. You
• 38:53
  went and met with them, and just like just the fact that you just
• 38:57
  mentioned leave behind. So I was a little felt a little
• 39:00
  nostalgic.
• 39:02
  It's the the difference
• 39:06
  in like, I always try to tell people like, especially when it
• 39:11
  comes to like, weddings, when people are hiring somebody, and
• 39:16
  I say, like, try as best you can to see somebody's work in
• 39:19
  person. Like, see it printed out? Because if you look to get
• 39:22
  an album like, you want to see what it's going to look like,
• 39:25
  what their work looks like printed because anybody can make
• 39:28
  something look pretty good for their website. Yeah, look a lot
• 39:33
  different, necessarily, than something that's, you know, 10
• 39:36
  by 15 or 20 by 30. See what their work looks like printed
• 39:42
  out, because it's going to look that. That's going to
• 39:46
  show you a lot of the
• 39:49
  inconsistencies in somebody's if they are present, if you when
• 39:55
  you see it blown up,
• 39:58
  Joe McNally: absolutely I mean, when you when you buy. Into a
• 40:00
  photographer's services in any realm. You're, you're, you're
• 40:05
  buying into their their presence as well. So I think a meeting is
• 40:09
  absolutely necessary. I shot the FedEx campaign, for instance,
• 40:15
  for five years, and they would rotate it every five years. They
• 40:19
  had kind of a consistency back back in the 80s and 90s. I shot
• 40:24
  for them throughout the 90s. And they would go on these trips,
• 40:30
  very extensive trips, their budget would renew, I think it
• 40:34
  was April 1 every year, and so I could count on for five years,
• 40:37
  the first two and a half weeks of April I would be busy with
• 40:41
  FedEx, because I knew they would call. But before I got the job,
• 40:46
  they flew me to Memphis, to the corporate headquarters, and the
• 40:49
  art director and the powers that be wanted to have lunch with me,
• 40:54
  and literally checked me out because we were going to be in
• 40:57
  intense situations for two and a half straight weeks, and they
• 41:00
  wanted to know if I was like a decent person to have breakfast
• 41:03
  with, you know. So there's that element, the human element of
• 41:06
  connection, and I always blessed that campaign, because I had a
• 41:10
  really good relationship with the art director, which we
• 41:12
  developed over time. And she was excellent. She actually changed
• 41:16
  my eye to a degree, because they wanted the whole campaign to
• 41:20
  look very offhand, as if somebody had a smartphone or
• 41:24
  something, and a FedEx truck whizzed by them, and they just
• 41:26
  went, Oh, click. And so they wanted an informal approach, not
• 41:31
  a really, you know, studied or controlled approach. And I'm,
• 41:35
  you know, I grew up, kind of like, yeah, you know, I'm
• 41:38
  supposed to make my picture sharp and all the angles even,
• 41:41
  and they were like, no, no, I want this to look I don't care
• 41:45
  about blowing things out. I don't care if things are even a
• 41:47
  little out of focus. I don't care if it's at an angle. Just
• 41:51
  go crazy and and it was, it was actually a little hard for me,
• 41:57
  you know? Because, okay, all right, you have a technical
• 42:00
  background, you know, but we got along great, and she was a very
• 42:06
  wonderful person. And we also developed a language because,
• 42:09
  you know, clients don't necessarily know, and they will
• 42:12
  come to you occasionally with an impossible situation, you know,
• 42:16
  or request. And the language we used, she would see my face when
• 42:20
  she was describing what she wanted. And then she would
• 42:23
  remind herself, and she'd go, oh, okay, I see that's the
• 42:27
  telephoto, wide angle. I said, Yep, you can't have both in one
• 42:31
  picture. The thing can't be really, really big, and also see
• 42:37
  everything else. It just doesn't work. Doesn't work that way,
• 42:40
  physically. And she would say, okay, all right, I get it. I get
• 42:43
  it.
• 42:45
  Casey Fatchett: I think that that's I mean, you taking a few
• 42:48
  of your workshops, you always emphasize problem solving in a
• 42:52
  way that intrigues me. Like, one of the reasons I go to
• 42:56
  workshops, or like to listen people, is kind of like, see how
• 42:59
  other people it's not that I want to copy the photos that you
• 43:02
  take. I want to listen to how you problem solve and how you
• 43:06
  work through a situation and and how important is adaptability.
• 43:15
  Do you think compared to mastery of a specific style or niche?
• 43:23
  Joe McNally: Well, for me, it's, you know, versatility,
• 43:26
  adaptability have been absolutely essential, you know.
• 43:29
  So you might remember the photographer, Mary Ellen Mark.
• 43:34
  She was an amazing photographer. I was lucky to be an
• 43:39
  acquaintance slash friend. We didn't work close, but, you
• 43:42
  know, we would get together every once in a while, and for a
• 43:46
  period of time. And Mary Ellen's career, she was really committed
• 43:50
  to shooting eight by 10 black and white film. And she
• 43:55
  basically threw a fence around herself and said, you know, if
• 43:58
  you don't allow me to shoot eight by 10, black and white,
• 44:01
  I'm just not going to shoot for you. And she still retained her
• 44:06
  clients. People still flock to her because of the power of her
• 44:10
  vision. Her the way she saw was so declarative that people would
• 44:15
  let her approach a job literally in any way she wanted to. That's
• 44:20
  not my story. I'm an assignment guy. I adapt to the job, not the
• 44:25
  other way around. So I've shot things from, you know,
• 44:29
  neighborhood stories for the National Geographic to large
• 44:34
  telescopes on Lonely Mountains, to science, you know, kind of
• 44:39
  interior science. It's, you know, I've been inside NIF, the
• 44:43
  National Ignition Facility several times, Lawrence
• 44:46
  Livermore, all that sort of stuff. I've shot aviation for
• 44:50
  them. I've shot culture for them, all of that, all over the
• 44:54
  years just kept pinging on me to remain versatile. Adapt
• 44:59
  yourself. To the job. And I always have told photographers,
• 45:03
  you know, you know. Just, just lie to the art director. They
• 45:07
  ask you, you know, hey, can you do this job? Just say yes. You
• 45:11
  know, you can do it, unless you don't want to do the job, unless
• 45:15
  you think you're ill suited to do the job. But if somebody
• 45:17
  says, Hey, do you think you can do this? Say yes. And then you
• 45:21
  go outside, and you go into the parking lot, and you throw up
• 45:24
  because you just told a lie, and you're very nervous, but you put
• 45:28
  your brain around it, and you think it through, and you sort
• 45:31
  it out, and you'll get through it. You'll do it. It'll be a
• 45:35
  whole new door that you will walk through. So I've always had
• 45:39
  the philosophy a job really terrifies you. That's an
• 45:42
  immediate signal that you have to do.
• 45:44
  Casey Fatchett: It leads me to a question, are there situations
• 45:48
  that still make you nervous? What? What scares you as
• 45:50
  photographer?
• 45:51
  Joe McNally: Oh, god yes, absolutely. Um, you know, last
• 45:55
  year I shot for Nikon. I shot their introductory marketing
• 46:00
  campaigns for both the 35 millimeter 1.2 and a long
• 46:04
  awaited lens and the newly adapted 2470 f2 eight, which is
• 46:10
  a huge improvement on the old version of that lens, both
• 46:13
  mainstay lenses, both you know, lenses that you know just about
• 46:18
  any photographer will use during the course of their career. And
• 46:22
  first, for instance, the 2470 I had the lens for one day, and
• 46:27
  that was it. I had the lens for 14 hours. We started pre dawn,
• 46:31
  and we ended when the sun went down. And I was nervous. I felt
• 46:35
  that pressure. I was also confident. I knew I could do the
• 46:38
  job. I had prepared well. I had the blessing of, you know, being
• 46:44
  in this environment that we are in the studio is that my studio
• 46:48
  manager, Lynn, is not only a studio manager, she's also a
• 46:53
  marvelous, experienced producer. She's been with me 33 years. So
• 46:59
  she worked on producing that one day of photography. It took her
• 47:03
  three weeks to produce it, to get the insurance, to get the
• 47:06
  permits, double permits, because we were shooting in New York
• 47:09
  City on the beaches, so we need a permit from the New York City
• 47:13
  Mayor's Office of Film and Television, and we needed a
• 47:17
  permit from the Department of Parks and Recreation just to
• 47:21
  shoot some pictures on the beaches of Brooklyn, all of that
• 47:24
  stuff, we had to get talent. The talent had to be signed off
• 47:28
  everything. Everything was prepared. And Lynn is very
• 47:33
  funny. It's like, she's prepared this giant event, and she's more
• 47:39
  than happy to hand it off to me. It's like, okay, here you go.
• 47:43
  I've worked very hard on this. Try not to screw it up. Don't
• 47:46
  mess it. I know that is the message, yes. And so yeah, I get
• 47:51
  I get nerves all the time.
• 47:53
  Casey Fatchett: I've got another question for you that's not
• 47:55
  quite related, but it's something that made me think,
• 47:57
  because I was thinking about having read your books, is there
• 48:00
  a situation where you thought you should have used less
• 48:02
  lights. Now, looking back on
• 48:03
  Joe McNally: it, oh god, yeah, yeah, I've said, I said
• 48:07
  routinely throughout my career, I've never met anybody I
• 48:09
  couldn't over light. And I have, you know, especially when, when,
• 48:16
  when I was coming up lighting was a very big deal. We're
• 48:20
  shooting Kodachrome for the magazines. And the magazines I
• 48:23
  was shooting for wanted things that were lit, you know, because
• 48:27
  I wasn't necessarily shooting news like for Time and Newsweek.
• 48:31
  I did a fair bit of it for Newsweek, but a lot of stuff I
• 48:34
  was assigned to were covers, or, you know, some measure of a well
• 48:40
  known human being that needed to be lit. And so they were, you
• 48:46
  know, there was a drive, you know, at that point to really
• 48:49
  light stuff, you know. And, you know, I No question about it. I
• 48:54
  overdid it. I'm in more than one occasion, guilty as charged.
• 48:58
  Casey Fatchett: I think that there's a something that I try
• 49:01
  to pass on to other photographers when I can, like,
• 49:05
  we talk about shooting film and that, that the limitations of
• 49:12
  that we no longer have, as far as like, I got to change my film
• 49:15
  speed. I got, I can't. I have one role, I have a candy. I'm
• 49:19
  not like change unless I've got another body with another, you
• 49:22
  know, film speed in it, I'm not changing film speeds or and just
• 49:26
  the the technical I've spent the last few years doing a lot
• 49:31
  getting back into film photography for, on a personal
• 49:34
  level, not not necessarily for for work, but sitting there and
• 49:37
  going like, oh yeah. This only goes up to a 1,000th of a second
• 49:41
  like this, this camera, this, you know, whatever I can only
• 49:44
  that's the fastest I can get, as far as shutter speed and just
• 49:47
  things that you had to deal with differently. I mean, I'm curious
• 49:51
  how you feel like Did that affect? Does that limitation?
• 49:58
  Did that did that limitation? Make you feel more like you had
• 50:01
  to be more creative, as opposed to now, where we can kind of,
• 50:06
  like, because we can see and change and adjust like, Oh, I'm
• 50:10
  going to bump this up to, you know, bump my ISO up from 100 to
• 50:14
  200 or I can, I can adjust this now that I've got, you know, my
• 50:18
  wireless lighting set up, and I can control it from my camera
• 50:22
  instead of having to, you know, jog a quarter of a mile and, you
• 50:26
  know, adjust the lights and turn the power pack down or whatever,
• 50:31
  so that my Pocket Wizard goes off. You know, I don't have any
• 50:35
  control of it from from my camera, that that sort of thing,
• 50:39
  like forced more creative thinking previously, or what do
• 50:45
  you think as compared to now?
• 50:47
  Joe McNally: I don't think it actually pushed the creative
• 50:52
  envelope. I think that comes from within. And I, you know, I
• 50:57
  had no frame of reference for digital back then, like, you
• 51:00
  know, this is what I this is what I was shooting for
• 51:03
  Geographic. I shot 1000s of rolls of Kodachrome 64 and
• 51:06
  Kodachrome 200 and so that was the upper end of my ISO. When I
• 51:10
  was shooting color transparency for geographic, every once in a
• 51:14
  great while you would get in yourself into a situation where
• 51:18
  you had to resort to a higher speed, color negative film, or
• 51:22
  something like that in a really kind of dark and, you know,
• 51:26
  unfriendly environment for sure. So you worked within that. That
• 51:31
  was your framework. These were the tools of the day. And so I
• 51:34
  just accepted that, like, Okay, let's try to be as creative as
• 51:38
  we can within the context of certain limitations, you know,
• 51:42
  and and, you know, I mean, I used to light arenas for Sports
• 51:46
  Illustrated, you know, I have an assistant who, you know, really
• 51:50
  knew arena lighting. But we would go out, we would think
• 51:53
  nothing of getting on an airplane with anywhere from 12
• 51:56
  to 1516, cases of gear, because the strobes were heavy,
• 52:01
  everything had to be linked electronically, you know, you'd
• 52:04
  put, you'd put four speedotrons in the roof of or the of an
• 52:10
  arena, and then you you'd zip line them all together, you
• 52:13
  know, do it, you do at a taps, you know. So everything would
• 52:17
  fire in sequence, because you had to drop a hard wire to the
• 52:21
  to the basketball court. This is really ancient history, because
• 52:25
  your sync speed to sync with flashes. The limit of that was a
• 52:29
  60th of a second and the and then, you know, that's why a lot
• 52:35
  of basketball into indoor sports, for geographic would be
• 52:39
  shot with Hasselblad, because a leaf shutter could sink at a 250
• 52:45
  or 500th of a second, but not a focal plane, you know, back in
• 52:50
  the day. And also, too, when we finally got to the point of, you
• 52:57
  know, faster shutter speeds to sync with strobes, we still used
• 53:01
  hardwire because the radios in the day, the signal wouldn't
• 53:05
  pulse to the flashes in the roof within the confines of a 250th
• 53:10
  of a second. So you'd clip the flash, or you wouldn't get flash
• 53:15
  at all. So the safest way to go was hard wires at either end of
• 53:19
  the court. So, you know, people don't even think about that
• 53:24
  stuff anymore, and I don't want to think about it anymore. I
• 53:26
  mean, trust me, I'm not doing this. Oh, you know, I really
• 53:29
  miss those times I don't, yeah, I mean, I threw myself a digital
• 53:34
  because, like, this is not only cool and interesting, but it's
• 53:40
  also helpful. Yeah, you know. And now you know, you know, the
• 53:45
  last Olympic I shot, I over in Tokyo. I was routinely at, you
• 53:50
  know, 5000 6000 8000 ISO. These numbers were not available to
• 53:55
  us.
• 53:57
  Casey Fatchett: It's an embarrassment of riches, I would
• 54:00
  say, in a lot of ways we can
• 54:04
  Joe McNally: which is why I don't have a lot of patience for
• 54:06
  people screaming on the internet and complaining about the
• 54:09
  cameras should have more pixels. It should have more this. I
• 54:13
  mean, good lord, what do you expect the cameras to do for you
• 54:16
  cook your breakfast?
• 54:16
  Casey Fatchett: Yeah, and it's, it's, that's another one of the
• 54:19
  things that I think that, you need to also know how to
• 54:24
  outthink your camera, because, like, in like, because some
• 54:28
  people, like you're mentioning, like, oh, yeah, I'm just gonna
• 54:31
  put this on. You can't repeat the there's no repeatability,
• 54:35
  because they don't understand how the camera is processing
• 54:39
  that image. And, like, knowing your metering modes, and, you
• 54:43
  know, various other things, like, what do I get that set on?
• 54:45
  What's it actually metering or what? Because I had somebody
• 54:48
  say, like, why are you using a light meter? And I said, Well,
• 54:54
  it's because I want to know what the oh, that's just and they
• 54:57
  said, Oh, that's just an excuse so that your shoe. Manual, and
• 55:00
  I'm like, No, it's because I I want a particular level of light
• 55:04
  like, well, you've got a light meter in your camera. Like,
• 55:08
  well, yeah, but my camera's as smart as it is, and as much as
• 55:12
  it gets done, it's also dumb, and I have to tell it what to
• 55:17
  do. And it doesn't always, it's always able to do exactly the
• 55:20
  thing I wanted to do. So I have to out think it.
• 55:25
  Joe McNally: Yeah, when I teach, I always emphasize that look,
• 55:27
  you have to run the camera. You can't let the camera run you.
• 55:30
  Casey Fatchett: Yeah. So
• 55:33
  for photographers trying to build
• 55:37
  a sustainable career, now, what do you think that the realities
• 55:44
  are that they need to honestly confront at this stage in the in
• 55:52
  history?
• 55:54
  Joe McNally: It's, it's a bit of a dichotomy. In certain ways,
• 55:59
  the possibilities to make creative images now have never
• 56:03
  been greater. The technology is astonishing. The don't take this
• 56:11
  the wrong way. The ease of use. I'm not saying this is easy, but
• 56:14
  the facility of the technology can really enable your
• 56:17
  imagination. I'm having more fun shooting nowadays than I
• 56:23
  probably ever had, you know, because I can shoot for a client
• 56:29
  and deliver very quickly. I shot one of the biggest clients we've
• 56:34
  had for the last two years has been a construction firm on Long
• 56:37
  Island. Really huge outfit that does major stuff, and I just had
• 56:43
  so much fun shooting for them, you know, I like to get involved
• 56:47
  with stuff like that. I was in tunnels. I had to get training
• 56:49
  to go into closed spaces, up in bucket trucks, you know, all
• 56:54
  that sort of I've always loved photographic industry, and so I
• 56:57
  applied the same skills I've always had as a storyteller to
• 57:01
  this highly commercial job, you know. And that is an absolute,
• 57:08
  you know, kind of explosion in my head, really, of how far
• 57:13
  we've come with this technology and how I can deliver to that
• 57:16
  client, really wonderful results, even in adverse
• 57:18
  conditions, under underground and all of this sort of stuff.
• 57:22
  It was a it was, I was really just so, so happy with the job,
• 57:26
  and that carried with it really positive economics for my
• 57:30
  studio. The hard part is when you confront a certain realm or
• 57:35
  sector of the marketplace that is sort of unwilling, or will,
• 57:42
  even, you know, kind of push for a photographer to work for them,
• 57:47
  for, you know, either no money or just seek to what's the best
• 57:56
  way,
• 57:58
  sorry, exposure.
• 58:01
  Yeah, there is that, there is that. So I think photographers
• 58:04
  have to be very aware that they are in this in a economic time
• 58:11
  that is not particularly friendly to the creative we're
• 58:15
  all we oftentimes, you know, are setting ourselves up against.
• 58:20
  That's not really the right word, but you know, when you get
• 58:23
  hired, you're oftentimes confronting a much larger entity
• 58:26
  than yourself, and so you have to be aware going into that,
• 58:29
  that there are certain things that you have to observe in
• 58:32
  terms of your rights, and there are certain things that you have
• 58:35
  to observe in terms of limitations of what that client
• 58:38
  can expect. And that's really, really important to set. Those
• 58:43
  are economic realities that are with us all, myself included,
• 58:47
  you know, I've I, I had a situation last year with a very
• 58:52
  well known person I had photographed years ago, and they
• 58:56
  were doing a book, and they called up the studio and said,
• 59:01
  you know, Joe shot the favorite photograph of me that's ever
• 59:04
  been shot, and I'd like to use it for for my book, and my
• 59:07
  publisher will get in touch with you. And in the initial letter
• 59:11
  from the publisher, there was the line, should you want to be
• 59:14
  paid?
• 59:17
  Casey Fatchett: Was like, should people want to pay for the book?
• 59:21
  Joe McNally: Said, Yes, we should, and we do, and we would,
• 59:24
  and we want, and all those things. Yes, we're this is going
• 59:27
  to be an economic transaction. Yeah, and some clients, you have
• 59:31
  to really be pretty firm in pushing back for to maintain
• 59:36
  your own integrity and your own, you know, creative space,
• 59:42
  because those economics will allow you to grow that creative
• 59:46
  space to do the next job, or to take revenue from the commercial
• 59:51
  job you just shot and use it to funnel into a project you want
• 59:55
  to shoot. I've always, always been aware in this field that
• 59:58
  there's food for the table and. For the soul. And when you go
• 1:00:01
  into this, you have to be very aware that you need both.
• 1:00:06
  Casey Fatchett: Yeah, I think that it's something that last
• 1:00:09
  week, I was spent some time every week going through some
• 1:00:14
  like Reddit forums, like to see what people are talking about,
• 1:00:17
  asking. And someone had said, like, should I bother telling
• 1:00:24
  this client that they didn't license my photo for this usage?
• 1:00:30
  And it was just like, like, I don't know if I want to, like,
• 1:00:33
  bother them with it. Like, there, wait, there was a
• 1:00:36
  contract that spelled out, like, the what they were supposed to
• 1:00:40
  be getting. And they're like, Yes, we had a contract that said
• 1:00:43
  it's for use on social media and like, something else, but
• 1:00:48
  they're using it in advertising. And yes, you should be
• 1:00:54
  contacting them and like, send that first of all, send them an
• 1:00:57
  invoice. When you contact them and say, like, this is for the
• 1:01:00
  and they're like, oh, but, you know, I want to bother them. I'm
• 1:01:04
  like, bother them. This is you need to bother them. This is how
• 1:01:08
  you feed yourself. This is how, yeah, this is how you do things.
• 1:01:11
  But looking ahead, what gives you optimism about the future of
• 1:01:21
  photography.
• 1:01:24
  Joe McNally: Well, lots of things, actually, photographers
• 1:01:28
  themselves. You know, we are a vibrant bunch, and despite the
• 1:01:35
  obstacles and difficulties that we oftentimes face, we keep
• 1:01:38
  doing this. And we keep doing it because we love it. And
• 1:01:44
  corollary to that, it's also very necessary. It's absolutely
• 1:01:48
  can imagine the world without Without photos. So we live in a
• 1:01:53
  very visual world. It's coming at us from all sides, and it can
• 1:01:57
  be very turbulent. But the beautiful thing about
• 1:02:01
  photographers is, no matter how Rocky the waves get, we continue
• 1:02:07
  to float, because we just love doing this. And that is an
• 1:02:13
  important source of inspiration to me, especially I see young
• 1:02:16
  photographers who are coming into the field just doing some
• 1:02:20
  really great work. And, you know, fighting against obstacles
• 1:02:25
  that are set up for them coming into the field, the economic
• 1:02:30
  obstacles and also the access obstacles that accesses
• 1:02:34
  everything, you know. And so we have to be really dogged and
• 1:02:39
  really pursue, pursue. And so that does you know it's been
• 1:02:44
  true forever. It's true even more so now. So that gives me
• 1:02:47
  hope that we are just en masse, still producing work and doing
• 1:02:55
  really, really important things with cameras and showing that to
• 1:02:59
  the world that's really important stuff, and so that
• 1:03:02
  gives me a great deal of hope. And also, you know, I guess it
• 1:03:09
  all circles around to me, back to the notion of loving this so
• 1:03:16
  much that you won't stop. And that enables the human spirit to
• 1:03:22
  find a way. You know, it's like you can quote Jeff Goldblum from
• 1:03:27
  Jurassic Park, Life finds a way. And so photographers find a way
• 1:03:32
  to succeed, to strive and to create new work, even though
• 1:03:36
  there are many obstacles that they will encounter in the
• 1:03:39
  course of doing this. So that that, to me, is a great source
• 1:03:42
  of hope and inspiration, and I have ideas for pictures, you
• 1:03:47
  know, still and, you know, the idea of of pursuing a client,
• 1:03:51
  the equation is a little bit flipped. Now, let's face it, you
• 1:03:55
  know, when there were, you know, a compendium of magazines and,
• 1:04:00
  or, you know, just this enormous sort of array of potential
• 1:04:05
  outlets. And you would oftentimes get approached, you
• 1:04:08
  know, I would get people calling for assignments. That doesn't
• 1:04:11
  happen that much anymore because those publications are gone. So
• 1:04:14
  what we have to do now is make our own proposals. Make our own
• 1:04:18
  fun. Push clients, nudge, you know, send letters and and
• 1:04:23
  hopefully crack through someone's sensibilities so that
• 1:04:26
  they will see the logic and power of hiring this
• 1:04:30
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  Unknown: Hey, now for my favorite part of the show,
• 1:07:32
  what's that? Say? Useless information.
• 1:07:37
  This is always death, Joe.
• 1:07:40
  Casey Fatchett: It's time for our useless information for this
• 1:07:43
  episode. Okay, you may know this. I'm not sure I actually
• 1:07:47
  have two for you. They're both sports related, because I know
• 1:07:50
  you're enjoy sports first. Wayne Gretzky, all time leading scorer
• 1:07:57
  in the history of the NHL. If you took away all of Wayne
• 1:08:03
  Gretzky's points that he scored from scoring goals, do you have
• 1:08:07
  any idea who would the leader in points in NHL history? Would be
• 1:08:16
  Bobby Orr. It would still be Wayne Gretzky.
• 1:08:22
  He is so far ahead.
• 1:08:26
  Oh, wow. If you took away all like 900 goals that he scored,
• 1:08:32
  he's still ahead of yaramir. Yager, I think, is in second
• 1:08:36
  place now, but he would still be ahead of him by like 50 points.
• 1:08:41
  Wow. And the second one that I saw, I was looking as I was
• 1:08:45
  looking through things. You might actually know this one. Do
• 1:08:48
  you know that the man who banned Pete Rose from baseball,
• 1:08:54
  that his son is more famous than he is?
• 1:08:58
  Joe McNally: Yeah, I didn't hear that last one that his
• 1:09:00
  Casey Fatchett: son is more famous than he is. His
• 1:09:03
  Joe McNally: son is more famous than the man who banned Yeah.
• 1:09:10
  No, I can't get to that one either. Giamatti.
• 1:09:13
  Casey Fatchett: Paul Giamatti is his son. Oh, okay,
• 1:09:15
  Joe McNally: yeah, yeah, the last name as soon as he said it.
• 1:09:18
  Oh, yeah, of course. Paul Giamatti, he's a
• 1:09:23
  Casey Fatchett: good actor, yeah, he's an excellent actor.
• 1:09:25
  Yeah, Joe, thank you for being on the show. I really appreciate
• 1:09:31
  it. I'm glad that we were able to do this. Where can people
• 1:09:34
  find you online, and I know that you have a new
• 1:09:39
  website community.
• 1:09:42
  Want to tell people about that as
• 1:09:44
  Joe McNally: well, sure over on Instagram, it's really simple
• 1:09:48
  Joe McNally photo, but and Casey will probably you'll probably
• 1:09:53
  send out a little bit of a notice about this. When this
• 1:09:56
  podcast gets published, we have a new site. It's. Of better
• 1:10:00
  pictures with Joe, and it's a little corny. It is what it
• 1:10:06
  declares itself in that title, what it is about. And it's a
• 1:10:12
  growing community that we launched. We did a slow roll out
• 1:10:15
  in December and into January, and people are having a lot of
• 1:10:18
  fun with it. It's a very lively, interactive community that I'm
• 1:10:22
  online with, folks. A lot people send in photos back and forth.
• 1:10:26
  We have critiques. I give out assignments. There's a lot of
• 1:10:30
  video lessons, a whole video library of things that I've done
• 1:10:34
  and talked about. And I also write kind of the equivalence of
• 1:10:40
  a couple of blogs a week offering informal information,
• 1:10:44
  observances, and I react to picture to pictures that people
• 1:10:47
  send in offer advice. It's a real back and forth. It's a two
• 1:10:51
  way street that's proven to be just an enormous amount of fun.
• 1:10:56
  And at this point in my career, you know, I'm not gonna, you
• 1:11:01
  know, photo information is just not particularly valuable unless
• 1:11:06
  you pass it on. Yeah, it's that's the real deal here. So
• 1:11:10
  and so this site is becoming a repository, literally, of
• 1:11:14
  everything I know about photography, and I fully and
• 1:11:17
  completely embrace the notion of just, you know, offering that
• 1:11:21
  up, talking to people, trying to help them make their pictures
• 1:11:25
  better,
• 1:11:26
  Casey Fatchett: it's a great thing. And yes, they definitely
• 1:11:28
  will be including the all that information in the Episode
• 1:11:31
  Notes, as well as a discount code. For anybody who wants to
• 1:11:35
  sign up,
• 1:11:36
  Joe McNally: anybody who listens to Casey's podcast, you get a
• 1:11:39
  discount Exactly.
• 1:11:40
  Casey Fatchett: And so be sure to go and check that out, Joe.
• 1:11:44
  Thank you again for being on the show.
• 1:11:46
  Joe McNally: Thank you, Casey. Appreciate the invite.
• 1:11:54
  Casey Fatchett: Welcome back. Many thanks to Joe McNally for
• 1:11:56
  taking the time to talk about the industry with me. Be sure to
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