In this episode of Your Photography Podcast, we delve into Paul's captivating journey into the world of photography. From his humble beginnings in a high school film photography class to the bustling streets of New York City, Paul shares his evolution as a photographer. Join us as we explore his experiences shooting weddings, collaborating with other photographers, and ultimately finding his niche in aerial photography. Discover the thrill of capturing New York City from dizzying heights and the unique challenges of shooting from helicopters. Tune in for an inspiring conversation about passion, perseverance, and the art of capturing breathtaking imagery from the skies.
Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/beholdingeye/?hl=en
Website
https://www.paulseibertphotography.com/
In this episode of Your Photography Podcast, we delve into Paul's captivating journey into the world of photography. From his humble beginnings in a high school film photography class to the bustling streets of New York City, Paul shares his evolution as a photographer. Join us as we explore his experiences shooting weddings, collaborating with other photographers, and ultimately finding his niche in aerial photography. Discover the thrill of capturing New York City from dizzying heights and the unique challenges of shooting from helicopters. Tune in for an inspiring conversation about passion, perseverance, and the art of capturing breathtaking imagery from the skies.
Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/beholdingeye/?hl=en
Website
https://www.paulseibertphotography.com/
Welcome to your photography podcast, where we immerse ourselves in the diverse world of creative expression with photography and sometimes videography, unveiling insights from portraits and weddings to the heart of what I truly cherish, adventure, sports, photography, and the vibrant tapestry of an active lifestyle. Whether you've been following my adventures or you're new to fstops and shutter speeds, this podcast is your gateway to a treasure trove of knowledge and insights. Together, we'll explore the art of working with clients, brands, capturing the essence of families, athletes, models and products.
This isn't just about capturing moments, it's a guide to Mashable storytelling through your lens. Join us as we explore the intricate facets of photography as a business, uncovering the invaluable tips and tricks of the trade. Learn from our shared experiences, the highs, the lows, the transformative moments that have shaped our path.
This podcast isn't just for photographers, it's a sanctuary for those hungry to deepen their understanding of photography and videography. Whether you're a seasoned pro or you're just starting to find your creative expedition, get ready for a captivating exploration of the art, the business, the spirit of photography. Creativity can be your vehicle and your passport to endless possibilities.
Let's embark on this adventure together. Be sure to subscribe and follow for every episode. Hey, thanks for joining your photography podcast.
If you've been listening to the last few episodes, you've heard me talk about magic mind, I'm still super stoked about it. This stuff is amazing. It has beneficial ingredients like lion's Mane, turmeric, and ashwagandha.
With that said, if you missed last month's offer for the next ten days, you can get 56% off your subscription by going to www.magicmind.com Adamp and use my code Adamp 20 hey guys, welcome to your photography podcast. I am super stoked to welcome Paul Seibert here.
I'm going to let him introduce himself. Hey Adam, thanks so much for having me on. As Adam said, my name is Paul Seibert.
I go by beholding eye on most social platforms. I have been a full time photographer creator for over a decade now. Originally from New York, currently living in Colorado.
I have published a book in 2022 called New York from the Air which kind of puts us into the niche that I am, an aerial photographer using general aviation and helicopters to capture my images. And yeah, I'm happy to be here. Yeah, sweet.
Stoked to have you with. That said, your work is super unique. One, you shoot a lot of black and white images, which is like, and the mood is just.
They're incredible. But two, they are a lot higher than most people are able to capture with a drone because of the limitations and restrictions that drones have. So it's super unique.
Now, I don't know, are you a pilot yourself, or do you coordinate that with someone else? Yeah, no, I am not a pilot. I think the world should be thankful for that, probably, but I don't know. No.
Every time I go up, it costs me an arm and a leg. So, yeah, I have to pay for somebody else to take me up, and I need that helicopter. So we make sure that we make the most of it every time we go up.
For sure. Yeah. You say arm and leg.
How much does that cost? It probably varies, but. It varies. I mean, even in New York, it varies from one company being $900 an hour to another company being $2,400 an hour to another one being, like, $6,000 an hour.
Yeah. Depends on the helicopter, depends on the pilot, depends on the mission that you're thereafter. Yeah, that's cool.
Yeah. I have a buddy that flies, and I know it's not cheap, but I just kind of, for the audience, wanted to them to hear what that. Yeah, that's cool.
So that kind of throws us into the next couple of questions that I usually ask, and that's why. Or what do you enjoy most about photography, and how long have you been doing it, and how did you get started? Yeah. Okay, so how did I get.
I'll start at the beginning. How's that? Yeah, sounds great. Yeah.
I think I first got my hands on a camera. I don't know. I was 14 years old or something like that.
And I was taking a film photography class in high school. I really liked it. The sidebar to that was that at the time, I'm also a musician.
That's what my degree is in. I'm a jazz saxophone player, and so I was pursuing that, and. Okay, nice.
The thought of taking on something else that I was really passionate about was not really. I don't know if it was discouraged, but it wasn't encouraged in my house. My dad was like, hey, look, we're spending a lot of time and energy on this music thing, and if this is where you want to go, then let's take it easy on the photography stuff, because at that time, I mean, film photography was still expensive.
So flash forward. I don't know. Got to be at least 25 years later.
And 2008. I'm now married and not under the supervision of any parental figures. So my wife and I were taking a trip to New Mexico I'd never gone before and had this.
Actually, it's hilarious because I just pulled it out. But this point and shoot camera, little canon power shot, eight megapixel beast, and I never been anywhere like that. So I started taking pictures and I was like, whoa.
I remember how much I like taking pictures. And then that is kind of where the obsession started. Then I would take that little bad boy with me everywhere.
You know, this was when Facebook was starting. So you start sharing pictures and people are, these are great. You should sell prints and don't really pay attention to that much.
And then after a while, I realized how much I really enjoyed taking pictures. So I took my quote unquote, portfolio of all the art that I've taken, like round holes in a brick wall, that kind of stuff, with ivy growing on it, and obviously a little bit more substance to that. But to the only photographer I knew, and she was like, oh, this is great.
You should think about playing around with your depth of field and was giving me pointers, and I was like, well, this is what I'm shooting with. And she said, oh, okay, well, yeah, go out and buy a used camera and learn everything you can. Yeah.
And that was, I don't know, 2000 maybe. It was like, only like a year or so later. And so I did, I bought a used camera.
My first camera camera was a used five d mark one. Oh, nice. That was a good camera.
Yeah, I love that camera. I'm sad I sold it to get another camera just because that's the business. A lot of the times the old one goes out and a new one comes in, and you can't really keep a lot of stuff if you're, it's true.
Struggling to make ends meet as a creator, right? Yeah. So, yeah, that and a 24 to 105 f four lens. And I just started learning everything I could.
So that's kind of how I got into photography. I would say that from that point on, the community aspect of my life and my development group came into play a lot more. That's when Instagram started and I started meeting strangers in New York City to go out and like, what are you doing? Are you going down to meet strangers and take pictures in the city? What's going on? Like, yeah, you know, and honest to like, if I didn't have those people in my life, expanding my own perspective, because first and foremost, I'm like, here's my mission.
And I'm like, let me stay in this. I got to get this shot. Right? Yeah.
And then a lot of the times, as a developing photographer, you will go out and shoot and come back with, like, 35 frames of the same exact thing. Right. And you're kind of like.
You're like, oh, that's great. And then, so what would happen was that we would start posting from the times that we were together, and I'd be like, what? How did you get that? Where'd you get that shot? So I had to force myself, basically, to. I'd still go and get my shot, but then what I would do is I would leave where I was shooting.
I'd walk down the line and see what everybody else was doing and be like, oh, okay. All right. And then in my own time, because I don't think I was full time yet, but I live close enough to the city where I could just drive in in ten minutes.
It just helped me expand my perspective and practice and start to see the best shot. Not the shot. The best shot may not be the shot that I'm going for.
You know what I mean? It may be the shot that. Where I'm like, all right, I got that shot. Let me go see what's going on.
No, that's cool. So from this point, I guess, what got you into doing the aerial stuff? What's that story? Right? Yeah. So, I mean, in New York, there is a company called Fly Nyeon.
They're a helicopter company that's actually out of New Jersey. They used to be called New York on air back in the day. And the people that I followed and admired, people like Miss Hatton and Dave Krugman and JN Silva, these guys are like the ogs of New York.
Right? And so they started doing this, and I was like, oh, my gosh, I want to try and do this one day. And, like, we covered in the opening. Helicopter flights are not cheap.
No. So I got an opportunity in 2015 from a friend who was doing a photo shoot for an aviation magazine and what's called an air to air. So it's two helicopters in the air flying next to each other around landmarks and things like that to capture the helicopter.
So my job was to capture him capturing us. Right. I was like the BTS photographer and the other.
And, yeah, after that, we had some extra time left on the flight, so we just took a loop around the city and hit some landmarks and came back. But I was hooked. Yeah, I came down and started tagging them and everything, which then turned into them offering me a position as a tributing photographer, which meant anytime they had an open seat on a flight, they would call a pool of people to take higher level imagery for them, for advertising and stuff like that.
So it was, like, both a way for me to build my portfolio, but also to help them. And then eventually 2018, about three years after that, I took a position them, and I ran their social media for about six months. Yeah.
And so it was just kind of like, once I realized, like, oh, I can do this, I didn't really want to do anything else. Yeah. But I will say that the only way that I was ready to do the helicopter stuff and shoot manual and be able to adapt to shooting out and then shooting down are two totally different things.
And that happens within seconds. There's not a lot of hovering, despite what you may think. In a helicopter, you can hover, but helicopter pods don't like to hover over millions of people, so you're moving at a clip.
There's a very short window of, like, two to 3 seconds where you better be ready, because here comes your frame. And if you miss it, you have to make the choice now, like, flash forward to when I'm doing this on my own and not on someone else's dime. Right.
I have to make the decision, do I pay for the extra time, or do I just say I missed the shot? I'm an idiot. I wasn't paying attention or I wasn't prepared or whatever. But it's that quick where it's like, if you don't get it, you don't get it, or you pay for more.
But I don't know that I'd be able to do what I do in a helicopter if I didn't have the developmental time of piecemealing together photo shoots where it's either like families and you're inside and you're learning, or you're outside or you're shooting weddings. Weddings are probably, like, the best trainer of how to understand your camera and understand light over maybe anything else, because it's so fast and you have to react and you have to understand what your gear is going to do. You have to understand the light, you have to understand white balance.
There's all these things that you have to understand in order to make it easier for you on the back end of editing thousands of pictures. And, yeah, definitely that learning curve for me in the helicopter was drastically decreased because of the fact that I shot weddings for years. Nice.
That's cool. I think a lot of people don't always, especially if anyone's seen your work right now. They probably don't, or they've stumbled upon your work recently.
They probably wouldn't see the before and all that. And I get it, too. But you get people that are like, well, how did I want to be like you? I'm like, cake.
Well, 20 years later, yeah. Like they say, there's really no such thing as an overnight success, right? I don't even think I've reached that status yet. So I'm in the trenches still.
Everyone has their own story, right? Everybody has their own developmental story that brings them to who they are presently, right? And it's going to be different in a year, probably, if they're really focusing and evolving and trying to learn more as they go along. It's funny that you said that. I take a lot of black and whites.
I've loved black and white images, but it was only this summer that I really started to share a lot consistently, to the point where it took over my feed, where I was in a rut creatively and was like, all right, let me take this opportunity where I'm feeling frustrated to go back to basics and do a light study. And that's really all I was doing. Some of the images were new images, some of them were archived images, but I wanted to learn how to treat the light first, which is something that I had done for a long time with my color images.
A lot of the times I would start the image in black and white to balance the light, to get it the way I wanted to, and then make the adjustments afterwards, because sometimes when you flip back and forth between black and white, then the colors get a lot more punchy and can get a little wonky. So you have to kind of temper it out a little bit. But, yeah, the black and white is funny that you said a lot of people wouldn't know that, what you did to get to the spot based on your current stuff.
And, yeah, it's true. My opinion is we should always be at least trying to learn something new, whether it's in how we shoot, how we see light, how we compose things, how we edit things, the tools that we use. We probably have the largest or the widest breadth of tools available to us right now than anyone's ever had.
And so at least be exploring some of those opportunities and options that are out there. Even if it's scary. You don't have to share everything you do.
You just workshop it until you feel like, oh, this is kind of a new direction. Cool. Let me see how this goes.
Yeah. When you first started with film, did you start on black and white, or did you. I guess the reason why I ask is because I started on film through a high school class, and you're developing, you're doing all your stuff in black and white.
So it was like, yeah, it was all black and white. I just think it's interesting because I think there's a lot that black and white imagery can teach a photographer, and a lot of people that are starting now aren't being forced to learn it that way. It was just kind of an interesting thought that came across my mind as we were kind of just talking about it.
Well, yeah. First and foremost, photography is all about light. Right? I think if you break down that word, something has to do with the mapping of light or something like that, right? That has to be first and foremost, like, how do I want this to look? How do I get this as close to how I want it to look in camera as I possibly can? Right? And nowadays, with digital cameras, we're so lucky to be able to have instant feedback on the back of our camera that if you messed up, your exposure was off or you didn't realize that whatever, the film speed.
Right. How easy is it now just to adjust the ISO for our quote unquote film speed right now as compared to if you screwed something up like that, or your light meter in your manual camera got all sticky and wonky or something broke and you're just like, oh, okay. And everything comes out washed out or something.
It's amazing how, I guess it's just amazing how quickly we can learn nowadays, for sure. Yeah, no, you brought up a good point because I never even like, and it sits back here on the counter or desk. But if you didn't match, because the camera, with the film cameras, they had the ISO or the ASA adjustment for the film, and if you quickly just threw that film in, you didn't pay attention to what speed the film was and the camera was on, and you didn't marry the two settings or whatever speed your film was, all your exposures are going to be wrong.
It's a hefty price to pay. Or it's a lesson that once you do something like that wrong incorrectly once, I hope that you learn from it and don't do it again. But we've all done the thing where we've gone out and shot on JPEG at least once, right? Yeah, it happens.
You do a knucklehead type of move and something like that happens. I've done stuff where, like, a previous shoot, I put the lens on manual focus, and then I'm like, oh, shoot, I got to get that shot. And you pull it out and you're like, firing away.
And then you look back later and the focus wasn't completely off, but it's not spot on, and you're just like, well, those are kind of garbage. Those are never fun to come to. Or when you realize it too, and all of a sudden you're like, oh, gosh, how long have I been shooting on manual? Yeah.
And going back to the ease of where we're at today compared to where we used to be, we didn't used to have the auto focus. My dad, he had a friend that would go photograph motorcycle races and have to manual focus every shot with the rider. I feel pretty fortunate and lucky, but, yeah.
Do you have a favorite lens or look, favorite lens, I'd probably say if I had to choose, I love the 700 and 8200. It's just one of these things that I love that compression. I love having my subject matter stacked up.
I love that. I also love the super wide shots. If I'm flying during the daytime, I have a 15 to 35, and then I have a 70 to 200 on another camera body, and that's because I can't choose between the two of them.
Yeah. So I would say for what I do, although I did just shoot the New York City marathon from a helicopter, and I used the 100 to 500 for the first time. That was bananas.
And those produced some of my, quite possibly my favorite all timers. I'm always going to remember those images and be like, I was super nervous shooting 500 handheld in a moving helicopter. That's cool, though.
Yeah. Thank God I remembered to keep my shutter speed up. Yeah, really pissed.
I think going back to kind of just trying stuff that's new and not showing everyone everything, but trying stuff that you don't see every day. Because I think, especially with social media, that it's easy to follow the trend and not push your creativity because you're trying to just capture the same thing someone else did. But I think that's cool.
Yeah, I feel like that's definitely something I've moved further and further away from. I never really wanted to do the influencer type of thing. It's never been my thing.
I always used my social media just as evidence of my evolution, and I'm sharing that along the way. And whether or not I grew, it didn't really matter to me. I just wanted to be, if someone reached out, I wanted to respond.
If I could give them the hope and an answer for something that I always wanted and didn't always get when I was starting out. So when I was like, if I ever get 5000 followers, I'm answering everybody, but I try and stay true to that. But I think it's interesting.
I have had this thought the last, I don't know, year, eight months to a year about this relationship between what's the difference between an artist and an influencer, right, or someone who considers itself a photographer or whatever, cinematographer, however you're creating your art and like a content creator, right? I think at first I hate the word content. Like it drives me absolutely crazy, feels disposable. It feels like the things that we're doing, that we're sharing, that we're hoping that are going to make a lasting impact are just the latest trend.
I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with following trends. I know it's not for me, but somebody who I admire greatly put it in a way that I love and I've seen it echoed in other areas from other people. And then kind of, I think you start to adapt, right, where we're all taking everything in, right, all the influences around us.
And what this person said was that the world that we live in, this creative realm, this bubble that we live in, there are innovators and then there are those who see that there's value in a certain innovation which creates a trend, and then there are people that perpetuate that trend and that's needed in the ecosystem for the innovators to be successful, right? It's almost like a proof of concept, right? I'm going to try something that no one else has done before and then somebody's like, oh my God, that's amazing. And then for like three months you hear the same voiceover on a real, I'm a photographer and I took this picture, or I'm proud of this one and this one and definitely this one. And you start to see the people that are right on the edge of being innovator, like the trendspotters.
And once they do something, you're like, oh, here, that's caught on now. And now it's going to go for the next two months. That's all I'm going to see.
Right? Yeah. I think we all get trapped at some point in that cycle of, this is how I make and doing this and deals and being present on social media, which I'm present on social media, and I will work with brands if it's something that I believe in, but my living is working with brands necessarily, not seeking it out. I'd rather focus on my art and my development.
And if it resonates with people and that gets me a job, then I'm so happy. But I'm more interested in doing something that's never been done before. Yeah, I don't know.
You can see that in your work. There's a difference. You know what I mean? At least I can see it.
And I would think most people could. But you see that in your work. I think so.
Thanks, man. Yeah, thanks. Mission accomplished.
All right. I can retire now. No, don't stop.
That's cool. Do you have a favorite project you worked on? You mentioned a. I mean, I think I probably have a couple, and some of them I didn't get paid to do it.
Like I just mentioned that got the New York City marathon from a helicopter. And that was just because my partner, who's a cinematographer, he and I spent the last year trying to show that we can capture sporting events from above in a way that is less about the news of the day and broadcast. Kind of like, boom, like, here's a shot.
And more artistically to help aid in storytelling and whatever, internal, external usage in the leagues and things like that, or the teams. So we thought that marathon would be a great thing to shoot as we did a culminating. We did a number of shoots over sporting events last year in 2000 and 20,002.
I did a, to my knowledge, the highest open door helicopter flight over New York City, which we went up to 15,000ft. And that's cool. That was sick.
That was like a two year planning project to do that shoot. And then of course, the book that launched in 2022 as well. I'd been published in a bunch of collaborative books before, but this one was my solo, first solo photo book with published by Rosoli Books.
And if you know Razoli or you don't know Razoli, Rosoli is like, they're famous for the quality of their books, their art books and their lifestyle books are like, they're amazing. And so it's like one of those kind of career. Oh, cool.
Yeah. Can I technically add author to my bio now? But yeah, those are probably that. Those reside at the top of my head for the most recent.
In the last year, 15 months that I've been working on stuff, those are still in the forefront of like, this is the coolest. That's cool. For those that don't know, 15,000ft is high.
This is real high. You said it was a two year planning. Can you summarize kind of what went into that? Yeah, sure.
I mean, it was also two years because at the time there was a stint there when I was moving across the country, basically in early 2021, a friend of mine is a pilot and he took me on a fixed wing little Cessna flight over Manhattan and we went up to 10,500ft and I was like, oh. And I saw New York differently at that point. That's when I started to realize how cool it would be to showcase the relationship between man and how much stuff is crammed in into this tiny little neck and small little islands that make up New York City.
Yeah. And so I basically was like, I got to go higher because I want to see this relationship between the geography of the New York City area and then how man has just absolutely mashed this place. Like, there's so many people, right? There's 7 million people living on this 13 miles island, right? Yeah, that's crazy.
I moved, right. And then come to the end of 2021, I started talking with my cinematographer, but the time was doing his own thing. He was working in sports and doing NFL sideline videography and stuff like that, but he's always wanted to get back in helicopters.
And I'm like, I had this idea, it's going to be crazy, but I think we should go after it. And he's like, yeah, absolutely. And so the planning started where I've flown over New York for coming up on nine years now.
And so I know when the air clears out and things like set. Yeah, I had to set my sights on end of the year. Like November ish is usually when the air gets really nice and clear.
And I know that my idea was to shoot sunrise, so then you're talking about like a perpendicular light to the actual island. And we did not get the weather that we had hoped for. It was like, it's 75% humidity and much warmer.
And so it took a lot to get to the images to where they are, which I'm happy about, but still, it was like, oh, man, I wish it wasn't. So I was, I kept in contact with guy who owned a helicopter from when I was working with Fly Nyon in New Jersey, and he had started his own, more of a production helicopter service for feature films and television, stuff like that, where they use shotovers. And I asked him, is this something? Can we do this? Well, yeah, let me look into it.
And then it became like, yes, we can do this. And then what is it going to take? And laws state that the pilot has to be on oxygen after 10,000ft and technically we had to be on oxygen from like 12,000ft up. But we had done, Alex and I, my cinematographer, had done a couple of flights in the Rockies out here at like 13, 14,000ft, and there was never any oxygen offered.
So we were like, we should be fine at 15,000ft. That's kind of the most abridged version I can give you of the story behind it. There's a lot more detail that went into it, but as far as the planning goes, you have to provide a flight plan and all these other things and how you want to see this unfold.
And, yeah, I think probably the thing that I learned most out of that one was how surprised I was with what I considered to be like my broll shots, because I had a whole. I wanted to basically go up incrementally and go further north every thousand feet, so that I would have all five boroughs at one point in the frames, which happened. It worked out.
But the other images, when we were at 15,000ft and we kind of just went down to midtown and started to circle our way down to me were some of the more compelling images. I think it probably confirms what I'm always preaching, which is like, if you're going to be a creator in the space and you're going to depend on any type of revenue for this, is that you have to be adaptable, even in times when you're planning as down to the minute, because you're paying for every minute. Okay, well, next time.
I know that if I'm ever going up that high, I want to spend some more time checking out the view and less rigid. But yeah, you're almost 3 miles above, so you're getting so much. And it's definitely wild.
There are definitely a couple of moments where I just had put the cameras down and just soaked it in so that I had it in my mind that this is something special. I don't know, it's kind of like going like 80 miles an hour in an airplane with the window open. It's like you're in a convertible, but you're 3 miles above the ground.
Yeah, that's cool. You mentioned something about. And it kind of just stuck out with me because I feel like having everything planned down to the t to the very minute and things can kind of change or whatever.
And I don't know how much commercial work you've done, but I feel like sometimes I would say for myself, I've had clients where the client doesn't fully understand that things need to be somewhat flexible. Because they're like, why are we changing plans? And you kind of have to really educate why? Because things. Have you ever had any situations with clients or anything like that where it's like, why is the plan changed? No, definitely.
I did a job through, like, a marketing firm for Tropicana orange juice. Yeah. And they approached me because they saw some of my Manhattan hench pictures.
If anybody doesn't know what Manhattan Henge is, a couple times a year, the sun will set directly on the east to west of all the streets in Manhattan. And so it's like this perfect moment where the sun is directly centered over the streets. And they wanted to do something know.
Yeah, they wanted to replicate a Manhattan hench style shoot with someone, like, just free floating, holding, and it was like a celebrity, like, holding a small bottle of tropicana. And I was supposed to balance the sun and make it. And so I talked them through the logistics of what to expect.
I asked questions like, well, how far away is this person going to be from me? And they're like, oh, you'll be on, like, a six foot platform. And I'm like, all right, look, there's no way that I can get a Manhattan henge, like, a clear sun, clear, just sun, circle, sun, orb, whatever you want to call it, right. Without using a longer lens.
And I'm like, you can get this type of shot. And we did a test shoot, and the person who was my direct contact was like, yeah, this was great. This will be good.
And then so the day comes, the shoot comes, and so I am, like, off camera flash to light her, because I'm shooting directly into the sun and blah, blah, blah. All these things. Like, I need you to move it up just a little bit.
Go down a little bit. Hold your breath. Stop moving all around and get the shot.
Go in. I'm starting to edit, and the team lead comes up to me, and it's like, okay, well, where's the Manhattan Hen shot? And I'm like, what? What are you talking know? And she's like, well, where's the other shot? And I'm like, what do you mean? This is the. Like I went through, and I looked at the person who was my point of contact, and I was like, did she not tell you that that shot is impossible? From what we were like, we went through this whole thing.
We had a whole day. When we test shot, like, I sent them examples. It was approved by someone.
I don't know who was approved by, but, yeah, I mean, there was adaptation there. But then also on the flip side of it, there was like, I had to stand up for myself at the same time because this person was about to kind of sandbag me for not getting the job done. And I'm like, it's physically impossible.
You cannot do that shot. And you were briefed on it. I sent images in.
They were approved. So I turned to her, and then I was like, well, then who approved the images? Aren't you the one who's in charge of this? Yeah. And then that was the end of the conversation.
She was like, oh, okay. Yeah, I was as, on me, it's interesting. So adaptation, but then also owning.
I've had other shoots where I'm like, you can't do this. It's just not possible to do, whether it's working with a developer or something like that to create assets for a new building. And the building is super low.
And just so you know, I'm shooting from a helicopter. You know that, right? Oh, yeah. I don't know.
We know. We know. Okay.
And just so you know, I can't fly that low around this. So let's figure out exactly what you need. And it was still, people have something in their mind and they don't let it go, that vision, even though I'm saying to you, we're looking at each other right now, and I'm like, that's not going to happen.
Do you still want to do this? And they're like, no, absolutely. Yeah, we want to do this. I've told you.
Okay, like, sign here saying that you heard me say. Right, exactly. Yeah.
And you're like, are you sure that. Yeah. And so I think what I've learned over the years is over communicate, especially if you're doing something for a commercial client where if there's ambiguity that isn't addressed prior to the photo shoot, and the photo shoot goes in a different direction, someone, and most likely, if you don't understand that, you should have said something.
Or in the photo shoot, you were like, okay, look, we need to take a time out here and reassess because things are moving in a different direction. I need to make sure if you're okay with this or whatever, but it's better to do it prior because then when it comes down to was like, oh, they may want to do a reshoot. And this client said, well, they may want to do a reshoot.
And I was like, okay, well, and this was like a couple of weeks after the fact. Yeah. And I was like, well, you understand that I don't live where the shoot is right.
And they're like, yeah. I'm like, okay, well, it's going to be cost more costs associated with this. They're like, well, the client's not happy.
And I'm like, well, I told you all the limitations prior to. And I'm like, and I, a long time ago, stopped being in the business of paying for other people's mistakes. So what do you want to do here? I can compromise and not charge you an arm and a leg or recharge you licensing fees because you've already paid for the images that you want to license.
But at the same time, you have to be able to understand that to the best of your ability, you've communicated all the things that could happen, all the things that you would need to adapt to, which could change some of the outcome. Be comfortable in saying, well, look, this didn't go according to how you wanted it, and next time maybe you'll communicate a little bit more. Yeah, I would say they kind of just caveat off that.
Make sure you're communicating with the clients that you might find yourself working with. For anyone that's listening, that finds themselves in that situation. Yeah.
If you could change anything about the photography industry, what might that be? I saw this question. You sent this question along, and I was like, kind of thinking about this one stuck out to me. So I'm glad that you asked.
I don't know that I would change necessarily anything about the photography business. I would change how business is done in general this day and age. I feel like as creators, and I don't think it's just us as creators, but what we produce is seen as content, as something that's disposable, as an elective.
Right. And as such, a lot of the times, communication becomes an elective. Whether or not you want to just say someone's not responding, or we say someone ghosts you and just doesn't respond when they get the answer that they want or they don't want.
Or if it's like I'm approaching someone, like on a cold call and just being like, hey, we start a conversation and then you bring in budget into the conversation, and then the conversation stops. Yeah. I think that there is an incredible amount of.
To me, that's the most disrespectful thing. I'll just put it that way. Nothing gets me.
For the most part. I'll say, like 70% to 75% of the time, I'm pretty darn laid back. Yeah.
But I get heated, especially if someone asked me to write something up for them. Oh, hey, we're interested in this. Could you present, come up with a couple of ideas and blah, blah, blah? Absolutely.
Sure. So now I'm taking a day's worth of work out from what I'm doing to create something in the hopes. Obviously that's the business, right? That's what we do.
Request for proposals, right? Rfps. And so you're doing that. That's just part of the job.
But then to not get a response, it's bad business to me because to me, I'm also a possible client for these people. And so what I'm getting is in how this company is run and whether or not I get the job or not. Now we're talking about, do I want to patronize this company because of how poorly the people behind the scenes look at that are hired to be agents for this company that you want to be associated with, did their job, and then you're like, does anybody really care for me? That's my biggest pet peeve in business is people not responding.
I get it. We're all busy. We all have limited bandwidth.
But if you had time to read it, time to read it. It takes 10 seconds. Thanks for reaching out.
We're not going to take this route. We'll keep you in mind for the future. How many times I've heard, we'll keep you in mind for the future? I don't expect anybody to keep me in mind for the future, but the fact that you responded and just was like, hey, look, it's not going to work out.
Things changed, whatever. Yeah, I think I probably burned a bunch of bridges because I refused to let somebody ghost me. It's been two weeks.
I haven't heard anything. What's going on here? And they're like, oh, yeah, sorry for the delay. Dubbed my toe on the bed last a couple of weeks ago and I haven't really gotten over it.
Yeah, my dad shared a thing with me recently that was about, it was like a person was like, and this is just kind of, just kind of funny. But a neighbor was like, hey, could I borrow your lawnmower? He's like, no, we're having chicken tonight. And he's like, what's the got to be borrowing your lawnmower? Any excuse is a good, if you're looking for an excuse, any is good.
But yeah, I don't know. I guess the thing is there's no reason that they need to even have an excuse. They just respond.
Or if you have an excuse, it better be really good. My mom's had cancer. I don't necessarily need an excuse.
Yeah, I don't necessarily need an excuse. I just want the courtesy, especially if I've prepared something for you. That means I'm, like, going into archives.
I'm writing stuff out. I'm making a presentation for you. Like a pitch deck type of situation that takes time.
It does, yeah. Depending on the client you might. Like you said in the opener, I'm a lifelong New Yorker.
Time is a commodity to us, so it doesn't matter where I live. That's ingrained in me. If I just wasted 6 hours on this thing or whatever, 4 hours.
That's a lot of money that I could potentially be earning. If I was getting paid. If I had a job, I'd get paid for that time.
Right, right. That's a long way to answer what I would change. No, I liked it.
Your answer. I liked it more than I think some of the previous people have answered it, but generally everyone's answering it. The same as either has something to do with business, transparency in price transparency or within clients and letting them know what they should be paying or lots of different things.
But you went into it further than most. I often do. I'm a little bit blown winded most of the time.
No, it was good, though. It was good because some people are like, I don't know how to say what I want to say. I'm like, well, it's fine.
Right? But you kind of had it. I know what I like, and I know what I don't like, and that's for sure. The gray area may take me longer to answer, but the things I don't like, forget it.
They're always right on the tip of my tongue. Nice. I think more people need to be that way.
But what goals for photography or life do you got? What goals? Yeah, that's a gray one right there. No, but I think definitely. All right, I'll put it this way.
As a musician and as a jazz musician, there is this goal that when someone hears your tone and how you're playing your instrument, that they know that it's you. Yeah, right. And the greats have that.
Right. When you're hearing somebody and you're like, oh, that's Charlie Parker, or that's Miles Davis, or that's Dexter Gordon, you know, within seconds who that is. My goal is to leave a lasting impression that when you see my image throughout my career, that there is a similar quality to that.
Whether or not it's earlier on in my development or later on in my development, that there's like a thread of authenticity that goes through, that connects all of those and that people can look at something and be like, oh, that's one of Paul's shots. I would like there to be a little bit of a legacy. If I'm doing it right and I'm doing the craft justice, that either helps other people understand photography more or have a greater appreciation for it.
Yeah, I like that. I think something that everyone should try to strive for, and I think when we get caught up in making quote unquote content, it gets lost. Last question, but do you have any tips or advice for anyone beginning photography or wanting to start a photography career? Tips.
I think we covered a lot of that. Learn as much as you can. Be.
Adaptable advice. Make sure that you have thick skin because you hear no more times than you hear yes. And when you hear yeses consecutively, figure out why the yeses are coming and focus on that and grow from those yeses.
Also grow from the no's because it may be maybe your work's not there, or maybe you didn't communicate well enough to your prospective client that this is why this. When you're doing like a budget breakdown or something like that, that this is what this costs. I think those are probably the top two.
I think if we do top three, I would say get involved in community. Be an active member, not just taking from community, but giving back to community. If you've learned from other people, then pay that forward and be a decent human being to your fellow creators.
Because it's tough out here for everyone. We all go through peaks and valleys of this is the best year ever, and then the next year you can be like, last year was the best year ever and this is the worst year ever. And sometimes it doesn't have rhyme or reason.
It's just a matter of either you doing something completely different and you're having to spend time educating people on why it's worthwhile, worth the investment, worth the chance. I think that's probably one of the larger parts of being a creator, is that we're always wanting to evolve. But if you want to be successful and consistent with income, sometimes you have to do the same thing over and over again.
And then, I guess, figure out what successful is to you. Is it financial? Is it emotional and mental health? Because those are super important. If you're not happy, like if you doing 50 weddings a year is just another job, but you get to do it with a camera and you're miserable, is it worth it? It might be, yeah.
Not for me. But I think that those people are super business savvy. And eventually, if you're doing 50 weddings a year, you're going to have a whole crew of people, like, editing for you and doing amazing things.
Yeah, I never reached that level. Right? Yeah. I was like, this is crazy.
I can't do this anymore. I was going to say, if you're reaching that many weddings a year, I would raise your prices so that you could cut back on the amount of you're doing. You're cut it back to 20 exactly a year and give back your time and still make the same amount.
But yeah, sweet. Thanks for being here, Paul. Where can people find your work? You can find my work Instagram.
I go by beholding. I same with Twitter. Those kind of like flip back and forth between.
You'll see a little bit of a difference between there. Obviously, most of the things are in a link tree, but if you want to check out what my partner and I are doing in the sports realm, check out back left media. That's our aerial production company, and we're spectrum wide there for those that are interested.
Yeah, that's where you can find me, behind this desk most of the time. Nice. Yeah, same.
All right, well, again, thanks for being here, Paul Adam, thank you for having me, man. It was great. Yeah.
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