“I’m not good at selling either.” He said and put on his serious face. “But I watched the Sales Table and it doesn’t look all that hard.”

At most of the old school Assembly Line Portrait studios the Photographer and the Passer were not friends and seldom had the same goals.  The Photographer’s job was to take a set number of portraits as quickly a possible and the Passer’s job was to try and sell those portraits.  Most of those old Companies didn’t pay the Photographer any Commission on Sales, so there was very little reason for the Photographers to care what the images looked like or if anyone ever bought them.

The New Company has resolved the problem of Photographers and Passers not getting along by making them one and the same.  And this is why my days are numbered.  As a Photographer I tend to be a bit of a prima donna and I have no love for people who come back and tell me how much my pictures suck.  The idea of getting this kind of feedback firsthand is not a pleasant one.

On the whole I’m pretty mellow about it all now.  I’m no longer stressed out, I’ve pretty much reached the Acceptance stage.  I haven’t changed the way I take portraits, though I have heard stories of a couple of other Photographers who have pretty much tossed in the towel.  If anything, I’m tweaking what I’m shooting in preparation for my own Shoots.  I might be stressing a bit about getting those Accounts of my own.

I’ve started to work a bit more on the Fine Art Photography side of my photographer dreams.  This is kind of like being a writer in that you work on short stories to pay the rent while you toil away on the Great American Novel.  There are many ways to make money with a camera, but since high quality cameras are now so cheap and Craigslist is free, there are a LOT of people now proclaiming themselves to be Professional Photographers.

Of course, it’s not really an Us vs Them kind of thing, we were all newbies at one point.  It’s just that in the old days creating a good image took a bit more work-now it seems that anyone can point an image capture devise in the right direction and create a sell-able image.  The Passers like to tell the Subjects that it’s the difference between a snapshot and a portrait, but it’s a difference that has less and less meaning.

The New Company has made it clear that the ways of the Old Company are history.  This means that the bulk of us Old Timers will be free to pursue other interests.  But not all.  A surprising number of my fellow Assembly Line Portrait photographers are embracing the whole Shot-N-Show idea.  The general feeling among most of them is: hey, how hard can it be? Having been there once or twice myself, I’ll say that it can be very hard indeed.

I worked with a Passer recently who crunched some numbers and came up with a simple solution.  All you have to do is sell $1,000 worth of portraits to 10 customers a day and you’ll make about $160 in commission.  Fine, so we had 11 customers that day and sold a little over $300.  See the problem there?

Taking a portrait can be challenging, getting the posing correct, obtaining a nice express, making sure the lighting is where it should be, and so on and so forth.  But with practice, it can be done in a matter of minutes.  Some Subjects take longer than others, and some give the same expression no matter what.  In any case, my job takes a few minutes.

Selling portraits is a whole other kettle of fish.  People can’t make up their minds about which portrait they like-though they can instantly make up their minds that they are NOT GOING TO SPEND ANY MONEY.  So the Passers job is to ease them into the decision to buy something.   This is often done with the standard Q&A method of narrowing down who they want to give pictures to and what size they want to give-then you whip up a package and give them a price.

I am terrible at this stuff.  Do you want anything? No? Have a nice day.

And so I am working on other things.  Taking images of the odds and ends I find in my travels has always been one of the side benefits of the job, so I am turning these images into Fine Art.  I have been told many times over the years that I have a good eye, so we’ll see if anyone is willing to pay for my artistic vision.  Hey, they don’t call them starving artists for nothing.

Artistic success is like any other, it takes work and dedication.  And like all professional photography, creating the image is the easy part, the fun part.  Getting eyes on those images and buyers to open their wallets can take a bit more effort.

Did I mention that I’m not really not good at that whole selling thing?

“So you mean this alligator was really 13 inches wide and a few millimeters thick and lived in a monochromatic electronic universe totally unlike the one we all inhabit?” I say as I lean in to look at the digital photo.  She just gives me a go-to-hell look.

I remember being greatly impressed by the images that Ansel Adams created.  I loved all those ‘nature’ shots of mountains and trees and rocks.  I remember thinking something along the lines of, I could have taken that photograph, if only I had been there.  But then I read one of Ansel Adams books on making fine art prints. Taking the picture was often difficult, involving scouting out locations, hauling heavy equipment, trimming trees and brush that would distract from the composition and then getting back to his lab with his 8×10 glass plates still in one piece. Once in the lab Adams went about the endless dodging and burning and cropping that went into bring his finial visions to reality.

I remember feeling a bit betrayed by the fact that Adam’s prints were not an accurate representation of reality.  I’m sure that some of this feeling came from my own photographic efforts, which were nothing more than snapshots straight out of the camera.  The idea that a carefully selected composition could then be turned into something more than a mere photograph was an idea that had never occurred to me.

There was a big uproar about ethics and nature photographers a few years back when a photographer used Photoshop to merge a half dozen separately captured images into one scene with every African cliche he could find.  Some photographers have this odd idea that an image out of the camera is a sacred artifact not to be tampered with, does this mean Ansel Adams was a liar and a cheat because he manipulated his photographs?

It’s worth noting that the same Assembly Line Portrait Photographer who insisted on the authenticity of her images also thought it was alright to call herself a Vegetarian while still eating eggs and drinking milk, neither of which, need it be said, is a vegetable.   Let’s just say her ethical standards need a little fine tuning.

In the opening pages of David duChemin’s Vision & Voice I find out that I’m not alone in thinking it odd that every photograph I see is not exactly as it was created in the camera.  But David is used to this questions, and says that there is nothing real, per se, about any photograph.  The Photographer decides what to put in the frame and what to leave out.  What settings to use in the camera that will effect how the scene is recorded.  What lens to use, which determines how much of the scene is captured and how much of that scene is in focus.  In the good old days, there was also the choice of film, which effected the tone, grain, and quality of the image.  We now have near infinite choices with modern photo editing software for use once the image does leave the camera.

A news reporter might want an image that is as true to reality as possible, but a fine art photographer or a portrait photographer?  Well, anything and everything goes.  Well, almost anything and everything.  At some point you have to stop shooting every random item that you wander by, and start to think, really think, about what you want your images to say.

People my age no longer appear on sitcoms, though some make cameos as parents.  An annoying number of people close to my age have died recently, reminding me that I should have already achieved any level of glory I was likely to reach and that it really is all downhill from here.  I still have these odd ideas that I might get a flat in London one day, or have a Hawaiian Shirt shop in Maui, or at the very least, take Beach Portraits in North Carolina.  I think about moving to Edinburgh, just so I can sit in a coffee shop and finish one of those books I’m always talking about but never actually writing.

I’m following a good deal of David duChemin’s advice about tweaking my images in Adobe Lightroom, a brilliant program that I have fallen madly in love with.  At some point the problem becomes not so much how to make my images look better, but how to capture better images in the first place.  It was pretty embarrassing while looking at the photos of my fellow Assembly Line Portrait Photographers to see how many images we had captured that were all but identical.   And not just the portraits we shoot for work, but our personal images, many of which show a longing to be an artist, but an eye for the mundane.

So, as Bill and Ted noted near the end of one of their movies, it’s time to stop playing around and get good.  Hmm, wonder where I can find a cheap used time machine?

“Pretty much so.” I say.

The Button Pusher part of the New Company Training was dead easy.  So easy in fact that we spent the better part of the two days sitting around bullshitting about taking portraits, doing fine art, and telling each other why their pictures suck, while our own are the pinnacle of photographic expression.

This particular Assembly Line Portrait Photographer used to be a Real Photographer and his portfolio was filled with images of famous people from the worlds of sports and entertainment.  When asked why he gave up these shoots where he could make more in a week than we make in a year, he mumbled something about there being too much competition.   That’s a long fall down to the bottom working for the New Company.

When I first started doing this kind of work, lo those many years ago, I was a simple Button Pusher.  The Studio had fixed lighting, fixed focus, and the camera could only be used in the studio-it was a monster long roll film camera useless for anything else.  This was not a setup that needed a Photographer, it was classic Button Pusher territory.  In other words, it was an idiot proof studio that virtually anyone with a few hours of training could use to create salable images.

Most of the Companies I worked for after that hired actual photographers and gave us real world studio photography equipment that you might find in any portrait studio anywhere.  With the exception of The New Company, who once again wants nothing but Button Pushers and used specialized equipment that could only be used in their idiot proofed studios.

I really got spoiled at most other places.  In the past few years I have been given all kinds of really nice Digital Cameras, several times they were given to me New In The Box.  This showed a level of trust unheard of by The New Company.  Many of those smaller outfits went so far as to say I could use the camera myself, so long as I didn’t damage it in the process, in which case I would have to pay for it.  I never damaged a camera while using it and I captured countless images for my personal use as I traveled near and far taking portraits for my employers.  This was a system that worked well for all concerned.

Once I went to work for the Old Company, they were pretty strict about what they wanted as well.  You were not officially allowed to use the camera, but many people did.  There were also a ton of rules about how to take portraits and they were really uptight about the poses, cropping, and exposure.  Then they went mad for a short time and told us to do anything and everything we wanted and shoot as many portraits as we could so the Subjects would have as many choices as possible.  Then they got bought out.

The New Company is a lot more Old School Assembly Line Portraits.  They work under the assumption that all of their Button Pushers are idiots.  Case in point:One of the instructions in their manual says not to look at the sun through the camera’s viewfinder.  It seems to be OK to look at the sun without using the viewfinder.  If the New Company is really hiring mind numbingly stupid people maybe this kind of warning is necessary.  If they really think I am mind numbingly stupid, this kind of thing pisses me off.

The new Studio has two fairly high quality DSLRs.  But once again the file and rank cannot be trust to pour piss out of a bucket.  The camera has been locked down in several places, once with a hot glue gun, a couple times with black tape, and once with a mechanical lock.  The lights have also been taped so that we won’t be tempted to change the power settings.  But just in case we go to the trouble of circumnavigating their preventive tampering methods, the Passer’s sales computer is programmed to reject any image that doesn’t meet the New Company mandated camera settings.

So what the dumb fucks at The New Company have done is taken a $2,000 DSLR camera and turned it into a $200 point and shoot camera.  God damn, why didn’t they just give us a fucking iPhone and have done with it?

The Passer side of the training was filled with a lot of really boring shit.  Redundant paperwork.  Writing out prices by hand.  Dealing with varied and sundry computer problems.  And general mass confusion on the Passer’s-and my-part as to what is supposed to be going on.

The Button Pusher’s part is all but irrelevant and will take maybe five minutes per sitting.  The Passer’s part has become a confusing nightmare of endless paperwork that will take about twenty minutes per sitting.  The New Company has gone above and beyond the call of duty in making this a job where the turnover rate is going to be close to a hundred percent every sixty days or so.

And this doesn’t even mention the real deal breaker-that we may all end up being paid the minimum wage for six on-the-clock hours a day.  For those of you playing at home that’s about 43 dollars a day, before they take out for tax and social security.  Oh, and the average week is usually four days, sometime only two or three.

“Yeah, I figure they have about a month left.” I say and shrug.

Still hanging in there with The New Company, that deadline when everything becomes impossible to deal with keeps getting pushed back a few weeks and I keep dragging my feet about doing anything else.  So I’ll try working a few of the new Shoots and see what the pay looks like.  I’m still not at all optimistic about any of it.

Since we are all Old Pros, we are not being given the normal two weeks of Training that a New Hire would get.  We had to watch an hour or two worth of videos online and we’re having a two day workshop where we are learning to setup and tear-down the new Studio.  It’s a pretty simple affair with a severely limited set of lighting and posing options compared to the Studio I’ve been using with the Old Company.  It is hot off the assembly line though and the cameras and lights are brand new.  Yes, I have two cameras, a bit of a change from most of the Studios I have used over the years where if your camera broke you were SOL.

Of course, the shiny new Studio is irrelevant.  They still want the Photographers to sell pictures and the Passers to take Portraits.  And if we don’t want to do that, the door is right over there.  Like everyone else, I’ve known the door was there for several months, but I have been pointedly trying not to look at it.

Working for the New Company is like stepping back in time twenty years.  The Studio, the Sales Table, and endless newsletters filled with self congratulations so reminds me of all those other Companies that thought they were the greatest thing since sliced bread-right before they went out of business.  The fact of the matter is that Assembly Line Portraits is a dying industry.  Free images from cell phones and ever cheaper Pro level digital cameras are going to continue to make our customer base less and less impressed with what we have to offer.

About 15 years or so ago, I did my first Shoot-N-Show.  I didn’t do well.  I shot a lot of Nonbuyers, I wasn’t good at making sells.  But I was impressed with the software the tiny Permanent Studio used.  I had been working in the Traveling Studio division, so I didn’t use any software.  The Sales Software was classic Graphic User Interface.  You clicked on a image of an 8×10 or a 5×7 and dragged it to one side of the display.  The computer automatically-and instantaneously-calculated the price for the package with that added or removed photo.  The Subject saw the price and could make an informed buying decision at that time.

I’m not a salesperson, but I am a pretty damned good software user.  My own favorite Portrait Sales software is ProSelect, an amazing bit of business that allows you to choose images, create composites, play slideshows, set prices, and crunch the numbers once you have the package put together-among other things.  My only gripe is that it doesn’t have a spreadsheet function where you can see the totals for a day’s or a week’s sales.  Still, ProSelect is by far the best photo selling software I have ever used.

The New Company has different ideas about Selling.  They want the Passer, and the Photographers forced to take up the role of Passer, to crunch all the numbers by hand.  And you have to calculate several sets of numbers to compare the prices for Basic, Canvas, Retouching, etc.  This is an even more drastic step back in time than the minimalist Portrait Studio that is one step up from a Photo-booth at an amusement park.  I can’t even remember the last time I used a real world calculator or wrote anything more than my signature in longhand.  I’m sure all The Old Company Passers are in the same boat.

For the most part, we’re a pretty curmudgeonly lot.  One of my best weeks ever I was working with a couple of the best Passers in the Area.  We were running high averages and the sales total for the week for over $25,000-where a normal week was closer $15,000 and often a lot less.  So what did we do?  W bitched and moaned about the five people who didn’t spend two hundred dollars on pictures.

I don’t think there are going to be any $25.000 weeks with the New Company.  I don’t think there will be many $10,000 weeks with the New Company.  I have my doubts about $5,000 weeks.  And I think that is where the New Company will finally winnow out the last of the Old Company holdouts.   It won’t take too many $85 paychecks to push the rest of us out the door.

Sigh.  Everything is going to be alright.

“Really?” I say and turn the book around so he can read the title which says Confessions of An Atheist Buddhist. “We’re in a Baptist church, how many Buddhists or Atheists am I likely to offend?”

Over the years I have read all manner of books while I have been working.  The topics have covered a wide range of passing and enduring interests.  Murder mysteries, science fiction, and memoirs have been the most common themes, but just about any topic might strike my fancy.  The Atheist Buddhist book was pretty damned cool.

My recent reading has lead me to the slightly more practical side, though anyone who knows me will realize that I am never all that practical.  Still, it is good to think about the future, even for those of us who kind of drift into it and hope for the best.

As a photographer I have tried my hand at a few different photographic styles.  Not all have been successful, but I like to think that a few of my images are great.  I could tell myself they were at least ‘good.’  That is until I tried to submit a few of them to a Microstock Agency, where 80 out of a 100 of my images were reject for the usual reasons of Overprocessed, Too Much Noise, and Subject Not Suitable for Stock.  As a result my desires to make a living selling microstock images met with limited results and a lot of disappointment.  Looking back, it’s a wonder they accepted the ten or so images they accepted.

At least part of my problem was how I viewed stock photography, and microstock photography in particular.  On the scale of photography, with Fine Art Platinum Prints being at the top and the button pusher down at Wal-Mart being at the bottom, microstock ranked in my mind below the scale in the same neighborhood as the casual snapshot everyone has taken of a flower, a sunset, or an animal at the zoo.  Wrongo.  Even now I’m still amazed that the people who make a living selling images in bulk treat their profession like an art form.

I’ve been reading Photographically Speaking, a rather high handed look at the world of fine art photography and what it takes to create an image that a ‘reader’ will view and be able to interpret in the way that the Artist wants it to be interpreted.  This is a serious book with a lot of high concepts and a lot of ten dollar words.  It is filled with odd and interesting images that show what the author means when he speaks of being conscious about what goes in the frame.  There’s a lot Zen here as he talks about being Mindful while creating an image.

I’ve also been reading Taking Stock, a book about the fine art of making thousands of dollars from great images that have been uploaded to a microstock agency.  Amazingly, Taking Stock covers much of the same ground as Photographically Speaking, right down to the idea that your images need to have a clear and easily read message to be successful.  The main difference seems to be that Photographically Speak does a lot of talking about theories and ideas, while Taking Stock takes you through the exact steps you need to follow in Photoshop or Lightroom to create images that will be accepted, and ultimately sold, by microstock agencies.

I’m guessing that the main focus of Photographically Speaking is to help you become a Fine Art Photographer or at the very least, to help you understand what separates Art from Snapshot.  To be honest, many of his shots of rocks in the desert and seemingly random landscapes don’t exactly speak to me.  They serve to illustrate his point, but they tend to leave me cold.

On the other hand, many of the examples of successful Stock Images are downright stunning.  So I am left with mixed feelings about both books.  The book on how to create Art is filled with images that seem to have no reason for being other than the Photographer’s desire to express himself artistically-whatever that might mean.  While the book on microstock is all about creating images that will have a better chance of being accept at a microstock agency and hopefully make the Photographer some cold, hard cash.  Should you spend your artistic efforts for an image that will sell for a dollar or less?

I can guess that the Fine Art Photographer is also interested in money, but he makes it clear that mere money is not a good enough reason to try and create Art.  David duChemin appear to be all about Learning, not about Earning.  While Rob Sylvan’s book has dollar signs on the cover and talks about Photos That Sell.

Maybe the differences aren’t all that big, both men sell the artwork they create. Rob has one stock image that has made him $13,000 and David sells his fine art prints for $400 each in editions of fifty.    Clearly both of them know how to turn a profit with their cameras.

I think I’ve benefited from reading both books. Photographically Speaking: A Deeper Look at Creating Stronger Images (Voices That Matter) is all about taking the time to think about what you are trying to do when you create an image.  While Taking Stock: Make money in microstock creating photos that sell tells you how, with enough time and patience, you can make good money from selling those carefully created images that carry a clear meaning.

On the whole I’d rather be David duChemin and travel the world pursuing my own visions.  In the meantime, I’m going to see if I can get a few more images accepted by the microstock agencies and see if I can follow in Rob Sylvan’s footsteps.

Of course, if anyone wants to send me to Africa or Argentina or Venice-or wherever, I’d willing to get my passport renewed.

“Why should I?” I say and shrug. But then take a deep breath and go through the fairly simple process of taking down the background, putting the ZII in it’s carrying case, stacking the boxes filled the toys we used as props, and loading up all the odds and ends of the tiny Assembly Line Portrait Studio.

The Manager makes a bit of small talk as I wheel the shopping cart out to her car and I stand around for a couple of minutes while she loads it all up.  I have no regrets in leaving this Company run by crooks and cheats-a Company that has since gone out of business.

It’s not over yet for me and the New Company, but it won’t be long now.  As I go through the process of sorting out my stuff from the Company’s stuff and thinking about where I will be going and what I will be doing, I think about all the other places I have said goodbye to over the years.  There’s only one company that I would seriously considering returning to, and I have made no move to contact them. Yet. Basically, every company I quit was a place that I had come to hate.

Those last few days are filled with thoughts like-I won’t miss this, I won’t miss that, I won’t miss working with this idiot, I won’t miss putting up with these damned people, and so on and so forth.

My first job saw me shooting mostly small children and babies-after a year of that I never wanted to see a two year old again.  Small children are still not my strongest suit and I still hate hearing those little screamers when they are drug in for a portrait.  But at least in directory work, you have Mom holding the kids.  The idiots that went to the Big Box store always wanted nothing but the kids-and they were always a 3 year old, a 2 year old, and a weeks old infant.  Posed on a small table four feet over a concrete floor.  Yeah, good times.

The second job was shooting in-store promotions at grocery stores-the big sales pitch at that Company was that you could have up to ten people in a portrait for one Sitting Fee-back in the days when we had sitting fees.  So just about every group we had was ten people.  The Company also wanted them all shot vertically.  This was a big shock after shooting kids for a year.  But I managed to learn how to do it, learned how to use professional lighting, and became the best photographer at that company.  I don’t miss shooting groups of ten, shooting a hundred sits a day, and making next to nothing in pay.

I worked at one Company where we shot portraits for composites.  This was rapid fire shooting where you would shoot 6 poses of anywhere from twenty or thirty to over a hundred kids in a matter of hours.  I don’t miss the smart ass kids who won’t do what you tell them.  I don’t miss the dumb-ass middle school kids who think everyone wants their body.  I don’t miss all the Ghetto schools where I felt like it was worth my life to go inside and take the portraits.

There was a High School Senior Studio where I hated the owner and the owner’s idiot son.  I was also not too fond of my fellow photographers, who were mostly a pack of jerks.  I didn’t like any of the office staff or the helpers they hired to show the proofs.  I was not happy having to sweep the floors and empty the trash cans.  I didn’t like a lot of the poses they shot.  But it was the only Real Studio I ever worked at and I did get a kick out of using high end pro equipment.  That was where I got to play around with Mamiyas and Hasselblads and it was the first time I realized that you could make ten thousand dollars in three hours shooting high school prom pictures.

The Company I loved and hated the most did Directory work.  For three years I traveled all over the country, got out of debt for the first and only time in my life, and learned to really hate old farts who ‘Just came for the Book.’  It was one of many times where The Wife and I almost went our separate ways.  Where the old pickup truck I was driving died on me many times.  Where I stayed in the worst motels I ever stayed at and had the worst meals I ever ate.  It was also how I happened to visited about 38 States and where I had hoped to visit all the rest.  But that didn’t happen, mainly because the people that ran the Company were complete and total idiots.

On very rare occasions I have found myself out of work and I have gone back to one or two of these places.  The first thing that hit me when I walked onto a Shoot was-Oh God I remember why I left.  I never lasted more than a few days and put a black line through those particular places.

My last days at all of these places were mostly happy ones-happy to be leaving, hopeful for something better at the next stop.

While I tend to think of myself as a Professional Portrait Photographer, most ‘Real’ Portrait Studios don’t share this opinion.  They usually want people with Degrees of one sort or another, years of experience using Photoshop, and often some degree of mastery using software I’ve never used and often never heard of.  And they want to pay $8 an hour.  Uh, yeah, right.

So I’m not too shocked when I don’t get call backs from the High End Studios, but I am genuinely shocked when I’m occasionally snubbed my some hole in the wall Assembly Line Portrait place.  Really?  You think I’m not good enough to do school pictures?  Or Composite pictures?  Or just plain old family portraits?  Well, the odds are good I would not have lasted long at those places anyway-we had fundamentally different philosophies.

I’ve never missed the people I worked with, since for the most part, the only people I knew where the biggest part of the reason I was leaving.  Even now, where I have worked with the same small group of people for the better part of six years, I have no plans to have annual lunches where we get together and talk about life after The Company.  There are one or two that I would like to work with if I ever get my business act together, but the rest-well, I can live without them and they can live without me.

As with the people I have photographed, the only coworkers I recall are the ones that were twerps.  Passers that hate my portraits and want retakes.  Trainers that know less about taking portraits than I do. PreSellers that lie to everyone about everything and then disappear leaving you to deal with the pissed off Subjects.

All Assembly Line Portrait Photographers think they are the best photographer of all time-better than Adams, better than Mapplethorpe, better than anyone you can name.  And the only reason they are stuck taking portraits of screaming babies and grumpy old couples is because they were dealt a bad hand, while every successful photographer has fame and fortune handed to them.  What this means is that any time two Assembly Line Portrait Photographers got together, we couldn’t agree on anything.

But it is all a little sad as well.  I’ll miss those rare trips to Colorado, or Kansas City, or Galveston.  So as the door slowly closes, I need to do some serious looking for that open window.

“Well, I don’t believe that.” He says with a snort. “Why would they buy all this stuff if they weren’t planning on using it?”

“They were just buying The Competition.” I say.

The New Company did, in fact, announce that they were closing the Old Company’s Plant and letting go a few hundred people who work there.  I can only hope that the Old Management is part of the deadweight that the New Company is jettisoning.

All of us in the Directory Division of the Old Company have been floating along in that dream world of hope where nothing much has changed yet.  So now we have been given the word that change is happening.  We are to be retrained, new equipment was mentioned, and life, such as it is, goes on.  The wording is odd and still a little too vague.  But it doesn’t sound all that good.

Time to get that book wrapped up and see if I can be the next self publishing success story on Kindle Direct Publishing.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. ~Douglas Adams

I’ve never really had a deadline.  Oh I used to put a bit of pressure on myself to blog once a day, or once a week, or once in a while, but that’s not quite the same.  So now I have a couple of months to think about what I’m going to do and how I’m going to do it.  This whole drifting from place to place has worked out well enough, but maybe a couple of goals might be in order.

I’m pretty much thinking the writing is on the wall now for how the New Company feels about its stepchildren at the Old Company.  It’s just a matter of time before the end of the line for old curmudgeons like myself.  And short of rounding up all the other disgruntled castaways and starting my own Assembly Line Portrait Directory Company, I don’t see anything good in the tea leaves.

I read a book about the Roman Empire one time.  It talked about how Rome would conquer a territory and how it was not all that great an experience for the folks being conquered.  The former Ruler was either exiled or killed outright, unless the were smart enough to plunder the Treasury and make a run for it-not unlike our Fearless Leader at the Company.  Then the Romans came in and took over everything, like The New Company.  Anyone who still wanted to fight was killed or enslaved.  And finally, all traces of the Old Ruler was replaced with the banner of Rome.  We’re still working on that one, but it won’t be long.

I have a couple of weeks worth of work using the Old Company model, and after that, who knows?  I have a couple of names of Managers I can call and see about going returning to work for, but I am not all that optimistic.  After all, the odds are good that a couple of hundred Directory Photographers will be pounding the streets looking for work pretty soon.

I’ve done Shoot-N-Show before, back in the Dark Ages when I first started in Assembly Line Portraits.  I sucked at it.  I shot a lot of people who bought nothing but the Special, which was the crap collection of 110 portraits, 60 of which were the size of a postage stamp, for those of you old enough to know what a postage stamp is.  The people who were good at this kind of thing were good Sales People and so-so Photographers.  That was when I left that Company and never looked back.

So I find myself once again pondering what I will be doing in the not too distant future.  The latest memo from the Big Boss contained many signs of the coming Apocalypse, the most worrisome for me being this line: transition to a unified photography platform and portrait sales approach-in other words; Shoot-N-Show.

Damn, it’s a very exciting time, as Tank said to Neo.

I’ve read the memo at least a dozen times, and each time it only gets worse.  That’s the masochist in me.  I should be working on my novels, polishing my nonfiction book, thinking of something I can turn into an information product, learning how to write better eBay listings, and so on and so forth.  At the very least, I should be trying to narrow down my focus a little.

I have somewhere between 28 and 60 days, judging from the memo, before the New Company reaches the tipping point where I won’t be able to take it anymore.  I’ll have a few hours a day to work on The Plan, assuming I can narrow my focus down to one Plan.

Of course, there is the very slim possibility that everything will be hunky dory at the New Company and I will love the new Shoots, New Equipment, and—yeah, like that’s gonna happen.

“Yeah.” I say and shake my head. “They’re a lot of sweethearts here.”

“I’ve had so many people go through the whole process of picking out their favorites, deciding which size they want, choosing the frames, and then when they see how much it will cost saying;Nah, we just want the Freebie.  Damn I hate that.”

We’re at a Shoot that might have been good, if we were shooting it in three or four more years.  As it is, we shot this location two years ago, and there is just flat not going to be enough interest in a place filled with old folks that had a book that recently.  And this Shoot is one of the walking dead Shoots were everyone hobbles in the door groaning that they’re only doing this for the Book.

Unless you’re one of those Super Coupon nuts, you go to a Supermarket to BUY stuff and if everyone came in with coupons worth a few hundred dollars, the store wouldn’t stay in business too long.  Every business has some product or service that they exchange money for;and that’s how they stay in business. The Company, however,  has always been so much in love with The Freebie that we have entire Shoots were people are jaw-on-the-floor shocked that we want them to PAY for something.

So, those of us at The Company, a division of The New Company, have to hope and pray that things will be better now.  The good people at the Home Office who ran The Company into the ground and out of business are still carrying on as if they are Alexander Haig;they THINK they are in charge.

Change is in the air.  The PreSellers are no longer paid on how many butts they get in the seats, but on a percentage of sales commission like the rest of us.   But we still have a few older Shoots on the books, like the one I had the good fortune to shoot this week where everyone wants the Book and damned few people want any portraits.

One of my favorite shows is Undercover Boss, where the clueless people who run big businesses are shocked, just shocked, by how much the file and rank hates management and the people they have been hired to serve.  Hey, this is America, we’re not big on that whole serving anyone business.  As a general rule I tend to side with the front line employees who complain about who they work for and who they work with.  Work, as a general rule, is not all that much fun.

I’m a good Photographer and I have chosen to continue working in Assembly Line Portraits.  I could throw up my hands and leave, and I may yet walk away from The New Company, but for now, it’s the best Assembly Line Portrait Company going.  It’s clear that the way The Company works it’s Directory Promotions could use a little tweaking, but it’s still better than the way the New Company runs them.

The Company needs to refocus and retool everything they do to promote our business.  The Company LOVES the Book, it’s ALL about the Book-and the Book is a FREEBIE!!!!  The Company wants to pretend that it’s McDonalds selling Happy Meals by promoting the toy instead of the food.  Those days are over, we have to tell people that our business is selling portraits.  We need to either Charge a fee for the Book or make the book free to anyone who BUYS portraits, not just give it to anyone who can hobble through the door and glare into the camera.

I’ve worked for other Companys that charged for the Book and didn’t offer any Freebies at all.  Every Shoot could be turned into a Fundraising Shoot where the money from the book goes to the Organization-we still don’t get any money, but the damned people walking in the door KNOW they are going to be SPENDING some money.

I had a couple of pretty good weeks at the start of the year.  I was at a good location with a good Passer.  I took the same portraits I take every week.  The same portraits I have taken for the past few years. My portraits sell, when there are Subject who want to buy portraits.  My weakness is dealing with people that need to be sold, that want to see the best portrait they have ever had taken, and want to pay as little as possible for it once they have it.

I don’t spend a lot of time talking to the Subjects.  I don’t tell them to say Fuzzy Pickles or Whiskey or Grand-babies.  I try to get them positioned correctly in the frame.  I try to get the lighting the way I like it.  I try to make the background pop.  The weak link in every portrait remains the Subject.  And it’s not their fault, it’s the PreSeller’s fault.  If the new pay scale stops the Bookers from booking Bad Shoots, than the Good Old Days may well be returning.

The PreSellers no longer has any reason to Book every place that will let us in the door.  They now have every reason to Book Shoots where people have money and are willing to spend it.  Places that may have never had a Shoot, places that aren’t on the PreSeller’s auto-responder to remind those Dud accounts that it’s been two years and they need a new Book.  I know it’s scary, Guys, but try getting us some New Accounts.

Or, you can keep booking these Two Year Shoots and starve to death, either plan works for me.

“Or.” The Passer says as she looks at the crappy sales total for the week. “What if they stay the same?”

As my one or two loyal reader know, there are just one or two things I would like to see changed about how The Old Company runs their business.  They are a clueless lot, but things started to look up once they were taken over by our arch rival, The New Company.  So right off the bat most of us in the field said to hell with a number of things that we hate.  After all, The Old Company is dead, Long Live The New Company.

Only the Old Company is not quite dead yet.  The useless morons at the Home Office are still calling the shots, for now at least, and they want us to keep pretending that we love the old bastard that sold the Old Company out from under us.  Hmm, maybe things will remain the same for a while after all.

There’s another meeting planned for the Managers and maybe we will all find out something then.  In the meantime we have to sit around and wonder-will I still have a job next month? Should I be working on other projects?  Will the commission/hours/days change?  Will we go to Shoot-N-Show?  A little uncertainty is not a bad thing, but this not know anything really sucks.

I’m reminded of Star Trek The Next Generation.  Near the start of their run they had a two parter as the season cliff hanger.  It was the one where the Borg took over Captain Picard and they were about to destroy the Earth.  It was a great episode, here was a real villain who had defeated the entire Federation and was one step away from taking over the Galaxy.  How could the good ship Enterprise possibly defeat them?  Watching it on DVD or a rerun doesn’t tell you how we true fans suffered through those months waiting for the show to come back.  The Borg were Superman without that pesky Kryptonite problem, Lord Voldemort with the Deathly Hallows in hand, the Wicked Witch of the West with a raincoat, they were the Ultimate Bad Guys.  So when the show came back and Data killed them by making them take a nap, well, it kind of sucked.

So this is what The New Company has done, they have given us at the Old Company three months to think about what might happen.  Now, no matter what they do, it will be a bit of a let down.  Of course, I can’t image that they give a damn what we think or feel about any of it.  The New Company wanted to get rid of the competition, and for the time being, they are stuck with those of us who worked for that competition.  A few of the folks from the Old Company have already jumped ship and I have to think that the rest are at least making plans for when the other shoe drops.

I’ve been working on a couple of writing projects-that whole editing thing is always more work than I think it will be.  I’ve got a couple of vampire books that seem to be moving in the right direction.  My plans for becoming a great Internet Marketer are not panning out too well, but, as always, I’m reading a new book that is sure to have me rolling in the dough in no time.  I’m having a bit of luck on eBay, but I’m having a hard time finding the good stuff to sell.  Ebay also takes a lot more time than I expect it to.

But I happen to have a bit of free time coming up.  I’ve been working, which is odd for this time of year, and I have worked a couple of good Shoots.  But the coming weeks look a little light, so I will have the time I need to work on my many random projects.  I found a cool book the other day on drawing Caricatures-hey, a portrait’s a portrait, right?

Over the past few weeks I have seen a Supervisor and a Manager, which is pretty unusual.  I can count on one hand how many times I’ve seen my Manager at a Shoot.  So that makes him a near perfect Boss.  He stopped by to tell me not to leave The Shoot before the time of the last appointment, just in case someone might have booked an appointment and I didn’t know about it.  The Company likes doing adding appointments at the last minute.  One change I would like to see is that there are No Changes to a Shoot the actual day of the Shoot.  Kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?

There has also been a lot of talk lately about the conditions set forth in the Contract with the Clients, kind of funny, since I can’t recall anyone ever mentioning The Contract this much before.  Do they expect us to try and enforce the conditions?  Yeah, that’s gonna happen.  Once we are at a Shoot the people running it do whatever the hell they want to do.

At the worst Shoots they tell people not buy anything, to just get the Freebie.  They split families up so they can get more pages for the Book and the family can get more free pictures.  And they complain about us if we try to stop them from ripping us off and the Company is always on their side!  So, no, I don’t give a damn what The Contract says, because I am not in a position to do anything about it.

The most recent concern is about the forms we have the people fill out, I’ve never had any luck with forms, people just can’t figure them out.  So the new forms are more complicated and have more lines to be filled out, so most of the people don’t want to fill them out.  Makes no difference to me.

So, yeah, what if nothing changes?  Damn.

“Yup.” He says with a sage nod. “It’s one of those things that makes you go hmmm.”

The New Company sends out little bits of propaganda once in a while. These are glossy little publications filled with nice photos and professional writing.  But oddly, they don’t have a lot of photographs taken by people who actually work for The Company.

The first portrait we see upon opening the booklet is of the New Company’s Chairman.  It’s a nice enough portrait in a contemporary style with a lot more negative space than I would use and an awkward pose.  In one corner is a signature from a portrait studio in Canada.  A Professional Portrait Studio.

From time to time we do Shoots in big churches with a lot of rich parishioners.  These are the people that run the local big companies, live in the good neighborhoods, and drive the latest luxury cars.  On first glace this seems like a good place to shoot, they have the money and we have portraits for sell.  But something funny happens with rich people-they are too good to buy portraits from a lowly Assembly Line Portrait Company.

These good folks often tell us that they have their own Portrait Photographer, or that they are going to visit a Professional Portrait Photographer soon, so they don’t need anything from us.  The message is clear enough, the kind of portraits we take are not good enough for them to deign to purchase.

I was never fond of the owner of the Old Company, but at least when he plastered his face on every bit of paper the Company used, it was a portrait taken by a Company photographer.

Now for all I know, the New Company owns this fancy studio, along with all the other studios it has gobbled up over the years.  But I didn’t see any proof of that.

This is like the owner of the Ford Motor Company driving to work in a Ferrari.  On the one hand its like, Hey, I’m rich I can do what ever I want.  But on the other hand, it clearly says what my Company makes is good enough for the working stiffs, but not nearly good enough for me.  It’s worth pointing out that Sam Walton shopped at Wal-Mart, back before they became the heartless giant corporation they are today.

I’ve worked at a few small Companies where I could talk to the owner whenever I wanted, but most of The Companies have been large and clueless.  Management has always been a bit condescending.  They have always held the opinion that they could have the perfect Company, if only they could get rid of all those damned stupid employees.

Of course, this is what makes Undercover Boss so much fun.  The Boss isn’t really a bad guy, but they are often a bit out of touch with the world that their employees live in.  Somewhere along the line things shifted just a bit too far out of whack.  When the people who work at a company can’t afford to use the products the company sells or the people who run the company see no value in the products they produce, then we have problems.  It’s not a bad thing that a Big Wig wants to use the best Portrait Studio he can find, what’s bad is that he doesn’t think the company he runs is the best-and that he goes the extra mile of putting his uber expensive portrait in the company newsletter.

A quick google takes me to Wikipedia-

Eating your own dog food, also called dogfooding, is when a company (usually, a software company) uses the products that it makes.  In 1988, Microsoft manager Paul Maritz sent Brian Valentine, test manager for Microsoft LAN Manager, an email titled “Eating our own Dogfood”, challenging him to increase internal usage of the company’s product. From there, the usage of the term spread through the company.

Dogfooding can be a way for a company to demonstrate confidence in its own products, and hence a kind of testimonial advertising.

For example, Microsoft and Google emphasize the internal use of their own software products. The idea behind “eating your own dog food” is that if you expect customers to buy your products, you should also be willing to use them.  ~Wikipedia

I like the bit about using the product yourself if you expect others to use it.