When I graduated from High School in 1969 there was a growing war in Viet Nam and I wanted to be a photo-journalist. I had already won first prize twice, four and five years earlier) in the Eastman Kodak/Scholastic Photo Contest (total prize money: $250, which I spent on a spruce and canvas kayak kit I bought from the back pages of "Boy's Life"). I wanted to be Alfred Eisenstaedt whom I had met in person. I didn't want to go to Viet Nam, except as, perhaps a photo-journalist. My father ran the local portrait studio and we were living quite comfortably. I was accepted into Drake University's Journalism School. I learned everything my father didn't know about photography and had a huge leg up because of what he HAD taught me. Fast forward to 1973...
I graduated into the worst recession since 1929. "Life" magazine had folded. "Look" was not far behind. "National Geographic" was down to about 8 or 10 staff photographers and the only people who showed up at the 1973 Drake recruitment fair were the Army, Navy and Marines. I had two job offers: one from Trek Photographic, which was the remains of the old Eastman Kodak Stores of America as a sales clerk and the other was from my father who wanted me to replace his darkroom man who had never mastered color. My father offered me more money, so I went home and started learning photography all over again because color photography was not taught at Drake in those days (what would a photo-journalist want with it?). I studied, I read, I practiced. I burned through thousands of dollars worth of film and paper. In a year or two, I was one of the best color darkroom technicians in Chicago's west suburbs. Still, it was not the work I really wanted. My father had always taken any work that walked in the door and this included commercial and advertising photography, which he was not terribly good at. I studied and practiced some more (my father was very indulgent with supplies as long as I was doing the money-producing work as well). It became clear that most advertising agencies in a market as big as Chicago would NEVER hire a portrait studio to shoot ad photos for them, so we started looking around for ways to sell my growing expertise at commercial photography (I had tried photographing high school seniors, which was my father's "bread and butter" and found I hated it and was not very good at eliciting smiles from pimply-faced high school-ers). A salesman for McGrew Color Graphics stopped by and told us all about the growing market for color brochures and post cards that his company printed and said they were looking for "agent/photographers" to sell and produce these brochures. Hotels, manufacturers, hell, everybody needed one and not only could we sell our photographic prowess (the guts of a color brochure) but we could make a profit on the printing as well!.
Now, I called upon my college training to lay out and copy-write. Drake didn't think it was enough to be just a photo-journalist - you had to learn the magazine and advertising businesses as well, so, at the moment, I was prepared, I thought. I designed some pretty awful hotel brochures. I wrote some pretty awful brochure copy for a knife manufacturer and some other oddball industries who couldn't afford a "real" ad agency. I studied. I read. I practiced. I learned. I was not yet thirty.
Fast-forward to 1983-84.
My father decides, after a two year bout with depression to sell the business. He gets an offer from my future brother-in-law (more about that in another diary) to buy the portrait business and sells. In another year or so, he makes me an offer to buy what's left of the commercial photography/brochure business which has limped along since the sale of the portrait business. He will finance a 3.5 year $100,000 buyout at 0% interest. Sounded like a good deal (it wasn't, yet another diary), but I took the bait.
By this time, it was clear that the color brochure market had changed a lot. 4-color printing had undergone a revolution and the requirements and standards had become MUCH higher. I studied. I learned. I practiced. I bought (and financed) typesetting machines, vertical graphics cameras, and then a Macintosh computer. I learned how to work all of them well enough to teach employees. I transferred my expertise at making color prints to making duplicate transparencies and "stripping" (gluing) them together to make the "color separations" required for brochures and the like. I had 3 employees, a wife, and three kids by now. I bought our first "real" Mac computer, a Macintosh IIIci with the then-new Quark Xpress. I studied, I read, I practiced. At last, I could produce a color brochure file that could be printed (with the addition of professionally-supplied photo separations). I bought Photoshop. Even the first version was incredibly dense and difficult. I studied. I practiced. I learned. I taught.
Employees came and went. I got divorced. My ex-wife moved, with my 3 kids, to Mobile, AL. I vowed to visit them every 6 weeks. I wore out two Ford Tauruses doing it for a year. I decide to learn to fly. I studied, I read, I learned. Two years later, I learned that flying a single engine plane 2,000 miles 'round-trip without an instrument license took longer than driving. I studied for my "instrument ticket" and 18 months later I had it. I studied, I practiced, I learned. I made good on my promise to visit my kids every 6 weeks.
About then, came the high-resolution scanners. I was still taking all my photographs on film, as was everyone. We had to scan them for brochures or pay someone else to do it. I bought at LeafScan45 for about $15,000 and learned how to use it. I learned how to calibrate it. I learned how to fix it when it broke. We made a lot of money with that thing until... digital cameras.
Early ones were horrible. We said they'd never replace film. We were wrong. I had to learn photography practically all over again. New world. New terms. At least by now, I am happily re-married and, although my hair is falling out, having the time of my life. I continued to have to evolve.
Now comes the Internet. Jesus. Everything changed. Brochures: out. Websites : in. Learn HTML, which for a 47-year-old is TOUGH. I studied, I practiced, I learned. I bought a web-server and a DSL line. I set up a website business to compliment our brochure and catalog business. Then comes "Flash" and "Java". More learning. More studying. More practice. Now, a few years later, most of that has turned to crap also.
My father spent an entire lifetime in business with only one major change: Black and white photography gave way to color. I helped him through that one and he never did learn color, really. I am now 62 and the world has changed so much in my business that I hardly recognize it and it is getting harder every day to keep up. Check out my current website at wyckoff.com to see where I've gotten to and tell me about your work-life experiences as well. I appreciate you following this long diary to the end.