Changing the Oil at 55mph

The best dish at a restaurant often disappears while people are still coming in to order it.

Top restaurants know a signature plate only lasts weeks; seasons change, key ingredients run out, and a favorite dish leaves the menu at its peak. A few times a year, the kitchen wipes the pass and starts over. Old work ends on schedule, ready or not.

I don't think photographers or directors get that kind of built-in reset. Nothing forces the change. A frame that worked in 2019 still works. It still sells. It still gets me the rehire, and no client has ever walked in to tell me they're bored because they’ve “seen this” from me before. I could shoot the same way for the next ten years and keep cashing the check.

In kitchens, the reset is mandatory in order to keep a steady flow of new guests. Mine is optional, and optional things are the first casualties of a calendar that's already full. Building that reset myself, on purpose, is the professional version of changing the oil at 55 miles per hour. There's no good time to pull over.

The work that pays the bills is the same work that can hold you back.

The Cage Is Comfortable

There's a point in some shoots where I notice my hands have moved ahead of my brain. The ratio's already dialed, the subject's already placed, the frame is one I've made a hundred times. There’s a pretty decent chance I could make a strong, window-lit, emotional, photojournalistic storytelling portrait with a blindfold on. The client will be happy. That's less craft than muscle memory recall.

The researcher Anders Ericsson found an unfortunately less-convenient version of this: past a certain point, more experience doesn't make you better. It only makes you faster at the version you already have. A doctor fifteen years in is sometimes worse at diagnosing than one five years in, because the veteran has stopped looking and started pattern-matching. This idea is well-known enough to be a cliché by now, and it still rings true when I catch the moment before hitting the autopilot button mid-shoot.

A consistent portfolio gives art buyers the confidence to hire us photographers, and that confidence is the whole transaction. They hire the known quantity. The known quantity writes your next brief, and the one after that, until the body of work becomes a recursive set of instructions. So many photographers I deeply respect are somewhere in this loop right now, and they'd probably tell you the same if you got them honest after a second drink.

Here's where I'll lose a few of you: I believe that a consistent portfolio, past a certain point, does more harm than good.

What was once an asset turns into a liability if it never changes, even though industry veterans might tell you otherwise. Your portfolio is also in some ways a time capsule. By the time a project is finished and released, it shows who you were a year ago or more. The gap between what you can do now and what you're showing stays invisible until it catches up with you mid-shoot, in front of the one client where it actually matters.

I've been stuck in that cycle myself, and honestly, the bills get paid on time, and it's pretty dang comfortable. However, that’s exactly the problem.

You Know Me for One Thing

Most of you probably discovered my work through editorial, news, and documentary assignments: photojournalism that depends on quick thinking, access, and engagement. That approach is still absolutely part of what I do, but lately I've been focused on making images in more controlled environments and with an eye to lifestyle, products, and commercial applications themselves.

My background in photojournalism is what gives my newer work an edge. I spent twenty years capturing real moments: on deadline, in places I couldn't control, no second take on offer. Finding genuine human moments quickly, under pressure, isn't something you can buy at the rental house with the lighting package. Most people chasing "authentic" are hoping for the best from the outside. I bring two decades of the real version, and now I'm layering in the control I used to work without: designing light instead of finding it, directing talent instead of observing it, and building continuity into a day I used to only react to. The instinct is still there even if the tools around it I have better access to are new. That's what my recent work is about: control, layered on top of twenty years of instinct.

Now for the other side, because if everything sounds perfect, nobody will believe it:

Some art buyers and CDs might look at my reel and see a news photog cosplaying a transition into a commercial shooter. And as much as it pains me to say, they won't be entirely wrong yet. I'm competing against people who've shot nothing but advertising, commercials, and lifestyle for fifteen years and have the muscle memory (and networks) I'm still building.

Two decades of walking into rooms I didn't build, in front of people who'd never met me, taught me to read a moment and come away with something to publish before the light or the moment left. No single memory sums it up as neatly as a highlight reel or pithy blog post would like. The instinct works in the background, underneath whatever the day's plan called for.

Here's what that mix of skills means on your shoot day, and it's the part you're really paying for: when the planned setup falls apart, when someone freezes in front of the camera, or when the schedule goes off the rails, a photographer with an editorial background has already run this drill. It's an average Tuesday for us. Someone who's only ever worked from a lighting diagram is the one who starts sweating when the day goes sideways. And a lot of days go sideways.

When Practice Looks Too Perfect, It Wasn't Practice

Case studies are the typical way creatives talk about our work, but most of them don't reflect how it really went down. They're written after the fact, starting with the answer and working backward. Mistakes disappear, and lucky breaks get repainted as careful planning. The photographer comes across like they knew exactly what they were doing from the start. Read enough of these, and you'd think nobody in this field has ever been confused on a project. The format doesn't teach the reader anything, and it teaches the writer even less, because the history is revised during the writing.

Real practice feels different. I set out to make something specific, and the result hands me back a gap I didn't know was there. A session that comes home perfect was never practice to begin with. Call it execution of something already in your toolbox with a veneer of creative growth. The clumsy version is where real learning lives: a setup that totally didn’t work or an environment that didn’t contribute to the story we were trying to tell on that spec project.

That's the point of practice: to dig up my weaknesses before clients do. The discipline is choosing what to be bad at before a paying client finds it for me in front of a stakeholder.

Talking About It Forces the Issue

For most of its life before this year, this newsletter served as a way to display finished work, tearsheets, and client updates. I'm deliberately turning it into something else because it genuinely feels like the finished frame is no longer the scarce thing.

Generative tools have cleared the technical floor of “barely good enough” in about two years. (Mind you, it’s still slop as far as the eye can see. But for a lot of commercial applications, people default to barely tripping over a low bar for visuals and advertising). A clean, well-composed, properly exposed image is now available to any intern with a subscription and an afternoon. What the tools can't do is tell you which of two frames actually serves the story, or get a guarded non-professional subject to drop their shoulders a few minutes before we lose the light for the day. Judgment, taste, and reading a room have come through that technical revolution untouched. That's what clients are actually paying for now: skills that don't show up when all I publish is the trophy.

I can't explain why a frame works until I've worked out why it works, and defining it out loud here (and in longer form on YouTube) forces a clarity the shooting never demanded. A call I've been making on instinct becomes something I can name and repeat on purpose now. That's the move from luck to method. So I'd rather share the problems I'm chewing on than show off the finished product. The finished projects are on my website, and they might be some of the least interesting parts.

What the Reset Is For

The kitchen doesn't retire a dish to build character and make their lives hard. It retires it because next season's menu doesn't exist until someone clears the pass and starts anew. The reset is what makes the new work possible.

So I built my own. Making work that lights me up with no client and nothing at stake but a creative lesson and the joy of making it. Lighting and toning that gets pushed until they break, simply to find out where. Days when I shoot stills and motion to reflect on what worked and what didn’t, and figure out which delivered better visual material for a prospective client. Because the projects I want to create more of this year and into the future need both visual languages, whichever side I’m covering for my clients. I'd rather find the failure points on my own time than on someone else's shoot day.

When projects come along that push boundaries, I believe the gap between the photographer who deliberately drilled the un-automatable parts and the one running on a decade-plus of muscle memory will be obvious in the work, to anyone looking closely.

I think it shows. I'm betting my career on it.