Category Archives: Commercial Photography

Apr 03 0 comments
Commercial Photography, Food Photography, Vegetables

The Quest Begins… (sounds like a knight in shining armor story, but it's about food)

Three Mirrors with String Beans

3:38PM, 4/1/2010 Three and a Half Mirrors and a Silver Card with String Beans on Set

Food photography is this totally different animal; it’s nothing like shooting products. Lighting for food is different. There’s a time limit when shooting food. You can’t leave food on set for three days waiting for someone to come back  from a long weekend to approve the shots. There’s a different passion on set when there’s food involved. It’s breaking bread with friends, but it’s a creative team. We’re designing food and when it all comes together, it’s a bit of magic.  And, no, I’m not gaining weight.

Even though I’ve been planning this for a while and doing my homework–studying the styles of food shooters and lighting techniques–there is a freshness and an excitement about working with chefs and food stylists that is totally different from other forms of commercial photography. There’s a sense of collaborative teamwork here, and an obsession that I can’t quite define, maybe only because I’m just beginning to explore this amazing new world of photographing (and eating) food.

Or maybe it’s just because I was hungry.

Mar 18 0 comments
Commercial Photography, Commercial Photography, Food Photography, Portfolio

A New Quest

Akamaru Modern Ramen at Ippudo, NYC

01/09/2010 - Akamaru Modern Ramen at Ippudo, NYC

I put an ad up on Craigslist in February for a food stylist and much to my surprise, there were responses from 2 chefs: Corey Earling, the third place runner up from Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen (season four) and Rob Endelman, a wonderful natural food chef and educator.

These responses plus responses from 5 other established food stylists and one dessert chef left me stunned. I never expected such great talent to respond to my posting.

This winter I started making my own udon and ramen at home. I’d been eating out regularly at Setagaya Ramen, Rai Rai Ken and Ippudo, each within a few blocks of each other, and each bowl of ramen is so very different in taste and appearance, it intrigued me. So it was bound to happen; this all started to migrate to my home cooking and somewhere along the way, I got the notion to shoot food and thus, the posting on Craigslist.

Everyone is so thrilled to be collaborating toward a vision and style that expands each of our individual books. I’m really looking forward to this new endeavor.

And I love the fact that digital food photography isn’t something that can be done with 3-D.

Feb 16 0 comments
Advertising, Commercial Photography, Lighting

My Clients Win Awards, Too.

Detail of Heat Sink, Lighting Services' LumeLEX 2024 - Winner, Next Generation Luminaires Design Competition

Just a few weeks ago, a U.S. Department of Energy panel of 14 judges from the architectural community handed out one of their coveted Next Generation Luminaires Design Competition Awards for Excellence in Lighting Design and Application to my long-time client, Lighting Services, Inc., for their architecturally beautiful, modular, and very green, LED spotlight.

As a privately held company, LSI never sits on their laurels – they’re always up against the big boys. I can relate to that. LSI’s fixtures hang in museums and institutions all over the world and this is just one of the many awards they have won. They are always developing new designs and incorporating new technologies, while practicing sustainability. They are serious about protecting our environment and work hard at it.

I’m proud to have LSI as a long time client, trusting me to photograph their products.

Now, if only I can figure out how NYC recycling works.

Feb 09 2 comments
Commercial Photography, Commercial Photography, Food, Organic, Slow Food, Union Square, Vegetables

Greenmarket in the Studio # 11

A Rutabaga and a Pair of Diamond and Green Amethyst Earrings Set in Gold

My fruits and vegetables have taken on a new purpose as props for expensive jewelry. I love the earthy quality of root vegetables against the gloss and glow of gemstones set in precious metal. And in this case, I just love the word – rutabaga. I think Bugs Bunny used the word once in a football cheer.

What’s next? Now I’m looking for artisans with hand made jewelry. And maybe asparagus, but that’s out of season. What looks good with asparagus anyway? Tiaras?

Feb 02 0 comments
Business, Commercial Photography, Commercial Photography, Marketing

What Do You Sell?

Last Stop Coney Island

I don’t know if there are any formulas, books or websites for quitting, like there are for starting businesses. I didn’t see, “When to Quit Investing in Your Losing Business Venture,” on Amazon.  But I did a search for those words and what did I get? Mostly I found links to information on starting a business, finding or borrowing money, entrepreneur guides, articles on bootstrapping and little about quitting. It appears as if quitting isn’t a really popular topic.

There was one story.  It’s an April, 2009, BusinessWeek.com article called, When It’s Time to Shutter Your Business. In it, Joe Kennedy, author of The Small Business Owner’s Manual, says, “maybe it’s time when you’ve already unleashed your best products and ideas into the market and they did not work out well.” How can that apply to an industry where we essentially make customized solutions and not “products” as defined by a consumer market?

What would be our best products and ideas? Our last job? Our last good job?

It shouldn’t be a job at all. It should be ideas. The images we produce as examples of our skills, the ones that we exhibit on the web or via other promotional vehicles, to introduce potential buyers to our interests should go far beyond looking like a product we sell. They should represent ideas, motivation, our interests –  because what we create is so deeply personal, just showing samples is not enough to create interest in you. Shoot, shoot and shoot more until there’s a body of work that says, “I have ideas, good ideas.” It’s work, planning what you shoot and what you show and what you don’t show, but then a great body of work says volumes about who you are.

We don’t really sell photography, we sell trust, creativity, reliability, insight, and let’s not forget quality. If you’re not selling that, you’re just selling pictures. These days, you can get those anywhere.

“The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand.”

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Jan 29 0 comments
Business, Commercial Photography, parody, Photography

This Weekend’s Featured Movie

The Fun of Being Thoughtful.

No kidding, that’s the name of this “educational” film that is part of the Internet Archives (a fun site to visit for ephemeral films) Ernest M. Ligon, Ph.D, author of The Psychology of Christian Personality (published 1938) was the educational collaborator. This short film from 1950 is about the Proctors, a family that seems to be on Prozac, or maybe that’s Xanax. Scary, this one is.

It demonstrates how the perfect family behaves, thoughtfully (oh, gag me now). They have no real emotional stress. Problems are resolved with a double date (more like cheating on the girlfriend and supported by the sister) and talking to dad and mom about sensitive issues. They’ve got to be kidding. This genre of films were shown right through the early 70s in high schools, until someone got smart and realized, Zombies!

I try to be thoughtful, but not as dramatically moody as Eddie, when I make cold calls to people I hardly know (sorry to all the art buyers). Behavior like this today would be considered psychopathic and the Proctor family may go berserk at any moment with their repressed anger.

Jan 29 0 comments
Business, Commercial Photography, parody, Photography

This Weekend's Featured Movie

The Fun of Being Thoughtful.

No kidding, that’s the name of this “educational” film that is part of the Internet Archives (a fun site to visit for ephemeral films) Ernest M. Ligon, Ph.D, author of The Psychology of Christian Personality (published 1938) was the educational collaborator. This short film from 1950 is about the Proctors, a family that seems to be on Prozac, or maybe that’s Xanax. Scary, this one is.

It demonstrates how the perfect family behaves, thoughtfully (oh, gag me now). They have no real emotional stress. Problems are resolved with a double date (more like cheating on the girlfriend and supported by the sister) and talking to dad and mom about sensitive issues. They’ve got to be kidding. This genre of films were shown right through the early 70s in high schools, until someone got smart and realized, Zombies!

I try to be thoughtful, but not as dramatically moody as Eddie, when I make cold calls to people I hardly know (sorry to all the art buyers). Behavior like this today would be considered psychopathic and the Proctor family may go berserk at any moment with their repressed anger.

Jan 12 0 comments
Blogging, Commercial Photography, Facebook, Photography, Social Media, Twitter

The Photo Argus Features D.A.Wagner Personal and Commercial Work

Petey. If the studio had a mascot, it would be Petey.

There is a chunk of nearly every day dedicated to writing, reading and exploring. When I launched this blog last July, it felt like a chore to keep up all my marketing efforts. Twitter. Facebook. The blog, and all the other places I’m active. Now, what it’s become is a morning routine. This isn’t a bad thing. I’ve read various articles and postings on the value of social media, and I can’t say that it’s brought me work, but what I can say is, it’s brought me discipline. It keeps me current with the rapidly changing face of commercial photography and offers up opportunities, if I choose to take them on. The web is a level playing field and that’s what I have loved about it since I built my first website in 1995.

This week, The Photo Argus featured D.A.Wagner photography and a D.A.Wagner Photoshop tutorial, both a direct outgrowth of my social medial efforts. Social media works. just not the way I had imagined it would.

It just keeps coming together.

Petey, here, seems to have a different opinion. But I beg to differ.

Jan 07 1 comments
Commercial Photography, Commercial Photography, Greenmarket in the Studio, Organic, Personal Photography, Photography, Portfolio, Slow Food, Union Square, Vegetables

Greenmarket in the Studio #10

Onion Mirror

A vision evolving.

While in the process of this particular exploration I’m finding there is a lot of failure. Not failure in the sense of exposure or composition, but failure in concept and vision. And, there’s certainly no value in putting images into my book simply because I did it. Right now, I’m developing the concept of a dark series. The vision is evolving and this shot is more like what I need for the new series; it definitely feels like a sister image to the Steak photo that started it all, back in October.

Now the challenge is to find a thread that connects my next dark image to the first two.

Dec 31 0 comments
Commercial Photography, Commercial Photography, Greenmarket in the Studio, Organic, Photography, Slow Food, slow food, Union Square, Vegetables

Greenmarket in the Studio #9 (onward to 2010)

2:02PM, 12/28/2009 - Celebration Onion 2010

I bought a dozen onions and brought them into the studio for the usual shoot ‘em and eat ‘em routine. One by one I placed them on set and, one by one, little personalities revealed themselves. These are the year-end onions, the ones that aren’t in the best of shape, but are still worth eating. No longer are the stems green and bright, they’re brown and look more like the ones in the supermarket than the greenmarket, shipped from far away and weeks or months old.

Am I deluded? Onions? Little personalities? Four years of this and still thinking there are little people in there somewhere. Should I make a metaphorical reference to the year passing as layers of an onion and go cliché on everyone?

Too late.

I pay homage to 2009 with this celebration onion. I will cut into it with sharp abandon, and with tears in my eyes, throw the thin slices into a hot frying pan drizzled with sesame oil, sizzling and transforming itself into something sweet, fragrant and appealing. Oh, how 2010 should be so transformed from 2009.

Happy New Year.