REFLECTIONS ON A CAREER

We asked six photographers who’ve built legacies in their fields how the industry has changed since they set up shop, and what they’ve done over the decades to flourish amid the ebbs and flows.

Compiled by Libby Peterson and Jacqueline Tobin

CLIFF MAUTNER

Sometime in the spring of 1982, I was a college student scraping by with no spending money in my pocket. I answered a want ad (in one of those old-fashioned classified sections of something called a newspaper) seeking a photographer for an “award-winning weekly newspaper.” After a two-minute interview, I had my first job as a professional photographer. I had zero experience, but they were truly desperate. Thirty-seven years later, I’m still at it.

I’d imagine that most photographers remember their first assignment. In 1985, my editor for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Bryan Grigsby, decided he’d make my first one something to laugh about: He sent this raw, inexperienced, Jewish photojournalist to a meeting of the German American Police Association. Yes, there was a level of discomfort. My second assignment was equally uneasy: coverage of the local La Leche league meeting. It was a room full of nursing moms, and I was the only man there.

I had the privilege of learning from some of the very best photojournalists in the world—Larry Price, Sarah Leen, John Paul Filo, April Saul, Tom Gralish and Ron Cortes were among those who earned the Pulitzer Prize. Heck, Larry earned two of them! Aside from those legends, I was able to watch, listen and learn from a staff of professionals that were incredibly gifted storytellers. While shooting 6,000 assignments with the Inquirer, I had many opportunities to see people, places and things that most people never had the privilege to see. Hospitals, corporations, universities, public relation firms, ad agencies and a plethora of other clients allowed my business to become incredibly diverse. I was truly making a decent living as a photographer, working my ass off shooting for an eclectic array of clients, and I still had my contract to shoot all week for the Inquirer. Until I didn’t.

No article on longevity could be complete without talking about setbacks. In 1998, after about 15 years with the newspaper, I received a phone call from the director of photography, Clem Murray, explaining that I was one of several photographers that were being laid off due to blah blah blah. All I heard was that I was fired. I had infant twin daughters, so it was now time to sink or swim. I’d realized that I’d gotten a little too comfortable with the career I had. Freelance photography, without a truly steady client to rely upon, was a scary place to be. So, I entered the wonderful world of wedding photography.

I shot my first wedding as a second shooter for a Philadelphia studio. After my second wedding, I knew I could do this myself but I had no work to show. None. So, I showed my first clients some of the photoj work I was proud of: sports work, a magazine feature on a medical mission to Liberia, and a bunch of other mounted images I’d taken over the years. After complimenting me on that work, they asked to see wedding images. I’d asked for $1,000 to shoot their wedding. I settled for $650.

That was the first of 1,200 or so weddings. I learned how to be a portraitist but also created dramatic texture, dimension and mood. Essentially, my style evolved over time, and I became known for the way I used light.

PHOTO © CLIFF MAUTNER

While I still shoot anywhere between 30 to 40 weddings a year, I’ve been teaching since 2005. I attended my first WPPI convention (where I later won a Lifetime Achievement award at age 50) in 2004. I owe my teaching career to Bill Hurter, the late, great editor of Rangefinder, and also a man who was open to new ideas. I proposed a seminar for the following year’s convention, and that began my teaching career.

Next, I approached Nikon USA and the company gave me a shot at speaking at their trade show booth at WPPI. My relationship with Nikon may be my proudest achievement in my career, representing, as a Nikon Ambassador, a brand that’s been in my hands since 1978.

In 2007, I began teaching workshops out of my Haddonfield, New Jersey, studio to help provide skills to photographers in order for them to create a style of their own. Truth be told, the Lighting and Skillset Bootcamp was born thanks to a simple blog post by Susan Stripling, who was my girlfriend at the time. She gave up dinner at the Four Seasons in lieu of a pizza and the creation of that post, helping announce my first workshop. I’m still grateful she did. I had 13 people at the first bootcamp, and then sold out the 20 seats four or five times per year from 2008 to 2018. Since then, I’ve had over 1,000 students from 44 countries come to my studio to learn.

Longevity is the byproduct of many, many different elements. Resilience is essential. Self-doubt, anxiety, stress and basic survival instincts are constant reminders of how unpredictable this career path is. Accept rejection or go insane. And then always bounce back.

Cliff Mautner’s WPPI Master Class on natural, flash and continuous light takes place at Mandalay Bay on Feb. 25 from 5:30-7:30 p.m.

CALLAWAY GABLE

My wife, Allison, and I started Callaway Gable over 11 years ago, shortly after she took a pregnancy test and realized we were unexpectedly expecting. We were terrified, wondering how we were going to take care of this future human. I was a sometime actor and Allison was a model and part-time teacher. Making a real living and planning for the future was always at the back of our minds, but not with the intensity that came with this overwhelming news. So what did we do? We got drunk. Well, I did, while Allison watched. When I finally woke up the next morning, we put a plan together to pursue a professional career in photography .

PHOTO © CALLAWAY GABLE

While many of my fellow thespians worked as servers and bartenders to make ends meet, I booked odd photography jobs, mostly headshots, non-profit annual reports and live music. It wasn’t great money, but it was a chance to experiment and hone my craft. When we found out we were going to be parents, Allison joined me. I taught Allison how to photograph and she showed me how to pose and work with people. Together we started pursuing the new bars, restaurants, lofts, and movers and shakers of the burgeoning and revitalized downtown scene in Los Angeles where we lived. Within a few months, we started booking more sophisticated work with complicated light setups and bigger budgets. It was happening, people!

Then the quintessential moment that inevitably happens to all photographers happened to us. A client asked us to shoot her wedding. Little did we know that we were about to stumble upon a wedding photography approach that has become our blueprint for over a decade of success.

What is the blueprint? It is important to note that this process hasn’t changed much over the years, and what works for us may not work for everyone. It starts by photographing the wedding like a commercial shoot. Inspired by fashion, we use off-camera light and tight apertures, resulting in portraits that look different and more expensive. They have a fashion magazine feel, and this is important: Our clients want to look their most beautiful on the most important day of their lives. This means we need to take control and direct them, pose them and find their best angles. Flowers, food and the venue are given equal importance, captured as if it were a product or architecture shoot. After the wedding, we quickly turn around a gallery of the details for the planner and vendors to use to promote their work. Today, when any of our wedding planner friends have a wedding with details, we are on the top of their list. Referrals like these are key to having a long career in wedding photography. Moments are shot dramatically and creatively like a lifestyle shoot. While we cannot control naturally occurring moments during getting- ready, ceremony and speeches, we can control the light and often where things are happening. In post, we do minimal editing, preferring to stick with vibrant colors and crisp blacks and whites, just the way we delivered our commercial imagery.

So how can you create your own plan for longevity? It’s all about relationships, not trends. Foster your relationships with vendors, especially planners and venues. Deliver detail photos in a downloadable gallery within a day or two of the wedding. During the wedding, create Instagram posts, tagging the planner and all of the vendors; they will love you for that. Offer to photograph wedding planners and their teams for their websites. Wine them and dine them. These relationships will pay off for years and years to come.

PHOTO © CALLAWAY GABLE

Stay away from trendy treatments, copying and over-editing. Let your photos speak for themselves. If you feel that your talent is lacking, do what we did—use engagement shoots to master off-camera light and other techniques. Experiment at an engagement; execute at the wedding.

Also, cull and color-correct your own photos—this is the fastest way to improve because you can immediately see what works and what doesn’t. Use resources like WPPI, Rangefinder and workshops to improve your technique and business practices. You’ll also make invaluable new friends.

Under-promise and over-deliver. Stay true to yourself. Be you. Don’t look at what everyone else is doing. Be a good human. Be kind. Run your business like a business. Don’t complain or whine. Love everyone. Be in service to your client and check your ego at the door. If you do this, you will have a long career in wedding photography, and anything else you put your mind to. And charge more—you are worth it.

KENNY KIM

When Rf senior editor Libby Peterson asked me to contribute an article detailing some insights on “surviving and thriving” in the wedding photography industry, two thoughts came to my mind: 1. What an incredible honor for them to include me in this. 2. Does this mean they consider me an old fart now? Jokes aside, by the time everyone reads this, I will be starting my 15th year as a full-time wedding photographer. Of course, I had no idea where this accidental career would take me when I first started.

PHOTO © KENNY KIM

I had majored in graphic design in college and got a job straight after graduating as a designer at a local company. I stayed on campus. My only goal when I picked up photography was to get better seats at college sporting events—they had the best seats in the house. I accidentally discovered the world of wedding photography when I brought my camera to friends’ weddings as a guest. I snapped some photos throughout the day and gave those images as part of my gift to the couples. To my surprise, my friends fell in love with them and some even told me that they were better than their hired photographer’s images (I think they were just being nice). Eventually, word got around that I take decent wedding photos.

But I did not know any wedding photographers. I had no one to answer my questions about this profession. I began my intense research by going to a local Barnes & Noble bookstore and picking up one wedding magazine that stood out to me most: Grace Ormonde Wedding Style. I perused the pages and noticed that it was filled with images taken by this photographer named Mike Colón. I was blown away by his work and I decided that moment that he will be my mentor (he didn’t even know it). I began following his work and reached out to him out of the blue to see if he would consider mentoring me. He initially declined (though looking back, I can see how my approach was borderline stalking).

I had no idea where this accidental career would take me when I first started.

One day, I got an email blast from a company called Pictage that it was going to host Mike for a seminar in Cleveland. I knew this was going to be the opportunity for me to meet him, so I drove over eight hours, through a major rainstorm and construction, to get to this event. I was so excited that when it was time to take a group photo with everyone, I made sure to position myself right next to him.

There were two other speakers that I did not recognize. One was Jeff Jochum, who consults creative entrepreneurs and worked with Pictage at the time, and the other was Skip Cohen, the president of Rangefinder and WPPI at the time. I soaked everything in like a sponge, and at the end of the night, I made sure to meet and thank them. Jeff encouraged me to sign up for Pictage; it became my online lab that night. Skip talked to me about WPPI, which I hadn’t heard of. I am not sure why but he offered me complimentary registration to attend, so I decided to go. Little did I know that my adventure of attempting to meet my photography hero would lead me to other serendipitous encounters that forever changed my photography career. Pictage and WPPI were instrumental in helping and guiding my photography career; they provided a community for me to grow as photographer.

For the next several years, my life would be filled with serendipitous meetings and numerous opportunities like these. Many other mentors entered in my life, and I just smile gratefully as I look back at the things that I got to do: writing books, getting sponsorship opportunities, speaking at various conferences, teaching workshops and leading photography tours internationally. I got to meet some incredible photographers along the way, but most importantly, I’m just grateful for all of the wonderful clients I got to photograph.

My two cents to anyone starting out in wedding photography would be this: If you are passionate about it, do not give up. Do not worry about the future and where you will be down the road. No one knows. When you discover something that you were meant to do, so many doors and opportunities will open themselves to help you achieve it.

I am grateful that I accidentally discovered that in wedding photography, but in hindsight, it doesn’t seem so accidental. My path was unique, full of successes and failures, but yours will also be unique and it will be different from those around you. Help others as you go on this journey; we are all in it together.

Kenny Kim’s WPPI Master Class on starting and maintaining a successful destination wedding photography business takes place at Mandalay Bay Feb. 26 from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

SANDRA COAN

I started my photography business in 1999, sort of by accident. It had always been something I loved, but I never thought it could be a job, let alone a career. It was just something I played around with on the weekends. I was teaching kindergarten and struggling to get by on my teacher’s salary. For fun, I took some maternity photos of a friend of mine, which she loved. She suggested I start offering maternity photography on the side to supplement income .

Back then maternity photography was not what it is today. Very few photographers offered it. And I was pretty sure that no one would pay me to take their picture. But I was desperate. So, I took the one good photo from my friend’s shoot, made it into a postcard with my name and phone number printed on the back, and put that little postcard in every coffee shop, yoga studio and maternity store I could find. To my astonishment, women started to call. The next year, I decided to go down to part-time teaching so that I could focus more on my photography. And a couple of years after that, I quit my job altogether. I’ve been a full-time photographer ever since.

To say the industry has changed since I started is a colossal understatement. In 1999, we all shot film. Hardly anyone had a website. There was no Facebook or Instagram. No blogs. Google had just started, but I certainly didn’t know what it was. If you wanted to look someone up, you used a phone book. And businesses relied on Yellow Pages to get in front of potential clients.

I’ve witnessed the death of film as well as its rebirth. I’ve seen the rise of digital cameras, the advent of the “mom with a camera,” and the fear that the industry is dying every time something new comes along (and something new is always coming along). My business has survived the birth of my twins, the worst recession since the Great Depression and the fact that I have no formal training in photography or business.

Much has changed over the past 20 years in all aspects of my life. And yet, here I am. I ask myself why that is all the time. I’m not the most talented photographer to ever have walked the earth. I’ve made mistakes. But I also made the choice early on to learn from those mistakes. I don’t make excuses.

If something is not working in my business, I don’t blame my competition or buy into the story that the market is too saturated for me to be successful. Instead, I look for solutions. I figure out what’s wrong and I fix it. When I realized that inconsistency in my work was hurting my business and keeping me from growing my brand, for example, I learned to create natural-looking light with strobes so that clients who came to me in the winter receive the same quality of work as clients who came to me in the summer.

When I was struggling with marketing and the advent of social media, I fixed it by investing in classes and mentorships that helped me and my business grow. Investing is key, and I don’t shy away from it. After all these years, I still take classes. I still go to conferences. I hire mentors and I push myself to keep getting better.

It hasn’t always been easy. I’ve had moments of hating what I do. I’ve rebranded more than once. I’ve been burned. And I’ve thought about quitting, more than once. (I have a recurring dream that I close my studio and get a job at Starbucks.)

The only thing that has stayed the same over the last 20 years is the fact that things change all the time. And if you want to stick around, you have to be okay with that. The industry will evolve. Trends will come and go. Institutions will fall and new ones will rise up in their place.

The only thing that has stayed the same over the last 20 years is the fact that things change all the time.

The secret to building a long-term career is not letting the changes scare you. Balance knowing what you do and what works for your business with the ability to evolve and learn. Be willing to get help when you need it and stick to your guns when it’s necessary. Love your work, love your clients, and most importantly, learn, learn, learn. Stay on top of the changes and make adjustments as you go. Last year marked my 20- year anniversary. Here’s to 20 more!

Sandra Coan’s WPPI Platform Class on creating a natural-light look without natural light takes place at Mandalay Bay on Feb. 27 from 3:00-4:00 p.m.

PHOTO © SANDRA COAN

DAN O’DAY

There was a time early in my life when I had hair down to my bum, refused to wear shoes (because they were separating me too much from Mother Earth) and I was busking my way through the then dirty, surfy streets of Australia’s Byron Bay with my mate, Arch. Using only patchouli to cover the smell of my 20-year-oldness, Arch and I busked the whole soundtrack of The Lion King night and day for loose change that would get us Big Macs and coolers of beer. I was living, man. And, shit, was the world lucky to have me.

At the time, I was unsure what I wanted to do beyond finding the next case of beer to drink. But I’m glad I had that time of aimlessness (that extended well beyond 1996) because once I found what I actually wanted to do, I latched on with determination and passion like my life depended on it.

In the not-too-distant future from my days in Byron Bay, I found my way into a public service job that paid my bills and found a flicker of passion in my free time in painting. Foraging a thirst for creation and a layman’s fine-art background, I created a large body of work and started exhibiting at galleries across Australia. Around the age of 32, I thought that I’d found my destiny in painting. Painting was my “career” in my mind and playing music was where my evenings were spent.

PHOTO © DAN O'DAY

In the way that many of our industry happenstanced their way into a career in wedding photography, the inevitable happened when I was gifted a camera and my medium changed all but overnight. Although I was still painting, I found the third source of income in cash jobs for photographing weddings in my free time around 2007. When it came down to both weddings and gigs for my band vying for my weekends, the decision between one or the other had to be made, and I’m surprised to say it was Googled best man speeches and dance floor cut-ups that took the cake.

I proceeded to quit my public service job and shoot every gig that was thrown my way. I was hungry to learn, and so 8.5-foot-high, unlit ceilings in community halls, Jewish hora dance floors with 250 people on them, and spontaneous drunk guest wedding speeches were the best place to learn. I was shooting upwards of 60 weddings a year in every ballroom that would have me, and I was learning quick and failing often. The benefit, I think, in not having any kind of a background in photography (especially not wedding photography) was that I was looking at these events and documenting them without a preconception of what it had to look like in the end. I was just showing up to people’s parties and documenting them in the way that my eye saw naturally.

In 2010, I had my first international speaking gig at the What If conference in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Jesh de Rox had become a friend and given my name to Steve and Jen Bebb who were organizing it all, and it was then that I was handed my first gig as a speaker. In 2010 speaking conferences weren’t as common as your mailman coming every day, and at the time it felt like a really big deal to be asked (it’s still a big deal to be asked—thank you, Bebbs, if you’re watching. And hi, Mum.)

In 2012 I shot the wedding of Tara and Paul at Alder Manor in Yonkers, New York, and it became for me a wedding that got me a lot of traction on the interwebs. After five years of spraying and praying for my work (so to speak), I had been given this gig with a woman who was the ultimate dream bride as far as the next stage of my career was concerned. Tara said to me, “I really don’t have any expectations from you at all, but I like how you see the world. I just want you to see my wedding day.” I internalized that amazing compliment as complete freedom to see the world how I see it, and at the time it gave me the encouragement I needed to trust my gut and my eye. It was also my first confirmation that how I saw naturally without influence was resonating with people other than myself.

After that, and because the internet has no borders, I got more inquiries internationally and started traveling more and more. At the time, it was an ultimate career dream. I had come a long way from singing ”Can You Feel The Love Tonight?” in the heat of the Aussie sun.

As my career was changing around 2012, I began attending conferences, speaking at things, and entering photo competitions for the AIPP and WPPI. The awards won me notoriety, which gained me respect, which got me work. Friendships made at WPPI gave me industry connections, which helped me gain awareness of so many other people’s work in the industry and vice versa. In an industry like ours, I’m always amazed at the size and depth of it (both big and tiny). The friendships I made in 2012 are ones I thankfully still have today and ones that helped shape my career.

Last November, I was standing in front of one of my idols, Sue Bryce, in a Californian desert, telling her how to pose her arm on her wedding day (gulp). No amount of Jewish dance floors or comp awards or speaking gigs could’ve made me feel any differently than packing my jocks in that moment. I wonder sometimes, though, if that deep gut fear and lack of complacency helps us in our careers at times. If I still thought I was God’s gift to Elton John, maybe I wouldn’t have tried as hard as I did in that moment.

VANESSA JOY

Some people think that my life is super easy now that I’ve “made it” and assume I don’t have to work that hard to get clients. Nothing could be further from the truth.

PHOTO © VANESSA JOY

Actually, I think I have to work even harder and spend more time and money getting the right clients than when I first started. The journey hasn’t ended for me—I’m still on it. It’s been a hell of a road so far.

When I first started dabbling in photography, I was in high school and my photography teacher at the time shot weddings on the weekends. After I graduated, I worked for him while I went to school thinking that I, too, would be a teacher—although a teacher of Spanish and not photography—and worked weddings on the weekends. I had no concept that you could be a full-time photographer. It was sort of just a dream.

I vividly remember the very first time I went to a photography trade show a few years later— PHOTOPLUS in New York City. I couldn’t help but be in awe at just how large this photography thing was. It was all I could do to not skip through the aisles of the trade show floor like a kid in a candy shop.

I remember looking at the photos of people at the Canon stage and somebody mentioning to me that these people were Explorers of Light. I knew right then and there that the title was something to be not only revered but would eventually be a goal of mine as well.

A friend of mine, Kenny Kim, encouraged me that I could be doing this for myself. I laughed when he suggested it, but I took his word for it anyway and started my own business while still working for that same photographer and starting my first year as a Spanish teacher. To say I was busy would be an understatement.

Two and a half years later, I got so busy with weddings that I had to leave teaching in the middle of the year. Absolutely no one in my school system was happy about me abandoning my post mid-year, but I truly never looked back. Every September I do a happy dance that I’m not going back to school!

I decided to take the jump into being an educator in the photo industry when I had gone to a few different trade shows and wanted to learn from these same photographers that I had always looked up to. I went to the classes and, while they were amazing photographers, they didn’t necessarily know how to teach a concept—business, photography or otherwise. Because I was a college-educated former teacher, I thought, I could do this. Not only do I understand photography and run a very successful business, but I know how to teach a concept to a class of students, no matter what the topic is. I decided to give it a try and asked a friend of mine who was helping find speakers for a local organization to set me up with one of those spots.

She did, and I can still remember it to this day. It was a small diner in New Jersey: the Peter Pank Diner. Since then, I’ve been working really hard at getting as many different speaking jobs as I can and more recently, been teaching quite a bit outside of the photography industry. It’s absolutely another full-time job.

It’s always been my motto since then that I didn’t want to become just an educator, but make sure that photography continued to be my main source of income. Not that I think you can’t teach photography if it’s not your main source of incomes; it’s just that I think you become very irrelevant, very quickly.

From the outside, it might seem like I was only teaching for a couple of years and then got scooped up by Profoto and scooped up by Canon, but trust me, it wasn’t that simple. I worked at building relationships in all those different places. I would speak on platforms that some would say wasn’t worth it. I even occasionally lost money speaking in places where the expenses outweighed the speaker fee (though I think every experience is always worth it). It’s a constant effort to balance the life of a wedding photographer while being a full-time educator as well.

I was recently asked the question, how did I manage to rise as a female in the photography industry in a male-dominant market? I’m probably going to have a very unpopular opinion here, but I’m going to tell the truth.

When I first started as a photographer, it was absolutely male dominated. I remember the first time I walked into my local photography meeting. There were only two women, and one of them was me. To be honest, I found the fact that I was a female to be an advantage and not a disadvantage. I was in weddings and I could relate to brides better than any man ever could. I easily stood out in the crowd of male photographers.

I saw my female minority status at the time as a strength instead of a weakness. I looked for ways to use it to stand out instead of hurt my career. Maybe it’s my perspective or maybe I’m naive, but I’ve found that being a very hardworking woman in a male-dominated industry, or previously male-dominated industry, has typically given me an edge. Have I been harassed in the photo world? Sure. Have I ever had colleagues belittle my work and intelligence because I’m a woman? Yeah. But those moments fueled my fire.

My advice to anyone trying to break into the field of either photography or education would just be to not give up. I could write articles and articles about all the different times I’ve gone wrong. But if you really love it, then that’s what you have to do. If you don’t truly love it or you find photography or teaching or anything that you’re doing more frustrating than rewarding, pursue a different career. You have to love the journey and never hope to reach the end.

Vanessa Joy shares her wisdom and knowledge at WPPI this year during a Photo Walk on Feb. 25—”Hips, Hands and Heads”—and in the Platform Class “Done is Better Than Perfect,” which takes place at Mandalay Bay on Feb. 26 from 4:00-5:30 p.m.