02/16/2025
⏳ What it was like as a commercial photographer 40 years ago
As a young photographer straight out of photography school back in the 1980s, one of my first jobs was working freelance in advertising studios in Toronto.
For me, it was a dream come true; being paid to do the photography I loved - and working with my peers.
On top of that, while a lot of the time I used my own gear, I often got the chance to use the studio's beautiful, hand-made, wooden, large format, Deardorff 8x10, 11x14 and 16x20 cameras with barber chair wheeled stands - gear that I could never afford and which easily cost more than my car.
For a while, I happily dealt with the long hours in a windowless studio (it was always dark when I went to and came home from work), dealing with difficult art directors, as well as the competition from countless other young photographers ready to replace me if I didn't perform.
Regardless, I treated it as training that I knew was teaching me what I needed to later survive independently with my own studio and clients.
A lot of the work in the beginning was for printed catalogs for retail stores that today no longer produce them. Like this shot for a well-known but now defunct Canadian department store.
I was paid by the page, and in the summer, when we worked 12-hour days, we pumped them out to meet deadlines for Christmas ads that weren't seen until 4-5 months later.
The rate was usually $100 per page, and if you were fast and didn't need re-shoots, it was possible on a good day to do 3-4 or more pages a day.
That sounds like a lot of money, but Christmas ad production was only for the months of June through September. The rest of the year was less busy, working on summer product location shots or furniture or appliance ads that needed time-consuming room-sets built.
Worst of all, it was freelance, so end-of-year was always stressful calculating income tax and deductions that weren't applied on my paycheques.
This was the pre-digital days when pages were shot "size-as." Meaning , if it was double-page, you shot at 100% on massive 11x14 Ektachrome film, leaving room for copy or "insert" photos.
Most of the time though, our shots were single page that required an 8x10 or 8x10 reducer back on the 11x14, or a film "splitter" which you flipped to make two 5x8 exposures on a sheet of 8x10.
To set up, you judged the product placement from a clear acetate tracing made with a Sharpie pen and the hand-drawn art department layout - which was taped upside down and backwards on your ground glass. The subjects ("merch") were arranged to fit the layout copy placement.
A shot like the one shown was done on glass and a lit white backdrop, with the merch and props usually glued down to prevent accidental movement while arranging. The camera was set up to point directly down from above, meaning a stepladder was required to view through the ground glass.
For exposure; large format Ektachrome was crazy expensive even then, and performance reviews always included my billed production costs. So if you miscalculated your bellows extension factor or took multiple reshoots to get a final image, it reflected poorly on your record. I knew many great freelance photographers who never got called back for jobs because their film-per-page cost was too high.
It was also pre-Photoshop, so instead of today when individual digital files are layered into a layout on a screen, the final, approved sheet film transparency was sent to the "stripping department," where a copy of the original was physically separated into its Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (CMYK) layers, then registered and prepared for 4-color printing where each overlapping color layer was printed separately four times.
Today, photography studios, like where I began my career, still exist, but are very different. I did work for three companies that were housed in their own multi-story buildings with dozens of departments, some occupying entire floors. All had their own E-6 film processing labs on-premises to enable a 1-hour time between shooting and approval by the studio manager.
Nowadays, those same production facilities are often a twentieth the size with a fraction of employees. Not including sales, accounting and shipping, each step of the 100% digital imaging and printing process is usually contracted out to separate companies.
Except for hand-picked jobs that pay well, I rarely do many product shots these days. And the only film I shoot is for pleasure.
However, for an aspiring advertising photographer reading this far, wondering what it was like before digital took over, I think this "historical" account should give a pretty good idea that it was indeed a far bigger operation than today.
Oh, and those $20,000 wooden Deardorff cameras with Rodenstock and Ektar lenses that I used? Fifteen - twenty years ago you couldn't give one away.
You can now buy nice Deardorffs, or similar Burke and James studio cameras for a few grand plus shipping. However, once you figure out film is either non-existent or stupendously expensive to buy and process, you'll find it looks great converted into a living room floor lamp! 😉
