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Transcript
Introduction:
Welcome back to the Let’s Get Personal Podcast with Chris Debella. Today our guest is corporate and fine art photographer Matt McKee from Boston. In his 30 plus year career, Matt has seen the industry go from film cameras to digital and now into ai. We talked to him about his process, all the work he’s done for us and what he sees coming down the line. So let’s get started.
Chris:
Well, we’re joined in the office today by Matt McKee, photographer on our next episode. Let’s get personal. Matt, we’ve worked together personally and I can’t wait to jump into your story, some of my personal experiences, and you’re just an all around fun guy to have around, so thank you for joining us.
Matt:
My pleasure. I’m looking forward to this. Yeah,
Chris:
No, it’s great. So you have some background podcasting yourself. We were just talking about that, that you did it kind of as something to do during the pandemic, obviously very creative outlet. I love doing these things, but happy to have you on board today and just want to simply jump into how do you get into photography? When did it happen? How do you jump into that?
Matt:
I have a picture at home that my mother handed me a few years ago. That was me at three years old and they handed me a Fisher-Price toy camera
Chris:
That
Matt:
I ran around snapping pictures
Chris:
About Half the
Matt:
Audience will know
Chris:
What you’re talking about.
Matt:
Yeah, yeah. That’s long, long time.
Chris:
I know exactly what you’re
Matt:
Talking about, but I kind of played around with it. I got handed a Polaroid camera at one point when I was seven or eight years old and created a scene in my bedroom on a red shag carpet of a giant T-Rex model that I got at the Museum of Science one time, and it was chewing on a Jeep with a little army men because I had just seen a Godzilla movie and looking back on it now, that was when I realized I could create worlds. I could tell stories with images. Fast forward 20 years, 10 years, whatever it was, when I hit college, I discovered that I was too impatient, too immature, really, but too impatient to take the time to do the drawing or the painting. I failed pottery. Yeah, well, I mean I was going to an art school, so pottery in some schools is kind of, okay, let’s introduce you to the clay and let’s have fun with it. Pottery at this art school anyway was very serious and you were expected to be in the studio of 24 hours a day, and I was a 17-year-old punk and discovered photography and was like, no, I don’t want to do pottery. I want to take pictures. And they said, no, no, you need to learn all these things. Become a well-rounded artist. But that’s really when I kind of discovered that photography was the shortcut.
Instead of setting up a still life and painting it for three weeks, I could click the shutter after setting everything up and go, okay, let’s go on to the next idea. I’ve got too many ideas floating around. Let’s get to the next one. Let’s get to the next one. And that’s kind of described how I do photography. Now I want to tell a story. When we came into photograph, I go on and ramble, so you have to cut me off When you, when I came into photograph you folks, we had a discussion, you and I ahead of time. So what’s the goal of this? Who’s going to see these things? What do they need to see to change their minds about how they feel about you or feel anything about you?
So let’s tell that story. So we photographed you at your desk with the award or the plaques behind. We photographed your team in their various places. We created scenes in different rooms that would talk about your professionality, your trustworthiness, your honesty, your ability to, I always say this line to listen to a client’s story, not take their bullshit, get to the truth of things so that you can solve the problem. If I can make you look like a hero, I mean we scribbled all these things down and it sketches did a walkthrough so that we could tell that story. And I forgot where I was going with this, but that’s what I love about it. No,
Chris:
Well, it’s funny how when you outline it like that, it really just shows how much more there is to photography than just taking a picture. Because we did do all those things, and I’ll get into a little bit of my experience with it, which was fantastic, but knowing what you want to do with the pictures, what captures that, what background captures that, how to display the people, that’s all that set up. It’s kind of prepping for a paint job, which is more important than actually painting,
Which I think is lost with the people that just come in and say, oh, I got the iPhone. I can take a nice picture, but maybe you’re not telling the story the way you want to. Maybe you’re not putting in that prep work, which when you put it that way, really it is a little bit enlightening because I do remember going through the process, but you forget how much really went into it. We had a full day shoot and from our perspective, it’s funny because everyone, I’ve been doing this 20 years, I’ve had a multitude of different websites and you just think, Hey, let’s just take a picture. Let’s take a headshot. You put it up there and nowadays everything’s so visual. We live in this world where everything is video and audio, and so you have to have high quality. Everybody’s putting out high quality work. You don’t want to be left behind, but it was kind of a great experience. It was kind of a team building experience, I think for us too, because your whole staff and everybody was great and fun and made it easy, and it was this day of, I think the whole staff thought, Hey, we’re celebrities. It kind of had that feel. None of us are, but you had that feel where you felt special and
Matt:
The story was about you folks. I mean, a law office is a law office, but the people who are in the law office are what makes the difference, and that’s what the story was about. So yes, you guys were rock stars because you were the heroes of that story.
Chris:
Yeah, well, that’s true. I know the staff was very anxious leading up to it, as I’m sure you get with a lot of your clients, and I think it’s to this day, one of the things they talk about the most, and I think the comradery, the shared anxiety, the shared seeing the product at the end and you’re like, wow, this is really great because you also get a sense of seeing what a professional can do versus an amateur, and it really does bring to life that story that you can’t get just by, even though cell phones are, we tell all of our clients nowadays, we live with a camera and a camera recorder, so to speak, in our pocket, which we didn’t have growing up. You mentioned Polaroids. I mean that seemed life-changing back in the day, that you could have an instant picture of something. Nowadays we have thousands of photos on our phones and I think everybody probably fashions themselves a photographer these days, but I think when you put it that way where there’s so much more to telling the story, capturing the moment rather than just taking a picture, it really does come through in a lot of your work.
Matt:
Thank you. Thank you.
Chris:
But that’s great to see how you started from such a early age because my kids are one’s going to college, one’s in college, and it’s so hard to know what you want to do. I always love when people’s story, they kind of know from an early age where they want to go and where their passions are.
Matt:
How can I respond to that one? I think that it’s important to explore at a young age and try lots of different things, and if my own collegiate experiences actually informed how my son made choices about sons, made choices about their colleges where you have to explore and part of exploring is understanding that some of the things you’re going to try are not going to be right.
My oldest went to UMass Amherst, which it gets a lot of students from our area, but he discovered over the semester he was in there that they weren’t going to let him explore the areas he wanted to explore because they had their curriculum and they weren’t going to let him have the time to do the exploration outside of classes. And he called us up, I think it was like three days into the second semester, and he called us up and said, mom, dad, if I leave right now, you’ll get back 80% of the tuition for the second semester. And my wife said, oh gosh, I think we need to talk about this. And I said, no, he’s made a decision. He just told us what he decided and he’s coming home because this wasn’t the right fit. He tried it out, he explored it, he gave it some time and decided it just wasn’t the right thing. So he went on to something else and a different school, and that was also part of the pandemic happened during that. So it got a little bit muddy, but tried a bunch of different things, came back to what he loved, which was actually working in the theatrical arts, doing lights and sound and has now built himself a career in it, but he had to try these other things.
Chris:
It’s so true. I tell my kids who are just getting into that realm is that it’s just as important to know what you don’t like as what you do, and you may think you like something until you try it. And we’re talking about everything is kind of a job. It sounds nice on the surface until you realize how much work goes into that and if you love the monotony of the parts that you still have to do. So that is an important part. Then that’s what being a 20-year-old is. I would say try as much as you can.
Matt:
Oh,
Chris:
Absolutely. I mean, when I was in college, I was telling my daughter and she’s at BU right now and go take, I took an astronomy class I loved, I love astronomy to this day and it’s something I read up on and still very curious about and that wasn’t a major or anything like that, but it’s nice to be able to explore other areas that
Matt:
It could have spun into it. You could have decided to go to a more science-based curriculum and followed up with it if that piqued your passion far enough.
Chris:
Yeah, I think college is trying to adapt to be a, I feel like when I went, I’m sure when you went, it was a much more rigid structure and now they’re kind of letting them flow between the different colleges a little bit more and step outside of there’s a curriculum, but it’s not as rigid as it used to be. So I think that’s important for kids that really don’t know and it’s such a, we’re digressing onto education, but it’s a great life lesson that just try as much as you can get exposed as much as you can. And
Matt:
The best advice I heard, I can’t remember where I heard it, but if you don’t know what you want to study in college, go get an associate’s degree, go get something else. Go take classes for sure, but don’t go to the $80,000 $120,000 a year school because you can major in partying anywhere and you don’t have to pay that much for it. Figure things out. And then when you figure out what your passion is, if you need that education to go further, go get it. Now you have a goal. If you don’t have a goal, then you just go explore.
Chris:
And there’s so much pressure on these kids from an early age to have it all figured out. I just think having a good grasp of life skills,
Speaker 4:
Being
Chris:
Able to talk to people, being able how to represent yourself, learning some of the technology that you’re going to have to utilize in any field that you go into, just showing up on time. I mean, just all those things are very important that absolutely no matter what you go into, it’s going to be helpful. So public speaking, which nobody loves to do, but all those things I would jump into if I had to do it over again. It’s
Matt:
Funny, as I’ve gotten older, the idea of public speaking doesn’t frighten me as much. I don’t know if it’s sort of a, after you reach a certain age, I don’t give a shit anymore. I don’t care what they think about it. Let’s go out and make an ass at myself. It’s fun and someone’s going to laugh and that’s going to be good enough. But when I was younger, I was like, crap, that was terrifying.
Chris:
You even have a great sense of humor, which came through during the shoot and it made a very, I think for some of the staff, very stressful moment, let them put their guard down and which is also so important to get the pictures that you want to tell the story that you want because it lets people release their anxiety, be their true self, and it comes across a little bit better in the picture. But that’s something I vividly remember from our shoot that you’re just very playful and created that kept it professional, but also kind of disarmed us when we were going through it. And that was
Matt:
On purpose. Yeah, that was very much, I mean, I had someone describe a session with me as both an improv class
And a psychiatrist’s guidebook because I’m guiding you to forget about the fact that going back to everyone running around with a phone in their pocket, it means that they’re very conscious of that one photograph that they took. It’s the perfect angle, and so they’re very conscious of it. When I sit down for a session with somebody for even a simple headshot session, there’s forty, eighty, a hundred twenty five hundred images that I’ll shoot because I want you to screw up so we can go over and look at it and giggle to ourselves about between each other, that didn’t work, don’t turn your head that way next time. Cool. We can go back in there. They can see that they can make a mistake and it’s not going to impact them, and then it goes away and then they come back and they’re relaxed a little bit more and they’re ready to play a little bit more, and then the real them comes out them on their best day in front of their best audience, and that’s when we got cold. But it’s all as playful as I am on a photo shoot. I’m always thinking about, okay, what’s going to be the hook to get Chris to look powerful and trustworthy and all these different keywords at the same time, not make him look like a stiff bump behind his desk. Right.
Chris:
Yeah. And everyone’s different, right? Everyone has different triggers and different ways to get that out of them. So that’s a project onto itself. Absolutely. Absolutely. One of the things I’d love to get what your thoughts are on is obviously we talked about Polaroids and obviously you must’ve developed film at one point and now we have digital and now we have AI creeping in. But how have you seen photography change in the last 20, 30 years, and how has it impacted what you’re doing day to day?
Matt:
It’s weird. There are cycles that take place and things go in in fashion and out of fashion. At one point everything was very lit. It was looking like the old set, I’m dating myself again. The old sets on a soap opera where there’s a perfect hair light behind everybody, no matter where they’re standing in the room. There’s always that perfect three point lighting set up, and then it went to more naturalistic, then it went back the other direction where it was all hyper colors. I think that one of the themes that has always run true is it’s this balance between got to get attention with these images, so hence the bright colors of the nineties and the S and being authentic. So if you’ve over lit something, if it feels very, oh look, they have a soft box over on that side over there and they have a key light behind them or whatever, if it looks very obvious, then it takes away from the authenticity of it if starts feeling like a set. So the authenticity is always the through line.
Chris:
Obviously your day must have changed a lot if you spend a lot of time developing film versus now you’re probably spending a lot more time editing or going through hundreds of photos that you didn’t take in the past and now the sheer volume and saving that and just getting through all those photos to get back to the person has to be a much different type of work schedule than you had initially.
Matt:
Yeah, very much so. The joke is in the film days, I would send off, we shot a lot of transparency, a lot of slides. We would send it off to the lab, the lab’s responsible for making sure the color is accurate. Then we send it to the client and the client is responsible for the scans and the ruby list and all the other technical terms that I’ve forgotten over the years. But I was not responsible for the color other than initially. Now I’m responsible for everything that’s in the photograph, which is another reason why I plan so much ahead of time is everything in the photograph has to be on purpose. So yes, we can retouch out that light switch behind your head if you want, but better we shoot it and just turn a little bit and get rid of the light switch. Right.
Chris:
It’s
Matt:
Easier. But yeah, there’s a lot more responsibility on the photographer to deliver the final product.
Chris:
And have you utilized ai? Do you see AI playing a role in photography even if you’re not utilizing it?
Matt:
I use it as a tool. I’m not generating AI images. I’ve played around a little bit with generating backgrounds and generally because of how much control I want to tell my story, I have not found AI to be that helpful for me in that aspect. Cleaning up skin is pretty good at that, doing masks, cutting somebody out so that you can darken the background or change the background entirely. That’s where AI really shines to me. I don’t need it to create the image for me because I want to make those choices, but I want it to help me to streamline the stuff. Like I hate retouching hair,
Chris:
Right? Yeah. We try and use it the same way to kind of just eliminate monotonous tasks, but obviously you want to keep the artistic element of what you’re doing. You want to keep control over it.
Matt:
If it’s creating for you, then number one, you have no more role in the process. But number two, it’s not your image anymore. You didn’t work for it. You didn’t have that intentionality. So another running gag throughout the years has been, yes, the person who has a high net worth job went out and bought the state-of-the-art camera and he captured a sunset or he captured some image. Kenny, he do that image again. Does he understand why it worked? Does he understand why that image is important or not important or what if he can’t describe that, then he can’t repeat it, which means he can’t produce, he’s not going to tell a story. He’s going to get lucky. And nothing wrong with being lucky. Part of my job is to look for those moments where the fates have intervened and there’s something interesting happening, and it’s up to me to make the choice to capture it or not, but
Chris:
You get more lucky when you know what you’re doing. Yes. The backgrounds and how they interplay with the different depths of the picture. And I mean, I felt completely incompetent when you mentioned that because I feel like I’ve taken a good picture every once in a while, but you’re completely right. I wouldn’t know why it kind of came out well, and I sure as hell probably wouldn’t have been able to reproduce it if I wanted to, but that’s really interesting. We put it that way.
Matt:
Like I said, there’s nothing wrong with that, but there are times where I’ve walked into a situation where everything about that situation was unlucky. It was bad room to begin with that we’re trying to photograph and there’s nothing there to help us tell the story, the subject that we’re photographing doesn’t really want to be there, but was told that we need to do this photo shoot a whole plethora of different things. So if you understand why a good photograph works, then you can apply those things and going, okay, so he’s very uncomfortable on camera. We’re not going to get him over that anxiety, so how can we play with things a little bit and make it so that he forgets he’s on camera and then we got the shot, but we have to know what we’re doing.
Chris:
There’s a lot more when you put human beings into the mix,
Matt:
Absolutely
Chris:
Much different than just shooting a mountain scene or something when you have to disarm people. And I’ve seen it firsthand. I mean, that is a whole gift onto itself because there are, people have so many, we all live and walk around with insecurities. To your point, angles that we like better than one another are, you could see these young kids, they do all different types of things to hold their arm a certain way to look more slimming. There’s so much of that going on, and there’s probably even more anxiety nowadays because of social media
Matt:
And
Chris:
So many more images out there
Matt:
That the curated world.
Chris:
And that’s so hard to, that’s a lot of pressure to get people. I mean, that human element, you’re doing a lot of corporate. That was our interaction. Was that something you always did? Did you grow into, how did you get into that realm?
Matt:
I started out, well, I started out the traditional path for a lot of photographers. After you get out of school, you go and work for a number of different photographers in a number of different industries to try to figure out what’s going to resonate for you, what do you think you can sell, basically? And I started out assisting and then jumped into doing editorial photography for a lot of high tech magazines during the tech bubble. So I went into, I can’t tell you how many different companies that were, startup companies that were Monster Inc. And that’s the big one I can remember off the top of my head. But the idea was to photograph them for the covers of the magazines, and then you’d end up having a conversation where the publicity director or the marketing director comes over afterward and says, you did a pretty good job handling the CEO and kept things light, didn’t keep ’em for more than the 10 minutes that he allotted. You want to do some more work for us. And that’s how I kind of got into the corporate side of things. It was a good learning experience. I don’t think editorial certainly is not what it once was. I could make a living doing editorial back then, but these days, I think that’s a tougher road hoe
Chris:
Is that just because there’s so many more pictures available, stock photos to buy, and I think
Matt:
Magazines, well, the budgets, as I started getting out of it, the budgets started dropping print and some of them have kind of made the transition over to the digital world and a lot of magazines just folded and went away.
The ones that did not fold and go away, a lot of ’em got sucked up by big corporations that started putting together these huge contracts that did not favor the small business person who’s just going around and I want to create images all day. And so it became very difficult to bill for the time and the supplies that went into doing these editorial shoots. So that’s when I figured out that the corporate world had bigger budgets, had money to play with, they were willing to invest in these images versus I think magazines at the end, it started to feel like, we know this is a throwaway culture. We know that this cover shot we’re going to do is going to be there for a month on the newsstand, and then it’s gone. So how much do we really want to spend on this? We’re just trying to sell ads. So I would register rather try to sell the company than try to sell ads.
Chris:
And so how did you make that transition when over, and you did that simultaneously with going out on your own?
Matt:
Yeah, pretty much. So this is in the late nineties, I think. Yeah,
Chris:
Late
Matt:
Nineties, 98,
Chris:
Something like that. Do you have a first account and you are like, this is where I’m going to make my niche?
Matt:
Sure. I
Chris:
Got,
Matt:
Here’s that word, lucky again. I got lucky in that I found some people early on through either other connections or through, there were a couple of times where a photographer threw me a gig that did not have the budget for the kind of production that they would put together, so let’s try something different, that kind of thing. And a lot of it was word of mouth in the beginning, and some of it was the people I photographed for the magazines. Those relationships lasted a little bit longer, at least until the dotcom bubble popped. And then I started to become more conscious of, okay, so meeting people this way worked, meeting people this way did not work. That was back in the time when you could actually do cold calls and people would actually answer the phone and you could have a conversation with somebody. I learned very quickly that no was a good thing. So I would call somebody up and say, I’m just trying to find out if it makes any sense for us even to start a conversation about photography. If I’m talking to the right person, they would say, well, yeah, it might if I was talking to the wrong person. No, but you might want to talk to, and it kind of spun from there where I ended up with a bunch of clients that way.
Chris:
It’s such an important, it’s amazing how many skills transcend industry and networking even for these younger kids is so important. You start your network early on in life and you can only build on it, try and stay in touch with people. It’s so much easier to do nowadays if you can connect through social media and then just drop a line every once in a while. But those connections and relationships tend to yield fruit later on. Absolutely. And it’s such a powerful tool that I think people don’t always realize or take advantage of
Matt:
Fully. Well, the challenge now is that people don’t answer the phone, number one. I mean, everyone’s busy, so I kind of understand
Chris:
That, but everyone’s so skeptical.
Matt:
Yeah.
Chris:
How many spam calls do you get a day? Oh god, that’s
Matt:
Ridiculous.
Chris:
So now if the number’s not in your phone,
Matt:
You
Chris:
Don’t answer it,
Matt:
But there’s also the fire hose effect now with how much information is flowing at you and the algorithms on, I used to be a big fan of, well, back in the day, Facebook first and Instagram, and I enjoyed Twitter for a while as a way of reaching around and exploring who I should reach out to. But nowadays, as soon as you get in there, the algorithm on any of these social media things is like, oh, you might like cat videos too. No, I’m trying to find out who is handling the marketing here and how they’re doing it, what their thoughts might be. But we also have this other thing over here of somebody doing the latest dance trend. And by the way, oh, check out this recipe for pork bogo. You’re going to love it. And of course, eventually
Chris:
You succumb to the
Matt:
Algorithm. Yeah, I made a great pork BOGO last night actually as a result of that. So maybe I’m old. I’m certainly not a digital native. My kids are in terms of social media, but even my youngest yesterday, 22, so he’s not that young anymore, was like, I haven’t been on TikTok in three days. Dad, what are you doing?
Chris:
Well, maybe he lost it when I turned it off.
Matt:
No, he still had it, but it was the distraction, the doom, scrolling, and he’s starting to get wise to the fact that what’s productive? Why are you going on there? If you’re just going on there for the dopamine hit,
Chris:
You can lose an hour of your life and not even know it feel any better for it. Yeah, it,
Matt:
It’s mindless stuff feel much worse as a
Chris:
Result of it. Right. It’s funny, from my kid’s perspective, two of ’em play hockey and photography is everywhere now. So I dunno if there’s a resurgence because of social media, but all the kids will invite different photographers to all these high school hockey games.
So there’s this 6 1 7 photo, I believe, and they’ll go to all the games, they’ll take pictures of the kids. The kids will repost it and give them a shout out for it. And they do a really good job. And some of ’em, even recently, I think this 6 1 7 guy took the team there, they’re blue and white and said, you know what? There’s a blue light at the swamp Scott train station. So you had ’em all come in their gear and took pictures there, but it was a good little creative thing. But it is neat seeing the kids get immersed in because it is such a nice art when someone’s doing it professionally and
Matt:
Well, as you were talking about that, one of my thoughts in my head was, okay, so the kids are inviting these photographers to shoot. Where’s that photographer making their rent?
Chris:
It’s a good question. That I don’t know. I don’t know if they buy images from them directly. I assume different action photos that are captured. Part of it is, and there’s people that do video clips too of them. So they’re capturing this guy that was really big, I think his name was Bernie. He’d come to all the high school games and he would take videos and it would get out, and he had a groundswell of followers. I don’t know if he made money through that, but then I think he was just recently up working for the Buffalo Bills. There
Matt:
You go.
Chris:
And he went from there to working, I think at BU for the hockey team because he did such a great job locally with the high school teams. And then he just made his way up. But it was, a lot of them are just about making that name, and they do it through going for the game. And I give these kids a lot of credit. They’re working hard, hustling, they’re out taking pictures, they’re doing all the editing, all the behind the scenes that you know better than most that I think everyone just sees a great clip or a great picture and just thinks, wow, they got lucky. And they caught that. Guess what?
Matt:
Hours and hours of work, your
Chris:
Luck improves when you actually know what you’re looking for and you know how to capture it. And so I feel like photography, as we move into this digital age, and I think you think about ai, there’s one way you think, wow, is it as important as it was when you had to do all the work behind it? And now I think it’s so much more of a part of our society. I mean, I have more photos than I ever had in my life, and there’s a big difference between the ones that are professionally done, which we can see when we have un to do the stuff through our work. We can see when someone’s taking it professionally, the kid at a wedding or the kid’s graduation or a sporting event, versus me just snapping it at a sporting event. Now these kids, they don’t want my pitcher at the game. They want one of these guys that’s taken thousands of pictures and
Matt:
And then editing it down to the five as the puck is coming into the glove. Yeah.
Chris:
Yeah. It’s pretty wild. But life to me is all about memories, and it’s so great to be able to look back on experiences that only photographs can capture. We have our memories, but memories stay alive a little bit better when you have supporting photos.
Matt:
Absolutely. Absolutely. To go
Chris:
Along with them. Yeah. Where do you see it going in the next 10 years?
Matt:
I don’t know. I’ve been thinking a lot about that. So I’m 58. My wife is going to be retiring in the next three to five years. So
Chris:
You don’t care, is that what you’re saying? Well, no,
Matt:
Just kidding. I do care because I love, you got to
Chris:
Get those vacation, those vacation photos
Matt:
We’re
Chris:
On the beach. Well,
Matt:
Maybe. So I have a different philosophy on my beach photos on vacation. That’s me capturing the memories versus me catching the waves and the sunset kind of thing, where I want to evoke in somebody of feelings that they weren’t there to experience. But I don’t know where exactly it’s going. It’s kind of interesting because when photography first came on the scene in the 1890s, I think it was, or 1840s whenever it came on the scene, the painters, everyone was getting of a certain demographic and price point. People were getting paintings done as their portraits. That was their headshot. They didn’t have LinkedIn at the time, but if they did, it would be all oil paintings on there.
And all the painters were like, oh my God, this is terrible. This is going to kill our industry. It’s going to do all these kind of wild things. And in a way it did, but in another way, it freed up those artists to find other ways of experimenting with paint. That’s when you had the surrealist movements, the cubist movements, and the paintings become much more, much more storytelling, much more free. I think that some of the people I’m seeing using AI on social media, some of them are phenomenal, and they have found the intentionality in the pieces. And I can’t think of any of the people’s names off the top of my head right now, of course, but they have found intentionality in what they’re creating. And even though they’re using AI as their primary platform to be creating in, they’re still creating images that are very stylistically theirs.
And that part is kind of fascinating to me because there are always limitations in photography where you’re stuck with the physics of the camera and the lenses and what it’s able to capture in low light situations and whatever situations. And if we could avoid some of those walls that I run into with every new camera body I get, I test it out and I’m like, okay, so I can’t go beyond this point because the camera won’t do it. I can’t do this because the physics of light won’t let me do it. If AI can get me around those things, what other stories can I tell with it? That could get very interesting. That
Chris:
Is interesting. Yeah. You raised it a couple times, and I feel like I know, but you mentioned this term of intentionality. What do you mean by that?
Matt:
Oh, I actually really hate buzzwords, but that’s one of the ones that always kind of comes back to me. Intentionality, authenticity, mindfulness. All of these are going back to when we were talking about the guy who got lucky with his camera and happened to catch the shot. I don’t want to need to get lucky. I want to be thinking about what story I’m trying to tell. So when I approach a product shot or a people shot or a lifestyle shot or any of these things, I am thinking about who we’re telling a story for. What do they need to see to change their perspective even just a little bit.
What can I create to make that change that has an authentic feel to it? So I don’t want to turn you into a clown in order to make you tell a story. I want it to be you on the other side of the camera, but I want your intentionality to be there to tell your story. I want, I’m using the word in the definition, which is terrible. My wife, an English teacher, she would shoot me for that one. A photographer ages ago told me that everything according to the audience, everything in that frame, in the photograph, the audience thinks was there on purpose. So when I’m creating an image to tell a story, I’m looking at the background behind you, I usually start there because that’s going to build the foundation coming forward. What are you wearing? How are you sitting? What is that telling somebody? If you’re slouching, is it because you have a back problem like me? So I’m kind of slouching all the time? Or is it that you are not being honest? Okay, so what do we need to do to correct that?
Speaker 4:
Right?
Matt:
Bring the story forward, another step. What’s in front of you? He’s got a microphone in front of him that we’re just going to tell a story. Is it a good microphone? Well, it looks good to me. Okay. So that’s going to tell a story about the quality of what you’re putting together. All these things are back to intentionality.
Chris:
They’re done with purpose.
Matt:
Yeah, yeah. Done with purpose. That’s the intentionality I want. So the happy accident will happen where somebody hands you a glass of water and it happens to be a nice glass, and it tells a further story about things. That’s cool. That’s a happy accident. I don’t want the ceiling light to fall down because that’s not a happy accident at that point. So I want to control the fact that my light hanging over your head isn’t going to fall on you.
Chris:
Yeah. I mean, even just on the simplest terms, I think from what you’re saying, what you come in to do a headshot for me, and you could headshot, you could take a passport photo, stick me up against a blank wall and take it and put it up on the website, but that doesn’t really tell much about who I am. But then when you are saying, Hey, Chris, let’s take a walk around the office. Let’s see what the best background is for the audience we’re trying to put that picture out for.
Matt:
Here’s where we can really talk about intentionality. The headshot behind the desk with the brick wall and the curtains and the diplomas is great for a large presentation on a webpage, it’s going to suck on LinkedIn, right? So let’s photograph you on a blank white wall, nice lighting, nice styled. Don’t care what you’re wearing for pants because we’re only going to see to your top button. So the intentionality there is, okay, we’re telling another story for a different audience for a different presentation. So let’s control for that.
Chris:
In a lot of ways, and I don’t know if you get this through your clients, which I know you did with me, really, but you actually have to do a little detective work. You got to know, oh, absolutely. Who’s your audience? What message are we trying to convey? Is it trust? Is it power? Is it approachable? Because as you said, the LinkedIn audience is much different than the guy visiting a website,
Matt:
And the LinkedIn presentation is much different than, so I mean, that all is part and parcel. So where is this image going to live later? I should say that as I had to change that because people were using the images all over the place. What is your primary thing? I can’t photograph for every situation in one picture. You certainly can run around and do seven different photographs of you for seven different purposes, but what’s the main reason we’re creating this image? Right? Yeah, it is definitely detective work. And sometimes the challenge is when I get a phone call from somebody’s assistant who has been told, call up three photographers who’s work you like, and just get numbers from them. My production is going to depend on a whole bunch of questions I’m going to ask, including things like where it is, how fast it has to be turned around, what kind of budget are we dealing with? Have you ever used a makeup artist before? A myriad of different questions. And if that person who called me up has no answers, has no skin in the game, then really hard to put together, what’s the word I’m looking for?
Well, I was thinking even before the quote, I have to almost envision the shot in my head. So it’s more like putting together how I would create this image, and then I can make the quote off of that. But if I don’t know why I’m making the image, it’s very hard to say how to make the image and then to say what it’s going to take to produce it.
Chris:
So obviously, certain things that you’ve done, if you do a hundred law offices, that probably becomes a little bit easier depending on the law. You
Matt:
Up criminal
Chris:
Versus divorce
Matt:
Versus you end up understanding the language better, but the ideas are still dependent on the people. Some people want, well, law firm I did where this is not crack on the law firm, but it was an older generation of lawyers in there who had been staring in their conference room at the oil painting of the founder of, and so they wanted that kind of royal treatment in terms of the final image versus I’m dealing with some younger lawyers now that are in their late twenties, early thirties, and they want something much more hip, natural, or they want to go with the stark white background kind of effect. So it’s
Chris:
Completely different.
Matt:
Yeah. So even though what I ended up gaining out of that was a language that we could speak to speak with and understand each other, because that’s always the hardest thing. My job is to climb, but into your look out through your eyes and see what you want to see. That’s always the biggest challenge.
Chris:
Right? That’s a great way to put it. Yeah. So I mean, from the outside, it looks like a job that somebody would love. Do you love what you do?
Matt:
I still love what I do. Not as keen about all the, you were talking about the other things that you have to do, the boring parts of the work. I was never very keen on that side of it, but yeah, creating images, dealing with people. One of my clients is a community theater, and I started doing posters for them where we do all kinds of Photoshop manipulations and things like that. They gave me basically freedom to, okay, here’s what it’s about. Here’s some ideas we had. How can we make these real? How can we put butts in seats so we know who we’re getting, we know why we’re trying to bring them in. We know some general rules of what makes a good post or presentation because you’re only going to be looking at it for five seconds as you walk past the poster. And that has been the most fun.
I’ve been doing it for now for close to 30 years for this company, and every year we come up with new wild things to do. The actors are involved in it, but you have the director and the producer and the publicity director and all involved in it, and we’re all working toward one purpose and doing a photo shoot with them, even doing the initial meetings with ’em or throwing ideas around it is an adrenaline rush. Oh yeah. Yeah. And that’s when I first started out, going back to the days of assisting and then going into doing editorial. I thought the photographer was a lone wolf kind of guy. I would show up sweaty carrying my gear and try to figure out how to navigate things. And over the years, I am a very slow learner, but I’ve learned that this is a team effort and sitting across from somebody throwing ideas back and forth about what an image needs to be and why it needs to be that way,
You end up with the, what is it? The sum is greater than the parts involved. I can’t remember exactly how that phrase goes. It’s the whole phrase, but that’s the rush. I got this idea, Chris, we’re going to photograph it this way. Oh, what if I brought this in? What if I brought that in? Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, that’s got possibility of that. No, I’m not so sure about, but let’s go with this one and see where it goes from there. And then somebody else says, oh yeah, but he shouldn’t wear that jacket with it. We should do this other jacket. Oh, I mean, all of a sudden you end up with an image that if I had just tried to create it on my own, it would look one way. If you had just tried to create it with your iPhone, it would look another way. But because we had three or four people all working on it, oh, we got something that’s going to be interesting now.
Chris:
Yeah. See, you bring me to another question. Maybe you answered it, but you may have more. Is are there,
Matt:
I always got more. That’s the problem. I’ve been
Chris:
Doing this too long, but obviously you love what you do. You’ve been doing it a long time. Are there a couple projects that stick out in your mind that just are, you look at, you look back and just say, wow, those were really some of the best work I’ve done, or most enjoyable projects I’ve worked on, or things that you really were happy with the end product.
Matt:
You’re asking an artist if he’s ever happy with his work. The cliche answer is, what’s your favorite project? It’s the next one. And again, I hate the cliches, but as I’ve gotten older, I started to see the truth in them.
One of my challenges is I have short attention span theater going on in my head. So after we had this great project where we photographed, that was a hundred, 125 biotech products for this company. And it was a really interesting technical experience as if somebody hands you a bag of what looked to me like sand, no, this is a $5,000 bag of this biochemical and we’re going to be selling it, blah, blah, blah. How do you get that bag to tell the story that this is a quality product that’s worth $5,000 that’s going to look like that kind of quality? There’s a highly technical exercise to do. It was great. We shot for a week and I got to work with all kinds of great product managers who were really into what they were putting out, and it was a lot of fun to do. After that week though, I could not wait to do the poster that was coming up because that poster, I can’t remember what the poster was for. It was something where I had 10 actors in the studio doing individual shots and a group shot together that we were going to be manipulating all over the place. And I love actors because they’re very outgoing. They’re not the technical side of things.
Speaker 4:
So
Matt:
It had to be ready for that moment when that expression flew past their face as they were projecting their character. For whatever reason it was we were doing it. That was so much fun to do. After I got done with that and putting that all together, the next shot, I can’t remember what the next shot was, but it was a smaller project that involved a firm where we were photographing 10 people for it and we’re photographing in labs. We were going into the labs. That was a whole different kind of storytelling. So I need that different kind of storytelling to keep myself fresh
From the beginning of my career. People are like, are you a people photographer? Are you a product photographer? Are you a corporate lifestyle photographer? I just want to tell a story, man. Let’s go tell a story. This sounds callous, but I don’t really care what the product is. If it’s a person or a light bulb or whatever, it’s the next one that’s coming down the pike where I can say, okay, this is the story that I haven’t told yet. This is the story that even if it’s a product that I’ve photographed for the last 15 years, and I’ve got some clients that are that way, let’s find a new way to do it. Let’s find a different way to tell that story. Let’s find something interesting about it. That’s what I love. And the constant change from that to, okay, let’s photograph the headshot.
Chris:
I find the same thing in my practice. Every case is different. So you’re constantly working on something new, different people, different story, different set of facts, and that sounds to be very similar to what you’re dealing with, where it gets less monotonous, it keeps the interest going, keeps the artistic blood flowing and
Matt:
Allows those intuitive leaps.
Chris:
Yep. I was looking online, there was one called the Sweet Blast series that seems very interesting.
Matt:
So parallel to my corporate photography career, I’ve had to, yeah, that’s the right way of putting it. I have had to have personal projects that are ideas that I can’t imagine ever quite making it to a corporate setting in terms of a direct line kind of thing. No one’s going to hire me to photograph a hand grenade top in a lemon or a banana. But that series started when I was listening to public radio way back in the day. So this was 2012, I think, something like that. And they were talking about that’s when genetic modification was really getting hot. Monsanto was on the hotspot because they were creating both the weed killer and the seeds, which is cool. The seeds would not be affected by the weed killer. But then they were putting this sort of monopoly thing on top of it where they couldn’t, you couldn’t replant the seeds.
They own the genetic material. And I can’t argue, I mean, you’re a lawyer, you could argue that stuff back and forth a lot better than I could. But it started occurring to me that, okay, we’ve created a monoculture with some of these food groups, a lot of our food groups and some of the things that I love to eat, at least according to the news reports, they’re threatening them. And I don’t know exactly how the story happened in my head, but I found myself envisioning a lemon with a hand grenade top on top of it, a fuse. And over the years, people have said, so what happens if you pull the hand grenade pin? And it’s like, it’s obvious what’s going to happen if you do that, but it’s about the potential that we have to destroy ourselves by letting the science get carried away. It’s the Jeff Goldblum quote, just because you can do it should you kind of thing. So that series kind of rolled out of there, and it was this series that I used to keep the intrusive thoughts in my head as it were, as opposed to bringing them out at a corporate shoot where it might frighten people.
Chris:
But it is. So I love thought provoking images and where you’re telling a great story and you’re mixing themes, but you’re really hitting a point in a way that that picture tells it. You take five minutes to tell the same story and one picture and one image can do that. And I really love coming across those images in different locations. And that struck me when I saw that series. It’s very neat.
Matt:
It was fun. It was fun. I may revisit parts of it in the future, but we’ll see where it goes.
Chris:
So what’s the next five or 10 years bring for you?
Matt:
Oh, good question. Still chasing the corporate dream, still watching what is stylistically appropriate for different industries and still creating those things. So with my wife being within a few years of retirement, we’ve had that discussion throwing around, so what are you going to do when you retire? If she retires, if I’m just sitting around the house, we will probably, it wouldn’t be a good scene. So I got it to be doing something, but I don’t ever, while I see myself not wanting to chase certain aspects of my photography practice that corporate has led me into somewhere down the line, I’m not going to want to go out to these labs and be photographing in labs partially because I think I’ve told a lot of the stories already, and it’s not going to be as interesting to me. But I don’t see myself ever stopping creating the ideas, the desire to create and tell these stories that created the Sweet Blast series, the Promethean Dream series, and the tool series and all these other things. They’re still going to be percolating in there. And if I go too long without creating something, I start getting antsy. My wife can tell right away, I know it’s Sunday, go into the studio, go create something, anything. Just go do something. And then I’ll be like, okay, well, I did have this one idea, and I figured that’s probably what’s going to end up happening in retirement too.
Chris:
That’s great to have that creative outlet that a lot of people don’t have, and you can carry that with you through retirement. Just to end on, and I want to give you a great plug. We’ve had a great experience, and obviously you do appreciate that the law and the legal industry. Who are clients out there that might’ve listened to this? Maybe, where can they find you online and what types of industries could benefit from your services?
Matt:
The wise ass answer is all of ’em. That’s not completely true. So you can find me online@www.mckeephotography.com. My fine art stuff is at the art of matt mckee.com. In terms of the industries, it’s funny because I’ve been hired by some industries that I wouldn’t have thought that they would’ve brought me in for. And I’ve worked in other industries where I was very quick to realize that it really wasn’t a fit because they didn’t have my same desire to tell a story. They were just checking a box kind of thing. So I do think to a certain extent, it’s not so much about the industry, it’s about how well does the client understand that they are, the audience is looking at them and seeing a story. If you understand that they’re looking at that, then you might want to control the story is not quite the right way of putting it. But you might want to tell the story that you want to tell intentionally otherwise it’s accidental, and they may take away a whole different story from you.
Chris:
And the nice part about our shoot, and we’re probably going to have to refresh it soon as new people come on, but we still have that archive that you’ve given us. And so much went right up on the website. And so much as we continue to do marketing and we find these photos that you captured that we’re like, oh my God, that’s perfect for this type of post that we’re doing. And it’s kind of the gift that keeps on giving. And you do have to refresh it because there’s a lot of things that change.
Matt:
A corporate library is really only good for one or two years of active use, and then fashions have changed. People have put on, taken off weight, changed hairstyles, whatever it is, and then, yeah, you throw it up and it looks like, I’ve seen some people have images from the nineties up on their website. Oh yeah. It’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah. Yep. You see that all the time. Yeah. Now you’ve just told the audience that either you don’t care or you don’t have any understanding of what you’ve done, or you’re too vain to actually have a picture of how you actually look right now. And all of those things are a detriment to a brand.
Chris:
But I guess I would say to anybody considering it, it’s not only just such a great thing to do, I think it’s a great team building experience. It is great because this is how people consume information now. I think it’s great to have somebody like yourself that some purpose and intentionality behind it that is telling the story they really want it to tell. Which I don’t think that people really, that haven’t had a professional photographer really understand until they see the difference. And it also, you’re now creating that archive that you can do other things with. Yeah, absolutely. And everything now is visual.
Matt:
Everything
Chris:
We digest online, all the social media,
Matt:
People will look at the picture before they look at the headline.
Chris:
That’s right. And so I encourage anybody out there who hasn’t give ’em a call, give it a shot, because it really has been a great experience for us.
Matt:
Thank you.
Chris:
We’re so happy you joined us. It was my pleasure. It was great having you on board today and best of luck.
Matt:
Thank you very much. Awesome. You too,
Chris:
As always. Thanks for joining. Let’s get personal. If you know someone who might like this episode, please share it with them and review us on iTunes as it really helps us to get the word out. And don’t forget to like and subscribe to, let’s get personal with Chris debell on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever fine podcasts are downloaded.