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SITE OF THE WEEK

Sometimes one web site just isn’t enough. Patrick McNamara has two, one for each of his photographic lives. He is, on the one hand, a highly successful commercial photographer with a New York agent and top-shelf corporate clients. He is, on the other hand, a local wedding photographer.

VISIT Patrick's commercial web site
VISIT Patrick's wedding web site

"Web sites?" McNamara says. "In my business you’ve got to have them.

A call today came from Canada, someone there saw me on the Internet. I just got a job in Minneapolis. Advertising agencies don’t have the luxury of time to call in portfolios as much as they used to. Now they can check your portfolio quickly on the Web."

McNamara, who lives in Cape Neddick, Maine started his photographic career at the York Coast County Star, he says, back when the New York Times owned it. His background was actually in restaurant management, but he wanted to break in to the already crowded photography field. His wife agreed that they should go where the action is. A decade ago they moved to Manhattan where McNamara got a job waiting tables at the "celebrity watching" River Café in view of the Brooklyn Bridge.

"I was actually at my wits end," he says. Breaking in to the biz was a catch –22. You need experience to get work, but all the work went to the veteran shooters. Then came the break. A waitress who worked with McNamara was in a gym class with a top photographer who agreed to look at his portfolio. Luckily, he says, the portfolio was filled with impressive shots of George Bush Sr. who had been President while McNamara worked at the newspaper in Maine.

That lead to a two-year apprentice job where McNamara got his feet wet in a real New York studio. Here, he says, he learned the business from the bottom up, literally, from cleaning toilets to archiving photos to solving customer problems. Soon he had developed his own client base and has been working steadily ever since.

But being a self-employed artist is a never-ending job of sales, promotion and effective management, McNamara says. Photography is not his hobby, but his vocation, and the work has to put food on the table.

Clients tend to quibble over the price of photography, he says, in a way they would not with other businesses.

"You don’t go in to your doctor or dentist and start haggling over the price," McNamara says.

"I see so many photographers willing to get the job, no matter what it takes. They give away their work for next to nothing because they are petrified that their phone will never ring again."

That may work locally, McNamara says where prices are low, but authentic agencies routinely do not give the job to the lowest bidder. Charging too little indicates that the commercial photographer does not know how to budget correctly or is operating on a shoe-string and may jeopardize the financial success of the project. Still for many, photographers are considered as unbusinesslike as musicians, writers and painters.

"How do you turn a photographer into a millionaire?" McNamara reprises an old joke. " Just give him $2 million."

THE WEB SITE MAKERS

Professionals tend to hire other professionals. If you’re busy flying around the country working for top corporations, you’re too busy to do your own web work. In fact, McNamara discovered his web designer while en route to a photo shoot in San Jose.

"I was on a flight going to shoot a job and just commiserating about web sites with my account rep. She said her husband built web sites and, although it was probably a risky business deal to hire the husband of the person who had hired me, it worked out great.."

Designer Eric McCallister of Exeter was able to deliver exactly the sophisticated design and simple navigation McNamara had in mind. McAllister is himself a photographer, as well as an avid rock climber, ice climber and kayak enthusiast.

"He listened to everything I asked for," the photographer says. "I wanted something image driven. I hate when you open a large photograph and then you have to click again to close it. I don’t want to have to jump around or move my mouse. Everything has to access off the one button bar on the homepage."

McCallister’s design for both the commercial and wedding web sites is all-the-way classy. That’s critical for the commercial photo site where clients can spend $10,000 or more for a powerful promotional photo or annual report. But wedding web sites are all over the map, from elegant and artistic to the kind that play a tinny version of "We’ve Only Just Begun" as little musical notes follow your cursor around the page.

McNamara wanted both sites to be winners. He got what he paid for.

It’s not just click and shoot. Commercial photography is hard work. The equipment is expensive. Professionals have to travel, work under difficult conditions and deadlines, deal with all manner of customers, art directors, editors and agencies. McNamara recently worked on a magazine ad for both NASCAR and the Mars company that produces M&M candies. The shoot included a staff of 15 – hair stylists, actors, lighting assistants, directors. Sometimes entire sets are built, as in the movies, before a picture can be taken in a photo studio.

McNamara does it all – still life, environmental corporate portraits of people in their workplace usually for annual reports. He especially loves portraiture while the corporate and magazine assignments are his bread and butter.

" Shooting landscapes for me is my therapy," he adds. "That’s where I go to clear my head and forget about the state of the economy."

The state of the economy under the new George Bush is bad, McNamara says. The advertising industry is in "dire straits" he says and major projects are drying up and good assignments are harder to find. After moving back to Maine and having two children, he feels the crunch -- which has only made him more competitive. He still places costly ads in "The Work Book" that promotes the nation’s best photographers.

"Who needs another starving artist?" he says. "We need artists who are also good business people. In New York you have to specialize. You have to be a generalist to survive up here."

McNamara stays busy even in hard times, he says, by sticking to his guns professionally. Rather than charge a day rate, like many local photographers, he prefers to calculate his price based on the value of the finished product to the customer. He licenses the image for specific usage over a specific time period and retains ownership of all additional rights.

Weddings, however, are another thing.

"Some people think that the wedding photographer is some dorky guy wearing a tuxedo and following the formula of posed shots. I laugh at people who look down their noses at it. Photography is what you make of it. I really have fun with it."

For McNamara, weddings are a creative elease from the restrictions of high-pressure commercial work. There, he says, working from storyboards under the watchful client eye, the photographer often becomes little more than a skilled technician and an exciting idea can turn out perfect, but still be bland.

He shoots weddings with a photojournalist’s eye and a commercial photographer’s skill, catching the mood and spontaneity of the event as it unfolds. Again, the web site is an ideal place for potential buyers – in this case potential brides and grooms – to see the artist’s work in advance. Couples can review McNamara’s wedding portfolio from home, the same way ad agencies can review his commercial work.

"If they’re not getting it from the web site, they’re probably not getting it at all. It’s a real good reflection of my personality and the end product," he says of potential clients.

So why two web sites? McNamara says corporate and top creative agencies often think of the wedding shooter as "not a real photographer". On the other hand, why ask an engaged couple to wade through his commercial portfolio? Do they care if the photographer just spent the week shooting for MasterCard, Gucci or Harley Davidson?

"If I wanted to still be struggling, I’d still be waiting tables," the photographer says. Being artistic and making a reasonable living, he insists, is not an impossible dream.