I didn't start out wanting to work in photography. I had some luck in the theatre while in high school and that looked like a good course to follow through university so I "went with my gut". Several of my friends went off in the direction of studying architecture and design and ended up getting involved in photography. Eventually one of them ended up majoring in photography and I ended up drifting away from the theatre and toward film making....that seemed more of a "total" art form at the time...it was also very, very hip to be in film making.
While Chicago had a pretty good bit of commercial and documentary film work going on, it soon became clear that it wasn't Los Angeles or New York. Jobs were few and far between and I don't even want to start talking about the difficulties and expense of getting established in any of the necessary unions. Things being what they were, I ended up working for a small studio that made late-night car dealer commercials and a photo studio that did commercial catalog photography. I basically knew how to set up lights, meter, focus and get an exposure so those qualities and my willingness to work for minimum wage got me the job at the catalog studio.
Another buddy of mine from the theatre department in college eventually put his acting skills to a profitable use: he opened a photo studio specializing in portraiture. He was doing pretty well but he always wanted to expand into food and product photography so he asked me if I could come over from time to time and give him a hand with the "non-people" stuff.
After spending years doing the bush league stuff, this was more like a shot at the big time....actual REAL LIVE art directors from REAL ad agencies on set....real models....stuff that was headed for national ads instead of page 231 of the Service Merchandise catalog. This was cool and the sort of thing that a photographer really aspires to. Even if I was technically an assistant, I was finally getting to use the sum of the knowledge that I had acquired over the years.
So one day, we're all mulling over how to place a light so that the highlight it would produce would let the product on set just jump off the page. Everybody had an opinion....nothing seemed to do the job. I very casually said, "Well, the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection." Everybody stopped. Dead silence. The head art director looked at me and said, "I've been doing this for years and I've never heard that. That is one of the most profound things I've ever heard. Is that Physics?" "Yeah, it's Physics." I said, "I studied optics when I was in school." I didn't want to say "in HIGH school" because I didn't want to make the guy fell like this stuff was SO elementary that I was amazed that a grown man with a prestigious and high paying job didn't know it.
My status suddenly jumped from lowly assistant to resident physics guru. Suddenly instead of me getting them a cup of coffee, they were getting ME a cup of coffee. Sadly, though, all I could think of was how unbelievable it was that out of a whole room full of people, I was the only one who knew this and I wasn't even really paying attention back in high school when that nattering old guy ran it past me the first time.
So photography, besides being an Art, is a discipline and a science. When we were all working in silver based imaging, those of us who knew the Physics and the Chemistry were a class apart. Sure you could just load a camera, shoot with auto exposure and send it to the lab....but those of us with the TRUE knowledge, the ARCANE knowledge....we were the Illuminati. WE knew how to make the photons and the atoms dance to OUR tune. I once worked with a fella who jokingly referred to me as "The Photo God"...I took it as a compliment. Now we work in digital...do we understand the Physics of that process as well as we did in the Silver Age? Sorta....but those of us who were members of the Illuminati now see where techniques and materials from both schools of photography can be used to optimize the final result.
So were ya' payin' attention back there while you were sitting there in Physics class? Chemistry class? There's another aspect to the expression "The Angle Of Incidence Equals The Angle Of Reflection", ya' know...where your art is concerned it means that what you put into it is what you get out of it.
