The Boomer Says "Say Cheese".

The Boomer has been a writer of one kind of another since he was about 18 years old, which makes that a very long time.
But in the process of mastering his craft, he also managed, somewhere along the line, to pick up photography.
Before the Boomer was married to Mrs Boomer, he lived in the Portuguese section of downtown Toronto, with his high school friend John Wild. John had come to Toronto to be a photographer and managed to land a job with a crazy transplanted New York Jewish photographer named Barry Ashley.
John was a pretty anal guy and as such was well suited to shooting the kinds of things that were quite difficult to shoot, like cars, jewelry, stereo equipment and other shiny expensive objects.
Later on John became quite adept at shooting people as well and had a great career on his own. He too is now a Boomer, and basically does photography for things that interest him.
Somewhere along the line, when the Boomer got interested in writing screenplays, he was talking to John, who suggested that learning photography might be a good way help to him visualize things for the screenplays he was writing.
He actually even went so far as to find and vet a Pentax Spotmatic system that somebody was selling and coerced the Boomer into buying it.
This, of course, sent the Boomer, who was always a bit on the obsessive compulsive side, off on a whole new creative tangent called photography.
A few years later, he had learned a great deal about natural light shooting and found that his friend was right about it. Getting used to framing images and paying attention to the details that comprise each image was, indeed, a transferable skill, which the Boomer used to his advantage in creating screenplays and treatments which would occupy about 10 years of his hobby life.
The Boomer got quite good at screenplay writing and even had a couple of his screenplays turned into direct to video films. In 1979 he and the then pregnant Mrs Boomer headed to Los Angeles to check out the movie business. But between a meeting with an old friend who had gone down there to do the same and the general creepiness of Hollywood, they only lasted a couple of days there, and skedaddled up the Pacific Coast highway to San Francisco, which was much more to their liking.
The idea of him paying his dues in Los Angeles did not appeal to them in the the least. That coupled with the fact that he was Canadian and would have to stand in line behind a ton of Americans who were just as, if not more, adept and ambitious as he was, led him to re-think the whole screenwriting thing.
But more importantly, it told him, and this took a while to sink in, that screenwriting was simply not where his passion resided.
In point of fact, it turned out that, for several years at least, copywriting and photography were his principal marketable skills, and advertising was the business where he felt most comfortable.
Several agency art directors of his acquaintance began hiring him to do freelance photographic projects, and he got a fairly steady gig with a roto magazine called Weekend which sent him to the far flung corners of the country photographing people like Mordecai Richler, Leonard Cohen, Gorden Pinsent and even the soon to be Prime Minister of Canada, Jean Chretien, among others.
On his trips, he took all kinds of scenic photographs which he placed with Masterfile, and even made some Cibachrome prints which he sold in rather limited numbers.
The strong visual skills he developed thanks to photography allowed him to beef up his advertising skills and begin to art direct a lot of his freelance projects and even some agency ads when his art director partner was swamped.
This combination of skills, coupled with the strategic analysis capabilities he developed in his last agency job, equipped him perfectly for life on his own, where after half a dozen years of working just as a writer and broadcast producer, he was able to apply all his skills to his work with some fairly large brands who were looking to move away from the huge fees that agencies charged for their services.
Most of the time he threw in the photography as a loss leader, especially when it came down to shooting products or situations for web sites or small print projects.
A while ago the Boomer wrote a post about this, entitled: Photography And The Law Of Unintended Consequences. But in the fullness of time, he has come to believe that the consequence of learning photography was not, as he first thought, unintended.
No, it was very much a key element in the master plan to become a complete communicator.
Today, the Boomer takes most of his pictures on his IPhone, which is actually a pretty good camera itself. He doesn’t take anywhere as many pictures as he did back in the day when photography was all shiny and new to him.
He just shoots whatever he thinks would make an interesting photograph. And most of the time (vis a vis the 80/20 Differential), they are.
If pressed, the Boomer would definitely recommend that all writers take up photography and learn about things like framing and composition and light and shadow and the dozen or so other qualities that good photographs, and the writing they inspire, should invariably possess.

Jim Murray is a marketer and communication strategist, writer, art director, blogger. His partner, Charlene Norman is a business systems and operational analyst. Their collaboration is called Bullet Proof Consulting, headquartered in St Catharines, Ontario. Bullet Proof is designed to help companies change their thin king for the better, to become more productive, efficient better branded and successful in today’s highly competitive business world. You can find out more about us at: www.bulletproofconsulting.ca