Stop Playing Safe! Level Up Your Lighting with John Gress

Pat Miller: 00:00

I'm Pat Miller, and this is The Professional Photographer Podcast. Welcome to the Professional Photographer Podcast. I'm your host, Pat Miller, and this is kind of cool because we are live. Well, not now you're seeing the recording, but right now I'm live at Imaging USA in Dallas. We're inside the Sony studios, and they pulled out all the stops. I'll tell you about that in just a minute. This episode, I sit down with John Gress and we talk about creative play. And as you know, John, educator, lighting expert, we're going to talk about how to make the most of your creative play, especially when it comes to lighting, and how you can push the boundaries and get the most out of your time to up-level your skills. Now, talking about this studio, Sony Cinema Line cameras are being used. We got three of them. You'll see it floating through the shoot. And we're also using the Monitor & Control app. We've got one iPad dialing around to all the different shots. It's pretty impressive. Sony really made us look good, or as good as you can make this look. Thank you, Sony. We appreciate it. Okay, enough with all that. Let's get to John Gress. John Gress, welcome to The Professional Photographer Podcast. How are you today?

John Gress: 01:14

Thanks for having me.

Pat Miller: 01:15

Oh, my gosh, I'm excited that you're here. Now, if they haven't met you yet, tell them who you are and what you do.

John Gress: 01:20

Yeah, so I'm a commercial photographer and a photography educator. Started off as a photojournalist, became a commercial photographer, and then sort of got on Instagram and a lot of photographers kept asking me to teach them, and eventually I relented and started and started teaching them. And actually PPA played a role in that too, because I got asked to fill in for a pre-con class, I think, in 2019. And I'd never taught a group of people before, so I thought like, well, I better start practicing in my studio and teaching people beforehand. So I didn't make a complete fool of myself. But that sort of started me on this journey, and now it's about half or two thirds of what I do. So I end up teaching workshops about 12 times a year in different cities. I'll do conferences like this or also sometimes the state affiliates, and then I have a YouTube channel and membership site. So it's just really great. Now I feel like I get to help other photographers grow their skills and learn and sort of live their best life, if you will. And I didn't really have a mentor when I was coming up. I just sort of had to figure it out on my own through trial and error. So I think it's great that I get to, like, be that person for other people and help them through that process and hopefully get better.

Pat Miller: 02:34

The lack of mentor. Is that what helps fuel your desire to teach people what you know?

John Gress: 02:40

Well, I don't know about that, particularly. I think it's just I really like doing it. I really like. I like the process of coming up with something creative and teaching someone how to do it, and also at the same time, getting to make something really cool myself and help them in the process. So it's just sort of a really good relationship that I enjoy doing. So I love hanging out with people, and so it seems like a good fit for me.

Pat Miller: 03:11

Yeah, well, today you get to teach us about creative play and how you look at it because this is the Creative Play series, and it comes natural to some people to put the client work to the side and to go explore their curiosity to learn a technique or to try something they've never done before. But if someone doesn't have it, come to them naturally. How would you share with us to, you know, get into creative play? What would you recommend? How do you look at it?

John Gress: 03:36

Yeah, so, like, whenever I'm on Instagram and I see something I like, I bookmark it, and then later on, I'll go through there and sort of make a mood board of similar pictures and then decide, you know, what in here do I want to try out? What do I want to play with today or tomorrow or that sort of thing, and then just sort of go through that process and I might recreate a picture, I might completely copy it, and I might put my own spin on it. I'm almost always putting my own spin on it. But it might be a really close replica, but. And it might not be. It might just be that I see a pose and I use the pose, or I see the lighting technique, or I use the lighting technique. And just by doing that, I try to pick something that I don't. I think I could do, but have it done and then go ahead and try to do that. So sometimes it might take me a while to figure it out. It might take me an hour and a half for that look to, like, really figure out what's going on and adapt to what I'm seeing and get things where it needs to be. But that's just all part of the process, too. You know, one of the things that reminds me of about when I'm teaching people is, at first, I was like, oh, I can't. I have to know. I can't be caught in a situation where I don't know the answer to something or I end up in a situation where something's not working right. I'll look foolish in front of people, and it just won't work out. And then I sort of realized, like, that's part of the process. Like it's part of the process for people to see you struggle through a problem and figure it out. The problem solving is really more key to things. As it happened over time, I probably shoot now more for YouTube content for the most part that there's like an idea or thing that I need to or want to teach people. And then I'll make a mood board for that and do a whole shoot for that. So I probably have one coming up that's about recreating window light versus artificial light, but making the artificial light look like window light. And sort of going over the idea of like, what's the pluses and minuses of this thing or that thing. So, yeah, so that would be a good example of something I probably have coming up when I'm playing, so to speak.

Pat Miller: 05:53

Is there a parallel between experimenting with something you've seen, like you mentioned seeing a look on Instagram, and I'm going to keep on experimenting until I capture it. And the same feeling someone has in one of your classes where they're learning something for the first time, is that essentially the same thing but in two different scenarios? One is self-directed, one is being in one of your classes?

John Gress: 06:16

Well, I guess in the classes, a lot of times I see people will realize there was a thing that they weren't quite getting that then they finally figured out in that moment. And sometimes for me, when I'm having those play sessions, if you will, it's more like there's six different lights to shoot this old Hollywood headshot. I saw someone do it. I saw behind the scenes of it. Let's figure out how all these lights relate to each other, that sort of thing. So sometimes in the workshops, it's more like a fundamental thing they're learning. And then sometimes I'm teaching myself something more nuanced, I guess. And that's actually the thing I love about making the educational content is I have to sort of test out what I've been told or have thought for the last 20 years just to make sure it's true. Because there are some things where it's like, for instance, there's a concept called flash duration, which is how long the burst of light takes determines how frozen stuff will be. So my mentors in the 90s said that the flash duration you need is a 2000th of a second, and you need to make it so that you are overpowering the light in the room by two stops. And so I ran an experiment, and it's actually at 3,000th of a second and three stops. But I had to make sure that that's what it was before I told people, you know, the myth as opposed to what the reality is. But, you know, for them not to go too in the weeds, but they were, of course, shooting negative film that's probably the equivalent of 6 megapixels, and we're shooting 45 megapixels. And so it's not really fair to judge what they thought and what you can know today.

Pat Miller: 08:11

I guess, in your situation where you may be using creative play to create content for a future workshop or YouTube video, where you're probably doing something and taking diligent notes and tracking what you're learning so you can teach it again in a YouTube video. When you put all of that away, do you personally take time to do creative play just for yourself, to keep yourself fresh and sharp?

John Gress: 08:35

Well, sometimes I do it just for the joy of it. Yeah, because it might be that, like, I have to execute something specific to make a video today, but there's another hour of time that I could be shooting. So I'll just shoot something without recording video of it, which is great because then all of a sudden I was like, oh, this is great. I don't actually need this for anything. And I just relax and have fun. So that becomes a good part of the process, too. But I think I just sort of am lucky that I get to explore all these things all the time and try out these new things all the time and see if I can, you know, make it work and learn how to do that, that new skill. And it's always pushing me and taking things to the next level all the time. And that's a lot like the class that I have in Imaging is about using colored gels and/or LEDs in cool pictures. And sometimes I'll get asked, like, in workshops or in different situations, people will be like, well, who's the client for this? And how do I sell this? And what is this for? Like, and, yeah, it could be a senior photo shoot. It could be a commercial photo shoot. Or it could just be that you'll learn through the process of doing something that looks cool, some skill that you might call on later in order to fix some problem. Because I think that's the greatest thing about what we do. It's sort of like you're adding in all these experiences which teach you all of these little things that you can do to make something better. And then when you're having that shoot and you are getting paid, you're just drawing on this nuanced thing you learned or that nuanced thing you learned in order to bend things to make them look like how the client is expressing to you how they want them to look.

Pat Miller: 10:25

So does it feel like you're leveling up when you learn a lighting technique or something, and you're in a situation where I've got to solve this problem? Oh, wait, I know how to solve this problem. It's got to make you feel great.

John Gress: 10:35

Yeah. Well, I had a big breakthrough last year where I always thought that way beauty dishes worked, where that light came out of the back, it bounced off the sides, it came towards the person. But actually, what it does, it does do that. But I figured out a way to prove it, which was take the beauty dish. If we take the circle here and put a black card perpendicular to it, and then photograph it from that angle, and then you can actually see where the light rays are going on the cardboard. And then I was like, oh, this is perfect, because now I can show someone that, like a beauty dish, the light comes—it's hard for me to do it from my perspective, I guess, but let's say this is the beauty dish. The light comes out of the back; it comes a little bit forward, but it also hits the sides of the beauty dish and then angles towards the person. So, yeah. So it's just great that now that's knowledge that I can use in order to make sure that I'm using that modifier correctly. Because the best place, as I tested it out, was to put the person's face about where those lines come together. So it's just little things like that. And then I also had a shoot late last year where I photographed these two dancers. And that was interesting because one of them just reached out to me and said, like, hey, I'm coming to town for this gig that I have. Do you want to do a photo shoot? And I was like, well, do you have any friends that might want to do it too? And they're like, oh, let me check. And so then I just got to have a fun shoot with two dancers because it's just it's really fun working with professional dancers, too, because they spend their whole time working on presenting their body visually to an audience. And so they're just kind of performing for you, doing things that they know will look cool from the audience perspective, which is you. And you're just, like, figuring out how to light it in a cool way or waiting for the right moment, or maybe making a little adjustment to what they're doing so it'll look right in the camera. And it's just really fun to do where you're working with someone of a professional at that level. So that actually was probably my favorite shoot, from last year, was the dancer shoot. And probably the beauty dish thing was like the biggest breakthrough thing that I learned and taught myself last year.

Pat Miller: 12:55

Give us 30 seconds on who is the client for this? Why do I do this? Giving us the permission to just explore because some people shut it down. They can't get their head around doing something that they may never use, but it upskills their ability. So if someone feels that way, what would you tell them?

John Gress: 13:14

That you're always going to have a client that's going to come to you and ask for something different. And maybe that skill you learned long ago will be applicable to this situation today. Or maybe if you show more variety in your work and more things that you can do, that client that you don't have today will see that and then hire you tomorrow to do the shoot that they need you to do. So, you know, it's sort of like when I talk about diversity to people that whenever I'm bookmarking models on Instagram to work with in the future, I'm always thinking about diversity. Because if everyone can see themselves reflected in our work, the more likely it is everyone will hire us. So not only is it the right thing to do, but it actually helps everyone out economically. And it's kind of the same thing with a style of art, that if we can show that we can do different things, there's more likely that we're going to have a match between our skills and the client's desires. So, you know, you never know where things are going to take you. I never thought that I would be at a photography conference talking to you and talking extensively about how I spend a lot of my time educating other photographers. That was never anything I set out to do or wanted to do. I thought I just wanted to be a sports photographer or politics photographer. Those were the things I wanted to do originally. And then I just did those things and became a commercial photographer and then got on Instagram and now I'm here. So you never know where it's going to take you.

Pat Miller: 14:42

Listening to the story, it sounds like even becoming an educator was a surprise to you. Do you remember when they asked you to fill in for the pre-con and your education career was born?

John Gress: 14:52

Oh, absolutely.

Pat Miller: 14:52

How did that feel?

John Gress: 14:53

Absolutely. A little bit scary.

Pat Miller: 14:55

I bet.

John Gress: 14:56

But, you know, it's fine. It's funny now. I was talking to a friend who was speaking this morning because I just met up with her right after she taught a class in a very large room. It was like exactly for her today was how it was for me in Nashville a few years ago. I had an 8 am class in the keynote speaker room with 1,200 seats, and I started the class with 100 people. And I was like, oh, this looks terrible. Like, they thought that I could get 1,200 people to come to this class and I only got 100. And she said that's how she felt this morning. And then, by the end of the class, I had 800 people. And then I realized, and I didn't know they were there at first because I was kind of blinded by the stage lights, and I went to adjust the light, and I was like, oh, shoot, like there's 800 people out here. And then I was like, tensed up. And then I was like, wait, you've been talking to them for an hour, so just keep going. And after that, like, I have zero stage fright for the most part.

Pat Miller: 15:59

That's awesome.

John Gress: 15:59

We'll see, though, about my program in a few days but yeah.

Pat Miller: 16:02

Oh, it'll be great. Let's wrap up the interview talking about creative play with light. Because you teach on light, you talk about it all the time. You already gave me a lesson on a beauty drum. I don't even know what that is. It was amazing.

John Gress: 16:14

It's a beauty dish.

Pat Miller: 16:15

Beauty dish. Beauty drum. Yeah, you know, whatever. Not a photographer. But talk us through if we wanted to do maybe a creative play session around light, not necessarily like cameras, but like, let's talk about how we can experiment with light in a session. Can you draft out like an exercise or two we could do to kind of better understand how to manipulate it or something that we could learn with it?

John Gress: 16:37

Yeah, I think, like, if you're always shooting with one softbox and making it look sort of like window light. Find a picture that's the complete opposite, where it's a black and white shot that uses multiple lights, and just start dialing in each one of those lights one at a time and put it all together and see how it gels. Because doing something that's totally outside of your wheelhouse, you'll learn from it. Or maybe you always shoot black and white with six lights. Maybe instead you should try to recreate window light. Or maybe you should try to work with LEDs that happen to have color in them and just play it, experiment, and just learn from that by doing something that's totally outside of your wheelhouse. I see a lot of photographers that are really good, that do the one thing they do really good, but that's it. And it'd be great if more people, I think, experimented, tried new things, and just found that as a way to grow.

Pat Miller: 17:32

But they may fail in that process.

John Gress: 17:34

They absolutely might fail in that process, and that's all part of it. You know, the only way to get better at photography is to practice. And so if you're not practicing and you're not trying something new, then you're not growing. I actually made a big mistake in my career. There was a time when I was still working as a photojournalist, but I was still lighting portraits. And I looked at how all the other photojournalists were doing, and instead of me taking things as far as I could take them and doing the most, I kind of looked at what everybody else was doing and did that. And so, I didn't push myself to try something new or to go very far. And all that happened after two years of me meeting the low expectations that I thought were—that sounded really bad, the whole thing.

Pat Miller: 18:28

I know what you mean.

John Gress: 18:29

Yeah. But they're just doing a workmanlike job. So then I did a workmanlike job and I didn't push myself. And because of that, I didn't really grow my portfolio for two or three years. And it just kind of looked back at that period of time as like a totally missed opportunity because I could have grown and I could have made some really good photos and I didn't. So that was probably one of the biggest mistakes is just doing what was acceptable and okay and not doing anything more than that. And that might be that, like everybody else is using one light in a three-foot softbox. So that's what I'll do. Even though I can use three lights in different soft boxes. And that's just how I just sort of had that blah period of time.

Pat Miller: 19:15

Yeah, well, that's the importance of being around other photographers, coming to classes like the ones you teach, and making time for creative play.

John Gress: 19:23

Yeah, absolutely.

Pat Miller: 19:24

All that stuff feeds to our ability to get better and you helped us out today.

John Gress: 19:27

Yeah.

Pat Miller: 19:28

John Gress, thanks for coming on the podcast.

John Gress: 19:29

I appreciate it. Thank you.

Pat Miller: 19:31

Awesome.

John Gress: 19:31

Thanks for having me.

Pat Miller: 19:32

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of The Professional Photographer Podcast. This has been the deep dive on industry trends. It's been a lot of fun. I hope you've enjoyed it. Now we're going to gauge whether or not you enjoyed it. Because if you didn't enjoy it, don't click like and subscribe. But you did enjoy it, Right? So you're going to click like and subscribe. Right? And you're going to leave us a comment and tell us what you liked about our guest today. That helps us and the team kind of know if we're doing the right stuff or if we need to go get a job at Dunkin' Donuts or something like that. So please leave us a comment, like, and subscribe to the YouTube channel. Also, if you're not a member of PPA, we need to have a real conversation. Because if you're trying to build a photography business, PPA is for you. We're talking top-notch equipment and insurance; we're also talking about education. This show and so much more is made possible by PPA. So if you like getting better at photography, PPA is there for you as well. Not to mention the sense of community with photographers that are all trying to get better and build their business. At PPA, you belong here. Register now and sign up for the group ppa.com. That's ppa.com. Thanks for tuning in to The Professional Photographer Podcast. I'm Pat Miller. We'll see you right here next time. Take care.