“I may not have been able to give them that four years ago before I had a kid. But that’s how I would love to see my son look at me. You know what I mean? That joy. It's just a moment from what is supposed to be a camping trip, right? But it's not—they’re at a golf course."

Rob:
Tell me who you are, where you live, and a couple things that you like to shoot.

Cary:
I'm Cary Norton. I'm a professional photographer in Birmingham, Alabama. I shoot a lot of different things because Birmingham is the kind of market where being a generalist is kind a good thing.

The jobs that I enjoy most are ones that connect me with people building stuff, working with their hands, people who are passionate about whatever it is they're working on. And trying to make a human connection. I'm sort of naturally curious—I’m not particularly good at most of the things that I'm interested in, but I’m curious about them.

On the non-work side, I enjoy shooting film. I also do alternative process stuff mostly in the form of wet plate collodion, which is finicky and fun.

Rob:
Tell me about how you came to be involved in this particular project and what state it was at when you got the call.

Cary:
I got a message from a friend who said that he gave somebody my name for a project. It turned out the agency was more of an analytics and business performance kind of agency, but they were wanting to pivot into the ad space, and their client was an outdoor retail company.

At first, there was no shot list. Their client didn't even know all the things that they wanted to photograph. They just knew they wanted do a photo shoot, and they had the target demographic, which was younger folks and families.

Rob:
Ok, so how did the project start?

Cary:
We had the initial Zoom call where they gave me the overview of what the project was and asked me what my process was for something like this is.

Rob:
Tell me about your process.

Cary:
I like to get a sketch of what you need, and then vamp within that. Me going into some sort of cacophonous situation where there's no hard plan for anything, and I just experience what's going on and see what comes out of it—that typically is how I get the work that I connect with the most.

Rob:
So they chose you, and then you had a scout. The agency folks were basically producing this themselves, right?

Cary:
Yeah. So the overall idea is that all these people are doing fun things outdoors—pickleball, walking, exercising, camping. We needed a hiking trail. We needed a way to make one location feel like a bunch of different settings. Whoever the connection was, however we got there, we ended up at a local golf course. It was really pretty but also is a bit secluded. The goal was to make it not look like a golf course.

After the scout, they sent me a shot list. It was 70 images long, like 12 or 14 pages of a PDF. During the scout, I had been like, “Oh, we could get this…oh, we could get this.” And basically, I think they wrote down everything we talked about. Everything they could possibly think of. And then they found a stock image to line up with it, and they put it all into a shot list.

"That's not a shot list. That's a dream list. It's an inspiration board, you know?"

So that turned into a conversation: “Okay, first of all, this is two or three days worth of shooting if we go shot by shot. Second, I don't think it’s the right approach.”

That is me telling them I don't think that's the right approach.

Rob:
What did you pitch?

Cary:
I think we get the broad strokes of what you're going for in this, like in the pickleball scene, in the camping scene, in the fire pit scene. We all get the vibes that we're going for and we get the client to specify which products are appropriate for each setting—like this speaker that's in this photo, it's blurry, but it's also really recognizable. I had them sort of rethink getting everything that's on their list.

If you try to orchestrate all these shots into happening, they’re gonna look terrible. It’s not going to ring true. Or at least that's not how I work to get something to ring true. It's not gonna feel like the work that they hired me to make, right?

Rob:
So you kind of talked them back into a shot list that’s…it aligns with what you do. And it's really what they need, even if they don’t recognize that yet.

Cary:
Well, it’s managing expectations, so no one's going into this thinking that we're getting 70 shots and it's going to line up with this grid on a PDF perfectly. It was expectation management on the front-end versus the back-end.

Rob:
And they went for that.

Cary:
Yeah.

Rob:
What were some other challenges you solved for?

Cary:
None of these people are proper talent. Both of the kids in the camping scene, the little boy more than the girl, would stare at the camera, and we'd have to be like, “All right, don't look at the camera. You're just hanging out with your family in the woods.” Even though there's a driving range 20 feet away.

Getting them through that initial, “You're taking my picture” feeling took time. But then, they're just a family again. They get to a real place. All of the good stuff from the camping scene is real.

Rob:
Tell me about the kids in the tents. Those pictures have a lot of feeling to me.

Cary:
With the boy and the flashlight, we put the kids in there and gave them a couple of flashlights and they were fighting, like, with lightsabers. That was something that we told them to do. I don't know how much of that really worked for what the client wanted, but it was fine. Then they went to change the boy into pajamas.

I was still shooting another scene when he came back. He got back in the tent at someone's direction, and he was just being a kid because nothing else was going on. He was in his default state of play. I'm not sure if he knew I was even there. And that's the stuff that I love to steal.

Rob:
And the girl with the guitar?

Cary:
The light was amazing. This is from the opening on the back of the tent, looking back in. We had given her the guitar to sort of play with, and the light on her was what I fell in love with.

Rob:
What about the family strolling?

Cary:
I framed them in a way—there’s a huge utility building to the left, and just over that hill is either a tee box or a green. And then if you go to the right, it goes back to the huge hotel and clubhouse and all that kind of stuff. I strategically framed this to feel like a neighborhood or walking trail or wherever this action could plausibly happen.

Rob:
Right. So again, you’re really turning this one location into a bunch of different settings. How did you approach the shoot technically? It all feels really natural.

Cary:
We lucked out on the weather. It feels like sunshine because it is sunshine. I brought two or three strobes, in case I needed them. But it drives me nuts when a picture is like, “Oh, look at us casually having fun…” And there's obviously a strobe on them. It doesn't read true to me. I don't know if that's me being pedantic or me being lazy. But it feels more real to me to just let people be in their environment, and photograph that. I know the technical limitations of the gear that I'm using, the camera, the lens. I know I can get what I like, not lose my highlights, but not have crappy darks. So that it's gonna feel right, but feel real.

Rob:
How was the work received?

Cary:
Somebody told Celine (Russell, the key stylist) that it was the best photo shoot they've ever had. The people who are normally stressed out during shoots were chill. I don't know the scale of the jobs that they've done in the past, I don't know what any of their marketing stuff has been before this. But they saw the value in it.

Rob:
It's hard to put a number on that “experience value” because at the end of the day, the money spent is attached to the set of pictures you deliver. But the experience for that person who has a lot riding on the project and is usually stressed out is really important.

Cary:
There's an emotional component to it that's separate from the work. There are some clients who understand that the cheapest option isn't always the best option. At the end of the job, in this case, everyone felt good about how the process went and how everything looked. I felt good about it.

Rob:
It’s great work. Thanks for sharing it. Where can people find you online?

Cary:
carynorton.com
instagram.com/carynorton
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