Commercial Street
"You have to change with the times if you're going to be in advertising photography," Al Satterwhite says, "because in advertising photography the clients are into the flavor of the month. Actually, it's more like the flavor of the hour."
Still, Al doesn't chase trends or follow fads. "I don't change radically," he says, "because I don't like doing stuff for the sake of doing it. I still hold to my vision. I'm not much of a chameleon." He does makes adjustments—in the highly competitive world of advertising photography you have to—but he stays true to his ideas.
Al wasn't always an advertising photographer. While still in high school he shot for the St Petersburg [Florida] Times, then moved on to ten years of freelance magazine work, shooting assignments for Fortune, Car & Driver, Life, Time, Newsweek, People, Sports Illustrated and Travel & Leisure, among other top magazines. In 1980 he began a 15-year run of national and international advertising photography. His clients included American Express, Kodak, Porsche, Saab, Coca Cola and Nikon. Somewhere in there he found time to lecture, conduct workshops, work on book projects, including A Day in the Life of Spain, and publish Lights! Camera! Advertising! and Satterwhite on Color & Design.
His strong sense of composition and bold use of color might lead you to believe that his background is in graphic arts or design, but in fact he started out studying aerospace engineering. "Which isn't graphic at all," he says. "You've got a pencil and a straight edge." It was when his newspaper work led to magazine photojournalism that he realized that photography was going to be his lifelong interest.
But not only still photography. About ten years ago, Al made a move into film. "I woke up one morning, and I was just bored," he says. "I'd shot everything in New York from miniature sets to jet airplanes on runways, and I was not excited anymore. And this was the early 90s and the economy had dipped and production budgets were way down. Instead of getting a crane, they'd say, you got a stepladder? So I was thinking about what to do to be challenged and excited. And I thought of film. So I moved to LA and bought a couple of Super 16mm cameras."
Al learned film the same way he'd learned still photography—by teaching himself. "I read a book, talked to other people and then went out and shot. Because I had a lot of access, I started shooting a lot of sporting events, a lot of motor racing, which got me used to using the camera. It's all about practicing—getting out there and shooting whatever you're trying to do every day." Before long Al was a cinematographer and a director of photography, shooting commercials, features and feature shorts.
Currently he's doing both film and still work. Film, he says, gave him a new and different appreciation of stills. "Film is about images serving a story, telling the story; it's not necessarily about the image itself. But with stills it's usually the other way around. You usually have one picture, and you have to get the story crammed into that one picture, and it has to stand out. So it's all about the technique you use for that one picture."
Which brings him back to thoughts of styles, trends and the nature of commercial photography. "The image on the page has to grab attention and hold it, and the ways in which it seeks to do that change. We went through a whole period of horizon lines at weird angles, and you work through trends like that. They become old hat, but you can kind of come back to them and use them later when they're appropriate." It's something the great advertising photographers know: file the fads away for future reference; there will be a time when they'll be appropriate for something you want to do, something that becomes part of your style.
"When you first start out you're looking for a style, and you're copying the guys you really love," he says. "Then if you shoot enough, one day you just wake up and you have a style. You don't have to think, how would he shoot this? You just do it, and now it's becomes how you would shoot this. Basically I like what I do and I've pretty much kept on doing it. With advertising photography you can go out of style, and later you get rediscovered and people go, oh, it's new and exciting. Well, it's the same vision I've had for a long time with maybe a little twist."
The twist might be one of those archived trends, or an idea fueled by his restless curiosity, or a favorite technique filtered through new technology. Whatever he decides to do, he's confident of his choices. "You go with your feelings, with your intuition. That's the uniting factor in all that I've done—film or still, editorial or advertising. Whether you're working from a layout or an editor is telling you about the story line to be illustrated, you get out there and you have the camera in front of you and you're trying to put together whatever image they want. A lot of times, if you're open to it, it'll just come to you."
Sometimes it comes disguised. "I just came back from teaching a seminar on directing TV spots. The key thing I told the directors was that often things happen for the better but you just don't realize it. We went out on a golf course and we scouted, and we had nice late afternoon shadows coming over the trees, and it was great. But we went out to shoot the next day and it was misty and foggy and definitely not what we wanted. But then I thought, you know, this is even better. We change a few things and we're ready to go. If I wanted fog I couldn't get it, and here they gave it to me for free. You have to be open to change and be able to think on your feet.
"A long time ago I realized that you don't have to torture yourself to be creative. You can just be comfortable, you can laugh and have a good time. Once you realize that, you can do what you want. The creativity will happen."
Tools and Techniques
In some ways technology has affected the way Al works. For example, where he once shot Kodachrome and used a slide duplicator to make composite images, today his tools for composites are likely to be a D2x and Photoshop. When he shoots film these days it's with an F5, and he'll use a COOLSCAN 9000 to digitize new and older slides. Among his favored Nikkor lenses are the 28mm f/1.4D AF Nikkor, 55mm f/2.8 Micro ("my all-time favorite"), 85mm f/1.4D AF Nikkor, 135mm f/2D AF DC-Nikkor, 180mm f/2.8D ED-IF AF Nikkor and 300mm f/4D ED-IF AF-S Nikkor. He also uses SB-800 AF Speedlight and SB-26 Speedlights.
