If Photographers had union like the musicians ...

Pam Goldsmith, world renowned violist, works with my daughter giving her tips to improve her playing.

I am in Los Angeles this week on our family vacation. We stopped by our family friend Pam Goldsmith's for a visit.

I was sharing about how photographers talk about the triangle for describing those working as pros. Many years ago that triangle base was not as wide as it is today. The tip still is small and many believe it to be smaller for those really earning a living as a full-time photographer.

Pam Goldsmith then shared how in the Professional Musicians Local 47 they have about 13,000 members of which less than a 1,000 are doing enough gigs to be making a living full-time as a professional musician.

She went on to say she thinks this number is actually smaller than the 1,000 and smaller group than years ago.

If photographers had a union

I am not advocating forming a union for the primary purpose of knowing how many of us are working, but the reason the union was formed was to help people get work in the music industry and for a fair wage.

I think if we had a union we would have similar numbers if not even more members than 13,000. Even if we too helped with regulating rates we still would have dismal numbers of those who have invested time and money to pursue this as a career.

My daughter, wife and I visited with Richard Bugg who works with Meyer Sound. Their sound systems is what was used in the Beijing Olympics and other major productions throughout the world.

Later in the day we went to Richard Bugg's home office studio where my daughter was getting to see what it is like to do sound mixing.  Richard had the Broadway musical Wicked tracks and letting my daughter listen to the different orchestra parts and vocals and how they can be mixed.

What we learned from Richard was to stay employed he had to continue to be flexible and adapt to new situations and apply his problem solving skills to a new situation.

My take away from today

After visiting not just average professionals in the entertainment industry, but the top in their respective fields each of them talked about to get jobs they had to be the best they could be.

Pam talked to us about when playing in orchestra there is a different approach than when in the recording studio for a movie. With the movie you have to be so exact because the editors have the scenes timed down to Milli-seconds. She had to be 110% accurate with the beat.

Richard shared about equipment breaking and fixing equipment in pressure situations.

Richard also talked about how he and my wife's brother Richard Zvonar determined that laptops have stage fright.  They would have sound systems running with their laptops and everything worked great in rehearsal and then they would crash during a performance.

This led them to help design systems that ran separate from the laptops.

Too many times Apple would upgrade an operating system which would crash their software. They would spend so much time trying to fix the problem that this is why the separate systems were designed to work sound design systems. They don't fail.

Again, I hope you see the importance of not just people but equipment must be the best and perfect.

If we had unions photographers would be even more aware of how many call themselves professional photographers and how few really are making it. The difference is in the nuances of details.