I spent ten years contributing photographs for publication before considering I might be a photographer.
As a record producer, I'd always brought a camera along to document my recording sessions -- mostly to satisfy my record collector's sense of nostalgia, but also in case the recording process needed to be retraced later (live-in-the-studio recordings can get hectic when old analog equipment gets temperamental, and sometimes it helps to have a few photos). But when the production budget didn't allow for hiring a professional photographer, it was my candid photos -- shot between and often during live takes -- that ended up on the album covers.
Later on, as budgets grew along with the success of the bands I was recording, professional photographers were brought in to shoot the sessions. But more often than not, my shots seemed to benefit from an insider's perspective that visitors just didn't have. And my images continued to be used for the artwork -- not only portraits for the cover, but also groupings of still life images taken before shutting down at the end of each day.
What was working for the art directors apparently wasn't lost on the musicians, who began asking me to shoot their publicity photos. They didn't recognize themselves in the uncomfortably formal portraits from the professional sessions set up by their record labels, and they wanted more of a shot-by-a-friend feel for magazine interviews and tour posters.
In the ten years since, my images of music and travel have appeared in magazines, newspapers and weeklies nationwide, including Wired, Yoga Journal, Time Out NY, Austin Chronicle, and many stops in between. And somwhere along the way someone told me I was a photographer, regardless of what my business card said. I'm not a big fan of labels, but I always pack the camera.