Interview with David Mejias – Commercial Photographer

 David Mejias was born in 1975, in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. For the trivia buffs, this is also the birth place of Jon Bon Jovi. His father from Puerto Rico and mother from the Dominican Republic, David grew up in a blue collar working class town. When he was 20, David moved to Spain, but returned to the USA a year later and has called Boulder, Colorado his home for the past 10 years. He went to Princeton University to study photography, film and public policy and tells me that he is a frequent but clumsy snowboarder and rock climber.

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Bright Hub (BH): You find a genie in a bottle who will grant you one wish. What would it be and why?

David Mejias (DM): I’d ask the genie to create five million new jobs in America with a million of those jobs reserved specifically for artists. I see a lot of people hurting for work out there, especially with the 500,000 Americans who were laid off last month due to the current economic challenges.

BH: When you aren’t working, what could we find you doing?

DM: I’m an American, I’m always working! When I’m not working, I spend a lot of time reading and writing about my silly ideas on life and photography. I try to make time to snowboard and rock climb. I also spend a lot of time sitting around thinking of reasons why I’m single.

BH: When did you first become interested in photography?

DM: When I was around ten years old, my parents bought me a VHS video camera. Randomly I found the camera last week when I went to visit my parents for Thanksgiving. I would make short movies using rudimentary stop motion or still techniques. I dabbled for a few years with my brother’s old Canon AE-1 too. Then in college, I had a roommate that was a fairly accomplished photographer. He suggested I take an intro photo course. From there, I continued to take classes in photography, film and video.

BH: You’ve already partially answered this question, but did you go to school or take any courses to become a photographer?

DM: I took an intro black and white class and an intro film color class in college. For a while I thought I’d focus on cinematography, so I took a few film and video courses too. My photography courses are where I learned to think about light. Emmet Gowin ran the photography department at Princeton University when I was an undergraduate – amazing photographer.

BH: Did you set out to become a commercial photographer, or did it just happen by chance?

DM: I started out doing editorial photography with an emphasis on portraiture. After freelancing for about three years, I landed my staff position at Crispin Porter + Bogusky. While there I continued to do some editorial work for the agency but focused mostly on studio and location commercial imagery. Commercial work is very different from editorial work. You usually have (slightly?) bigger budgets, input from a broad range of stakeholders – including art directors and client representatives - a crew of people that include producers, stylists, assistants, and digital techs, and more defined creative concepts.

I did not explicitly set out to become a commercial photographer, but I found that working with a team of people was very rewarding. Steering a big commercial job with hundreds of moving parts can be nuts. I always manage to have fun though.

BH: You worked for Crispin Porter + Bogusky for two and a half years. In that time, you had some big name clients, such as Nike, Geek Squad, Volkswagen and Burger King. Can you tell me what your typical day on the set consisted of?

DM: There were no typical days at Crispin. I was an über generalist photographer. I managed something like 500 shoot days during my time there. I tackled everything from car interior shots, to tabletop food images, to a two week location lifestyle shoot, to shooting panoramas of a national forest in Louisiana. It was nonstop shooting. I enjoyed my time there and learned a lot. It’s hard to accumulate that kind of broad creative and technical experience when you are freelancing and managing 3 or 4 shoots a month. 

Please continue on to page 2 to learn what David Mejias has to say about the challenges of commercial photography, what he likes most about commercial photography and what advice he has for those who are thinking about entering the world of commercial photography. Also on page 2, we'll find out what camera equipment David uses and how important David feels camera equipment is to succeed as a professional photographer.