Success—Right From the Start!
Cape Breton Island (Canada) is known as one of the most beautiful islands in the world and Warren Gordon, MPA photographs it all. Visit any bookstore/tourist shop on the island and you’ll see his work. He has sold over 200,000 hard cover coffee table photo books about his island and tons of picturesque calendars.
For 30 years he has operated a full service studio. Warren first heard about Virtual Backgrounds some years ago, thought it was a great idea, but didn’t acquire a system because he heard that some photographers had trouble.
In April 2005, Warren attended the Professional Photographers of Canada (PPOC) National Convention in Calgary and watched Trevon Baker get great results with a Scene Machine even though he was working in a very small trade show booth. He also attended Joseph and Louise Simone’s PPOC presentation and decided the time had come for him to acquire a system. He started using the system in January 2006.
Warren reports, “I was expecting to have to spend at least several days learning to use it, but I was very pleasantly surprised that my very first exposures were salable. I didn’t think it would be so easy, and I didn’t expect the impressive results I was getting.” From that point on, he has continued to use the system for every studio photograph he captures.
“I already had a collection of backgrounds on a motorized roller system. I have a lot of different canvas backgrounds, muslins, and even imitation book case backgrounds. But now, I am putting these old backgrounds up for sale because I don’t need them anymore.” However, because some customers want exactly the same backgrounds they had in photographs taken years earlier, Warren is photographing his old backgrounds and turning them into background slides before he sells them.
Warren explains, “Sometimes a family has an array of photographs on the wall of each child’s graduation and they all have the same background. So now, I will just project the old background along with new ones that I will also use, but I won’t have all those different backgrounds cluttering up my studio.”
Warren has been using a spare D70 camera on the system but now is going to permanently mount a new D200. Warren’s wife, Katheryn was the featured speaker for the 2006 PPOC Halifax convention in May. Katheryn, PPOC Atlantic Photographer of the Year ’04 & ’05, is also an accomplished artist and will be creating a variety of art backgrounds for use with the Scene Machine.