Tag: entrepreneur

Building Control Systems: Continuous Commissioning

On Episode 78 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with Dan Frasier, co-founder of Cornerstone Commissioning Inc., about building control systems and continuous commissioning.

Show Notes

Cornerstone Commissioning Inc.’s Website
About Dan Frasier
About Cornerstone Commissioning
Find Cornerstone Commissioning on Twitter
Find Cornerstone Commissioning on LinkedIn
Find Dan Frasier on LinkedIn
Cornerstone Commissioning’s Blog
“The Importance of Communication During the Commissioning Process”
“Commissioning Best Practices During the Construction Phase”
Link to SaviorLabs Assessment

Sections

Why Collaboration is So Important
Building Control Systems
How Cornerstone Commissioning Does Testing
Continuous Commissioning
What is a Net Zero Building?
How Many Companies are in the Commissioning World?
So Why Is It Called Commissioning?
Commissioning is a Growing Industry
How Dan’s Career Began
How Cornerstone Commissioning Began
There’s No Place Like New England
More Episodes

Building Control Systems: Continuous Commissioning

Why Collaboration is So Important

Paul: Hello, and welcome to the Edge of Innovation. Today we’re talking with Dan Frasier from Cornerstone Commissioning, Incorporated.

So, you sort of alluded to the fact that you collaborate with all the parties at the table. Why wouldn’t somebody do that? I mean, especially in the commissioning space where you’re going to be pointing out flaws? I mean, if I said, “Hey, how come you’re wearing those shoes? They look terrible,” that’s immediately going to put you in a defensive posture as opposed to if I said, “Gee, you know, maybe you should think about polishing your shoes once in a while.” Not your shoes. I’m not even looking at your shoes. So why wouldn’t everybody be saying, “Hey, we’ve got to work together to get this done”? Do you find that out there? I get the sense that that’s sort of a differentiator between you, is sort of collaborating. And that seems alarming to me that it would a differentiator.

Dan: Yeah, well, it is a differentiator. And I think partly because of the kind of buildings that we work on that we are going to find a lot of issues. And so it’s so hard—

Paul: And right, rightfully so, though. You want to have found those issues.

Dan: Yeah.

Paul: Especially in a biomedical building. It’d be terrible to have somebody die or get infected because you didn’t work through those issues. So, you know, you’re not just nitpicking.

Dan: Right. And so, yeah. They’re real issues, and they really have to be addressed in a conclusive way, and it’s a tremendous amount of effort, a lot of times, to get these buildings — especially the building control system. 75% of our effort is on the building control systems.

Building Control Systems

Paul: Okay. So what does that do, for our listeners? A building control system. What does that mean?

Dan: It’s the computerized system that will be tied into monitoring and controlling all the aspects of the environment within the building, sometimes outside the building, different ways. But we talk about the ventilation system which includes heating and ventilating, bringing fresh air into buildings. If it’s a laboratory building, it’s one-pass air. In other words, we bring in 100% outside air, heat it or cool it to get to the condition, and then we do a really energy-inefficient thing by just exhausting all that air right out of the building. So these are energy pigs.

But back to the point on, on the building control system. It does the heating, ventilating, air conditioning, lighting controls; it might do fire alarm system, other things related to security, all those things that function within a building control system, we’re involved with making sure that all these things work properly as an integrated system so that, for example… When a fire alarm goes off, a smoke alarm system, and they take that signal, and they shut down the supply air handling system, because we don’t want air blowing into a fire. There have been buildings where we’ve been hired because they’ll say, “I don’t understand why, but every time the fire alarm goes off, they lock the doors on the building.”

Well, they actually didn’t lock the doors. The supply air handling system kept running or stopped running, but the exhaust fans kept running. The building was so negative that even a big, 250-pound football player couldn’t get the door open. So all those systems have to be verified to do what they’re supposed to do. So we get pretty involved with the actual building control sequences to make sure that in a scenario like that, that the exhaust fans still run but at a very low speed so we don’t have any risk problem in the building.

How Cornerstone Commissioning Does Testing

Paul: How do you test that? Do you actually put it into a failure mode?

Dan: Oh yeah. We actually run the building. So let me just tell you what… If we look at our whole process chronologically… So during the design phase — I already talked about that. We verify the design is going to work in the building. During the construction phase, we’re on site. Not all the time. We’re not on site like the contractors. We go on site when we need to see how well things are being installed. And, to make sure that there’s not going to be a problem with access, with maintenance, with how things perform, and the way things get installed, have a huge impact on how well they perform for airflows for the flow of fuel oil to the generator and things like that. And leak detection — there’s all kinds of parts and pieces. But then it gets down to the control sequences. We want to start seeing that dampers and valves act the way they’re supposed to, when they’re supposed to.

So ultimately, we end up having the controls contractor telling us when the systems are ready to be tested. One differentiator between us and other commissioning agents is that we actually will do the testing. We’ll actually take our laptops, logon to the building control system when the contractor says it’s ready, and then we’ll test it so that we’re getting ready for turnover. So we know it does what it’s supposed to do under normal and under failure scenarios. And so we work very closely, especially with the controls contractor. Get the building ready for turnover.

And then the building’s been turned over, owner’s moved in, and we will look at the building early in the occupancy because sometimes they’ll move in and they’ll say, “Well, that room that we were planning on using for doing a few months of testing, now that’s going to be an animal holding room.”

So, what are the implications of that? So we’ll look at helping them through some of those modifications and alarms and so that during the early occupancy, we’ll do some tweaks with the building controls contractor on how the building needs to meet those, perhaps, adjusted uses.

Paul: Right. Well, it sounds like they would need to do that contiguously, especially if they change things in the building. Like okay, we’re going to use this for this room today but six months from now, well, let’s do this. And it just incrementally changes. Do you get called back in for that?

Continuous Commissioning

Dan: Yeah, so we’ll be called back in on existing buildings to do what’s called existing building commissioning or continuous commissioning, which is a whole new aspect of the field right now that is starting to expand at a pretty exponential rate that… Continuous commissioning is doing analytics, building analytics. So, for energy reasons, for performance reasons, looking for anomalies in the building that maybe somebody who was running the control system and the building just really got tired of somebody complaining about how cold their room was in the wintertime. And so they do what’s called an overwrite. They’ll overwrite. Some heating valve opens when it’s just open all the time, not realizing the really detrimental impact that can have. And so some of these analytics are going to see those overwrites and raise a flag, send an alarm so that somebody says, “Why is this in place?”

Paul: So are you taking data feeds from these systems?

Dan: Mm-hmm.

Paul: And going through them? Sort of really analyzing them? Or you’re trusting their alarms? So, I imagine both but…

Dan: For continuous commissioning, the way I’m talking about it, where the industry’s going, it’s a smart analytic system. It’s being set up in such a way that it doesn’t require somebody to go in and look at the data and say, “Hmm, this looks like this could be a problem.” No. These analytics are actually looking for certain things to happen within systems to identify either an energy-wasting system relative to outside air conditions — how come this cooling system is operating and it’s three below zero? You know, it’ll look at things like that and raise a flag. How come the outside air dampers are open on the mechanical room, and the unit heaters in there are blowing? They’re 100% open and producing heat when it’s 10 degrees outside. Those outside air dampers shouldn’t be giving you fresh outside air unless you need it for combustion air, of course.

Paul: So you mentioned a house in New Hampshire. I know you said it was off the grid?

Dan: So it’s not connected to the power utility.

Paul: At all.

Dan: At all.

What is a Net Zero Building?

Paul: So you mentioned previously a net zero building. What does net zero mean?

Dan: A net zero building does not take power off the grid. It actually has the capability of supplying all of its own power, typically through some kind of PV panels, photovoltaic panels, solar system, or some renewable energy source that is not requiring power from the utility.

Paul: Okay. Obviously, people are interested in saving money and saving the planet and global warming and global cooling and all these different things. So you’re saying, are these buildings in New England?

Dan: We haven’t done any net-zero buildings in New England. We’ve done them in the D.C. area.

Paul: We don’t have enough sun.

Dan: Well, there are some net-zero buildings in New England. They’re smaller. The unique things, the interesting thing is about these net-zero buildings that we’re doing, one of them is a very large world headquarters building. And it’s an incredible building. It won’t save the owner long term by building a net-zero building. The payback on it is way beyond what any of us would consider. It’s really about being environmentally conscious.

Paul: Right, so it’s a marketing…

Dan: It’s marketing. It’s a really unique client who just is cutting edge in every way in their research. So we’ve done a call center for them. We’re doing another large research facility in Florida for them. And they’re just a client who is really committed to doing everything in a way that is very environmentally conscious.

Paul: Doing good.

Dan: Yeah. Yes.

Paul: So just to understand that. It is expensive to make a neutral building.

Dan: Very expensive. Yes.

Paul: And hopefully that will go down. I don’t know if you can speak to this, but that’s been my thing with photo solar cells, is every year they improve so much that it would be very painful to have put solar panels in last year and spent, let’s say $10,000 on — I don’t even know if that’s reasonable for a house. And then you’re going to get 10% more efficiency by waiting a year. So the problem is I’ll end up waiting forever. So it’s an interesting thing, but it’s neat to see that there are people sort of want to blaze a trail and say, “I’m going to do it anyway.”

Dan: And it’s helping the industry to go to a place that we just keep getting better at it because we keep using it.

Paul: And it is good for the environment. It’s just not as good for the wallet.

Dan: Exactly.

Paul: In other words, they’re generating most of those electricity, possibly even giving stuff back to the grid. That, while that doesn’t make sense financially, it does make sense environmentally.

Dan: That’s correct.

How Many Companies are in the Commissioning World?

Paul: Yeah. Okay. Cool. How many companies are in the commissioning world? Another one, five, a thousand?

Dan: So when the company was started about 17 years ago, it was probably in the low hundreds. And the number of commissioning companies that was in… We specialize in mission critical facilities. I would say that was in the dozens at the time. There are now thousands.

Paul: Really?

Dan: I’m guessing there might be a couple thousand. One of the reasons why the number went way up was around 2008, 2009 when the economy tanked. There were design-engineering firms — and some architects but mostly design-engineering firms — who, their business just dried up.

Paul: Well, we can do that.

Dan: Yeah.

Paul: Is that what they said?

Dan: Well, yeah. That’s what they did. They hung a shingle out. And the sad thing was, two things happened. The quality or the level of quality of commissioning services went down tremendously because you had people who were used to sitting in cubicles working on CAD systems and maybe wearing a tie now going out to say, “We do commissioning.” You won’t find too many guys in our companies wearing ties — not because we’re… I think we actually wearing ties, but we’re hands-on people. We have mostly engineers in our company, but we are on construction sites all the time. And we really know systems. And we’ve had young guys who start in our company — engineering degrees. We had one guy six months into the company, and he said, “I firmly believe that the people who design these systems never get out in the field to see them.” And so there’s an element of that that has come in, where from 2008 or 2009, for the next five years, we were just flooded with these people who knew how to design systems, but they’d get out in the field, and they’d say, “What is that?”

We still say that because there’s some new technologies that come. I was like, “What is that?” It was like, “Wow. That is so cool. I’m so glad we get to play with these new toys.” But when it comes to commissioning, there’s really — especially in the biocontainment industry where we do most of our work — there is a handful of those kind of commissioning companies out there that are recognized and known, that have, like us. We done over a hundred biosafety level three labs.

So Why Is It Called Commissioning?

Paul: So why is it called commissioning? Like you commission a boat, or I commission a painting. Or I sell something and I get a commission. Why is it call commissioning? I always struggle with the definition of words. Do you have any insight on that?

Dan: Well, The first thing that you stated is what was probably used for the industry that we’re in, and that was the reference to a boat being commissioned. That’s probably the most common use of the word commission, or commissioning before commissioning was introduced into the construction industry. I think now, there’s a lot more construction projects than there are boats being built that are, that are of the scale that need to be commissioned. But that’s where really it came from.

Commissioning is a Growing Industry

Paul: So 17 years ago, how many commissioning companies were there in the area?

Dan: Probably 200.

Paul: 200. And so that’s rare. I mean, that’s a rarified era kind of thing. 200 in the United States or — I don’t know — worldwide.

Dan: And it was new. Probably 25 years ago there were less than a hundred. Partly because the commissioning, or the construction industry did a big turn in the late ’80s to ’90s that buildings became more sophisticated. The owners were putting things on a faster track schedule. So you combine sophisticated building and a faster delivery with what architects and engineers and contractors used to have time to do, and they work together collaboratively. I come from a contracting background, and if you weren’t happy as an owner, we weren’t done. And so we would just work with the system, tweak it. Well, today, contractors say, “Whatever the architects and engineers designed on their drawings, that’s what we owe. That’s what we’re going to deliver. And the most efficient way we can do that is to get it done as quickly as we can.” The owners said they want to have this building done by January of 2018, so guess what happens on February 1st, 2018? They pack up their bags, and they’re gone. Their tools and their… So to the extent that they can do that, they hit that. And it has left this huge gap of performance. And so it really has been applied mostly to mission critical facilities like labs and vivarium, like we do.

How Dan’s Career Began

Paul: When you were 16 years old and thinking about “What do I want to do for the rest of my life?” Did you say, “Ah-ha. I’m going to do something that’s going to be called commissioning?” You probably didn’t. So how, what were you thinking of back then? And how did you get to saying, “Ah-ha. I’m going to start a commissioning company”? What made you think that 17 years ago?

Dan: Well, I knew that someday I was going to own my own company. I grew up in a mechanical contracting company that my great-grandfather started a hundred years ago.

Paul: Oh, okay. So you had some comfort in that world.

Dan: Yes. Very much so. And it’s just second nature to a Frasier male. And so my younger brother runs that business now, and I have an older brother who has his own plumbing and heating business as well. And I graduated with a degree in engineering.

Paul: Which kind?

Dan: Aerospace engineering.

Paul: Aerospace. Ooh. So you could commission a plane.

Dan: Yeah, perhaps. I don’t know.

Paul: Might have to get continuing education credits before doing that.

Dan: I think I would, yes. But I graduated. Got right back into the construction field. I was deflected from the aerospace industry by a professor that encouraged me to look elsewhere. And I’m glad I did. Yeah. The aerospace industry is interesting, exciting, and I like it, but this ended up being the right path for me. And then I was working for a company who manufactured critical controls for laboratories, mostly air-flow-control systems, and it was while I was working at that company that I found out about commissioning.

How Cornerstone Commissioning Began

And really, for me, I was just seeing owner after owner — mostly higher education and federal government laboratory projects that were being delivered, hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on these buildings — on each building — and the buildings didn’t work. And so I found out about this thing called commissioning. It was at the right time for me when I was trying to figure out what kind of company am I going to start. And I was teaching a class at the University of Wisconsin on ventilation controls for labs, and I saw a label on one of the doors that said they were teaching commissioning. And thought, “Hey, I think that might be something I’d be interested in.” And so I asked the faculty that was teaching it, if I could sit in in the back of the room. And he said, “Oh, yeah. We know your background. We’d like to have you in the classroom for discussion purposes when you can be here.”

I was sitting in the class for 10 minutes and started writing my business plan.

Paul: Really. Wow. Interesting.

Dan: In 2001.

There’s No Place Like New England

Paul: Okay. What brought you to New England? I mean, because you’re headquartered in New England. I know you have people all over the country, but what in the world brought you to New England. Was it a deliberate thing, or was it just a family, a life thing?

Dan: Well, I moved to New England right out of college in 1988. And I worked as a manufacturer’s rep and then worked in marketing for Phoenix Controls.

Paul: So you didn’t leave is what you’re saying.

Dan: Yeah. I didn’t. Well, I grew up in the Midwest. And moved out here right after college. And I like New England a lot. This is where I am for life, Lord willing.

Paul: Yeah, it is. I have a good friend who went over to study in Cambridge, England. And he came back, and he was just overwhelmed with how beautiful it is. And I’m like, “But you were in England. That’s so quaint and so cool and all.”

It’s really amazingly beautiful. I think that we take it for granted. Certainly I do. And then we go to different parts of the country… I mean, America is hugely beautiful all over. But it is a beautiful area, and it was a very unique area.

Paul: Well, we’ve been talking with Dan Frasier of Cornerstone Commissioning. And we’re really delighted that you took the time to come in today and look forward to talking to you in the future.

Dan: Thank you, Paul. This has been a pleasure.

More Episodes:

You’ve been listening to Part 2 of our conversation with Dan Frasier! You’ve been listening to Part 2 of our conversation with Dan Frasier! Listen to Part 3 here! We’ll be talking about how Cornerstone Commissioning Inc. is more than just a business!
If you missed Part 1, you can find it here!


Also published on Medium.

Living the Dream as a Nature Photographer With Arthur Morris

On Episode 75 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with Arthur Morris who’s living the dream as a world renowned nature photographer! He’s sharing with us the story of how it all began!

Show Notes

Arthur Morris’ Website: Birds As Art
Arthur Morris’ Blog
Find Arthur Morris on Facebook
Find Arthur Morris on Twitter
Information for the Birds As Art Instructional Photo Tours
About Arthur Morris & Birds As Art
The Birds As Art Online Photography Store
Buy Arthur Morris’ book, The Art of Bird Photography, online here:
Arthur Morris’ Book, Shorebirds: Beautiful Beachcombers
Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Queens, New York City
New York City Audubon Society
Bird Watcher’s Digest
Photographer Milton Heiberg
Photographer Thomas Mangelsen
iBird – A Handheld Field Guide to birds of North America
Roger Tory Peterson
Peterson Field Guides to Eastern Birds
Cape May Bird Observatory
Festival of the Cranes
Cape May Fall Festival
Available to Buy: Books, Videos and Training Instruction by Arthur Morris, as well as books by his friends and colleagues
Link to SaviorLabs Assessment

Sections

Arthur Morris’ Dream
Selling Pictures of Birds
How Arthur Morris First Began Publishing Articles
Writing and Photography Go Together
Drawing as a Child: How it Helped
Photography is Learned
Birds As Art: How the Name Came About
For the Love of Birds
The Decline of Selling Stock Photos
How Can Photographers Make Money Besides Selling Photos?
Birding: A Popular Pastime That is Growing Everyday
More Episodes

Living the Dream as a Nature Photographer

Arthur Morris’ Dream

Paul: So, what did the people around you think as you’re starting on this and in ’83 you’re picking up a camera and you’re a teacher. Was it just like no big deal or where did this come from or…?

Arthur: It was no big deal. I had played golf in college and wound up being captain of Brooklyn College Golf Team. Compared to my predecessors I wasn’t very good. I had a great friend who when he was a senior, his name was Dom Ferrone, and he wound up winning the Met intercollegiate one year in a huge upset over two scholarship golfers from Princeton and Pace University.

Paul: Wow.

Arthur: And, I still have the New York Times article. And I talk to Donnie once in a while. He knew he wasn’t good enough to make it on the tour, but he fulfilled his dream by becoming a head teaching profession at Callaway Gardens in Georgia.

Paul: Oh, cool.

Arthur: So I’m photographing away, and of course, it was all film then and had a halfway decent collection of slides. And to get my dream rolling, I decided I would try to sell a few bird pictures here and there.

Paul: Well, but before you go there, what was the dream?

Arthur: The dream was just that I could be a professional nature photographer specializing in birds.

Paul: Okay. So, you actually articulated that. You thought, okay, I’m going to go and do this for a living. I’m going to try to.

Arthur: In my, in my own head.

Paul: Right, right.

Arthur: You know, I didn’t share it with anybody then. It was sort of a secret dream. Again, with no planning. Just pretty much everything I’ve done in my life is just by hook or by crook, seat of the pants. We’ll take one step at a time and see what happens.

So, by the late ’80s, my marriage had ended, and I remarried my best friend who I’d known for 13 or 14 years, Elaine Belsky. We had three different apartments in Howard Beach section of Queens, which conveniently was by Jamaica Bay Refuge.

Paul: Was that by design?

Arthur: It was convenient because Elaine’s ex-husband, Marvin, and her son lived in Canarsie.

Paul: I see.

Selling Pictures of Birds

Arthur: And my school was in Bushwick. So, it was a neat little triangle. So that worked well. Then I guess I thought, if I’m going to be a professional, I might as well try to sell a few pictures. So, I started sending pictures into Bird Watcher’s Digest and Birder’s World. Very rarely I would sell a photograph for $50 or $75. And then it dawned on me, hey, if I’m killing myself to sell one picture to be used with someone else’s article, how about if I write the article, get paid for the article, and sell five or six pictures with the article. That seemed like a much better idea.

The funny part is lots of people tell you if you want to get started as a writer or a photographic illustrator, illustrating your stories with your pictures, the best way to do it is to write a cover letter and make it interesting and include a few pictures. And then all the editors will come running back to you telling you how much they want you to do this or that article for them.

So, I tried that, and I must have sent out a dozen cover letters with story ideas to different editors, and I didn’t even get a rejection letter. I got nothing. So, I said, this isn’t working very well. I don’t think these people are accurate.

How Arthur Morris First Began Publishing Articles

Arthur: And I forget if I read it somewhere, but it’s turned out I was much more successful in writing an article, getting it proofread by a friend or two, and sending it along with a tight submission of maybe 20 photographs for the editor to choose from.

So, my first victim, or target, was a lady named Mary Beacom Bowers at Bird Watcher’s Digest. Bird Watcher’s Digest was published six times a year, and every issue had 20 articles or so. So, I figured that would be good.

I sent a package to Mary, and she sent me back a note with a promise to publish. So a month went by, and I got my Bird Watcher’s Digest, and I opened it up, and look on the table of contents for the name Arthur Morris — nothing. Then two months later — nothing. A year later — nothing. Two years later — nothing. So, I have this promise to publish that’s not getting published. I’ve always been a very determined person. Most people by this point, I think, would have called the editor and reminded them and said give me a break in life or maybe complained a little bit. But I came up with an alternate plan. I sent her a second article. And a few months after that, I went down to Cape May for some birding festival, Cape May, New Jersey. And I had the pleasure of meeting Mary Bowers for the first time.

And by that time, she had published the second article, and then in the next issue, published the first article. And they went on in a period of six years or so where I had about 25 articles published. You know, that sort of got me in on the ground floor at a time when you could sell photographs.

When I met Mary, she was this just this gentle, southern woman with a beautiful southern accent. And she said, “Artie, I do declare, you sent me that first article, and I held it for two years, and I never published it.” She said, “It just impressed me, your determination. And instead of calling me and complaining, you sent me a second article, and boy I really admire determination in a person.”

Her health is very failing, and I don’t know if she’s alive to this minute. The publisher who is now the editor of Bird Watcher Digest promised to get in touch when Mary passed. But I do, when I have a thorny grammatical problem, to this day I will email Mary because she knew language better than anyone that I’ve ever come across. And she was a very sweet and loving woman, Mary Beacom Bowers. And she was like the golf teacher that inspires you by just praising you — not real concrete suggestions, just, “Oh, Arnie, that was so beautifully written, I didn’t even have to raise my pen.”

Paul: Wow.

Arthur: Then, the second thing that happened was that there was a little nicer — and by “nicer” I meant finer paper and nicer photographic reproductions — and that was Birder’s World. And I worked with two editors there. One was named Julie Riddle and Mary Catherine Parks. And one of them, I sent an article about photographing birds from blinds called “No reason to hide.” Because in Europe, a hide is like a little blind. But I never used a blind. I just crawled in the mud and got close to the birds. And I sent her the article, and my memory precludes me from knowing if it was Mary Catherine Parks or Julie Riddle. In any case, one of them said, “Artie, you know that part that you wrote about your crawling through the mud and the no-see-ums are biting the back of your hand, and 10 feet away, a least sandpiper slept peacefully,” she said, “That’s a little first-person anecdote. If you would add some more of those to the article, we’ll publish it.”

So I did, and that became sort of the hallmark of my storytelling, interspersing what I was feeling and doing and thinking and seeing with some solid information.

Paul: Interesting.

Arthur: So between Mary Catherine Parks and Julie Riddle and Mary Bowers, they inspired me to write more. And, you know, that’s become instrumental in my success in the failing photography market, as far as being able to sell images, is my ability to write and write good how-to, and that connects with my blog, which is the life blood of my business today.

Writing and Photography Go Together

Paul: Well, let’s get into that in a minute. But so now you’re talking about… You sort of, just to reiterate, you went off to become a professional photographer, and you ended up being a writer as well.

Arthur: Oh absolutely. If the writing hadn’t kicked in, I’d be a greeter in Walmart or serving hamburgers at Burger King.

Paul: Wow. So, you’re a photographer is what you are. You’re not a writer. Or are you both?

Arthur: Oh, I’m surely both.

Paul: Sure. But I mean, when you think of yourself, do you say, “I’m a writer. You know, I’m like Stephen King. I write.” That’s all Stephen King does is write. And I don’t mean to say “all,” but, I mean, that’s what he… That’s the definition.

Arthur: Today I think of myself as a photojournalist.

Paul: Okay. Interesting.

Arthur: You know, there’s no way I could survive as a photographer, not for one day, one hour, one minute. And we’ll get into that in a little bit as far as the declining market for photographs.

Drawing as a Child: How it Helped

Paul: Right. So, I mean, were you very artistic when you were younger? Did you learn everything about composition and all of the fine arts side of photography, the artistic side of photography?

Arthur: Well I liked to draw when I was a kid, and in elementary school, for the first five years, six years, kindergarten through fifth grade, I was a star student. They used to have S-Os. So I would get “outstanding” in every single thing. You know, I was perfectly well behaved. I was a good kid.

And then in sixth grade, I had a teacher named Mrs. McMenamin. I don’t know if she’s… I doubt that she’s still alive. And the first week of school, my mother was called up to the principal’s office by Mrs. McMenamin about four times. I was the same kid. I didn’t do anything different than I had ever done. One day we had a new girl in class after about the first month. The girl’s name was Sarah Lee Miller. Don’t ask me how I remember that after 65 years. But Sarah Lee Miller came into class in sixth grade, and we used to put our chairs up on the desk before we went home. And Sarah lee knocked one chair over, and about 25 chairs fell on the ground like a domino effect. And I remember Mrs. McMenamin shouting out, “Okay, Morris, 25 demerits.” I hadn’t done anything that nobody, anyone in the class hadn’t done.

We learned later that she was an anti-Semite, and to punish me — because I had the grades to be put ahead a grade. There was a program in junior high where you did 7th grade and then 9th grade. They called it SP, special progress. I more than had the grades for that. But the punishment, she could put me in special art, which I didn’t do very much with that. I wasn’t really artistic. I liked to draw, but I wasn’t very good at it. So, it actually turned out to be nice. I had one more year in junior high than the smart kids, went on to Brooklyn Tech, and didn’t do anything particularly artistic.

Photography is Learned

We’ll skip ahead to that first nature photography class. I was so proud. I had one picture of a Greater Yellowlegs that I took at Sandy Hook. And by, just pure luck I managed to get the right exposure. And we did a critiquing session. Milton Heiberg projected the slide, and everyone said “Oooh.” And Milton said, “Well, it’s very nice, but why did you put the bird in the middle?”

And I said, “Well, where are you supposed to put the bird?” I didn’t know any better, that we want to move the bird back in the frame and give it room to see.

So, I guess you could say that everything compositionally and artistically was learned. I think that there must have been some innate stuff lurking in my brain with an artistic side but that definitely was mostly learned and had to be nurtured and developed.

Paul: Would this be fair? You saw birds. You loved birds. And then you said, “Well, let me take pictures of birds.” And you enjoyed that. And then you wanted to have your bird artwork publicized, and you couldn’t get it publicized, so you started writing articles. And along with that, you started to get published, both your pictures and your articles.

Arthur: That is all correct then. I just had a thought. Keep talking about the art stuff and the transitioning from being a school teacher to thinking there was a chance I might be able to make some money as a photographer or, as it turned out, to be a photojournalist.

Birds As Art: How the Name Came About

So probably sometime about 1989, 1990, I was living with Elaine, and we were recently married, and I was telling her that I might want to be a professional photographer one day, but I needed a name for my business. At the time, there was a famous photographer named Tom Mangelsen. He’s still well known. And I think his business name was Reflections of Nature. And everybody who was getting into photography took a play on his name — Images of Nature, Nature’s Reflections, Reflections of Nature.

I said, “Elaine, what could we do? I need a good business name, and I don’t want it to be ‘reflections’ of anything.”

So, we sort of brainstormed for a minute, and she said, “Well, you like birds, and your work is artistic, and your name is Arthur, and short for that is Artie or Art,” and then she blurted out “Birds as Art.”

And I remember at the moment, I said, “Oh, babe, that’s amazing. That’s the greatest thing I ever heard — Birds as Art.”

So, I would go on to lose her to breast cancer in 1994, and it’s just very comforting to know that even today in the age of digital, every time I press the shutter button, Birds as Art is embedded in the metadata. So Elaine lives on.

Paul: Wow. That’s great.

Arthur: She was always my best friend and my biggest supporter. And you know, I was sad for a long time after she died. Then I got into this stuff called the Work, the Work of Byron Katie and found the good measure of peace, and now I can look back on Elaine Belsky just with nothing but smiles and how lucky I was to be with her for nine years.

For the Love of Birds

Paul: So now, if you had not sold that article or not found the path to being able to get your pictures published, I’ll bet you’d still be looking at birds. You’d be doing something else for income, but you’d be probably still looking at birds because you loved birds.

Arthur: Oh, I always have said that if I never sold one photograph, if I never sold one article, if I never led one photographic tour teaching other people, that I’d be spending just as much time photographing birds. It’s not a question. The fact that I was able to make a living in what turned out to be an amazingly lucrative living doing what I love to do more than anything in the world, that’s the miracle of my life. Everyone should be so blessed.

The Decline of Selling Stock Photos

Paul: So, well let’s talk a little bit about sort of the business of it, as it’s evolved throughout the years. So you had this first foray into the business of it by creating an article. So pretty smart, from a bystander saying, “Okay, you’re not going to publish my, my pictures; I’ll send you an article with pictures.” And so you got that in there. Then what was the next thing that happened? Did you just continue to write articles?

Arthur: I wrote a lot, and I had sent some pictures to VIREO, and the guy who was director then, name was J. Pete Meyers, and I said, “I’m a fledging bird photographer.”

And he wrote back, and he said, “You’re far more than a fledging bird photographer.” But in fact, that’s what I was.

So VIREO started selling a few pictures, and at the time, in the late ’90s and the very early part of the aughts, there was some money to be made selling nature photography as stock by doing it the hard way, not through a stock agent. Although VIREO was a quasi-stock agency — Visual Resources for Ornithology, part of the Academy of Natural Science at Philadelphia. And at the height of it, maybe they were selling four or five thousand dollars twice a year. So, I get some decent checks. And we were sending stuff over the transom.

I remember in the early years just going to the bookstores, looking at the books and magazine, finding the name of the publisher, writing a cover letter, sending samples, and selling a few pictures. And that grew. Elaine was gone in ’94. But 2001, I hired my daughter Jennifer to help me run the business in 1998. And probably the height of the sales of images to be used in books and on calendars was probably about 2001 because Jennifer’s my quasi accountant. And I said, “Hey, Jen, see how much money we made selling photographs in 2001.”

So, she went back through the spreadsheets, and she came up with a figure of about $220,000.

Paul: That’s pretty good in that year.

Arthur: Pretty damn good for selling the rights to photographs to be used in books and magazines and — I don’t remember — maybe even on a website or two back then.

So, in 2011, 10 years, I said to Jen, “Hey, Jen, you remember when you used to do that thing with where we made to money from?” I said, “Just go back and check the sales of pictures. Just pictures that we sold to publishers for books and magazines and websites usage.” And pretty stunningly — I mean, I knew things were bad, but I didn’t realize how bad — we had sold, from 2001 when we sold $220,000 worth of images, to 2011, that number had dropped to just under $20,000 for the year.

Paul: Wow. So a tenth.

Arthur: Then a month ago, I said to Jen, “Hey, Jen, go back and see how much we made from selling pictures in 2016.” $2004.

Paul: Wow.

Arthur: Down another 90%. So really, in essence, down about 99%.

How Can Photographers Make Money Besides Selling Photos?

Paul: Wow. So would you say — I mean, a lot of photographers are probably going to listen to this — that you need to find alternate ways to make money than selling photos?

Arthur: I’m sure there’s some photographers around, commercial, who are still surviving by selling photographs. In nature photography, the market has gotten a thousand times tighter. Sometime after 9-11, traditional publishing of hardcopy books and calendars has just gone totally downhill. And then other factors for involved in that. It’s so much easier to become a good digital photographer than it was to become a good photographer with film so that there are hundreds of excellent photographers. And the way it’s worked out is many of them are more than happy to give away their photographs for a credit line. So, the market is virtually destroyed.

Paul: Hmm. Interesting.

Arthur: A perfect example of that is a little publishing project called iBird. There used to be a guy named Peter Thayer. And he used to make bird recording CDs, and he bought all the pictures through VIREO. And not only did he pay a fair price, $60 or $70 for each photograph, but when he would sell 10,000 CDs as per the contract, you would get paid a second time. So those were some nice checks.

Then along came this guy with iBird, and he emailed every bird photographer he could find on the planet, and he came up with the following pitch. You let me use your pictures for free on this new CD I’m doing for bird recordings called iBird, and I will use your picture, and I will give you a credit line, and people will be soon lining up to buy your pictures from you because you’ll have 2— or 300 pictures on my iBird CD.

So many of the best photographers bought that deal. I did not. I said, that’s ridiculous. Then the credit line for each photographer you need a 20-power magnifier to read it. And no one has ever sold a picture. But the end result was Peter Thayer pretty much went out of business, and the iBird guy went on, I would think, to be a multi-millionaire because he expanded to just dozens and dozens of different CDs. You know, Peter Thayer was selling a CD for $90 and paying people fairly. This guy didn’t have to pay anybody fairly. He got the rights to the recordings rather cheaply, and he sells his thing for $12. And then with this explosion of birdwatching and birding, he’s done quite well for himself.

Birding: A Popular Pastime That is Growing Everyday

Paul: So, let’s just take a detour here. Is birding still a popular pastime for people?

Arthur: Oh, birding is growing every day. For me, for Birds as Art, to leave teaching when I did just as this huge groundswell of people being aware of nature, wanting to get out there with a pair of binoculars… I mean the grandfather of the whole thing was Roger Tory Peterson with his series, the Eastern Field Guide to Birds. And then that’s grown into this huge collection of field guides and done in the Peterson style. And birding continues to grow as the baby boomers are getting to retirement with disposable income. There are just more and more birdwatchers, more and more birding events.

Heck, when I, when I first started, that was the fall roundup at Cape May by Cape May Bird Observatory. There was one birding festival. Now if you get online and do a search for birding festivals, you can probably find two or three or four a week for 52 weeks a year. You know, the next big one was the Festival of the Cranes at Bosque del Apache in New Mexico. After that, things grew like wildfire, in part, due to my friend Paul Kerlinger at Cape May Bird Observatory. I mentioned they had the fall roundup. Well Paul decided one year to do a study on how much money the birders spent when they came to Cape May to come to the festival and then expanded that to a year and extrapolate it. And it found out that when people travel to visit a birding festival or to go birding in general, that there is this huge multiplier effect. They buy their plane tickets. They got their binoculars. They have their hotel reservations. They have their rental car. They eat at the local restaurants. They stay a week, and I forget the fantastic figure that he came up with. But once folks saw this and this became common knowledge, people at bird-rich areas all around the country said, “Hey, let’s have a festival.” And there are plenty of them today, and they’re generating, surely, tens of millions of dollars of income for individual communities each year around the country and around the world, even.

More Episodes:

You’ve been listening to Part 2 of our conversation with Arthur Morris! Stay tuned for Part 3!
If you missed Part 1, you can find it here!


Also published on Medium.

© 2025 Paul Parisi

Theme by Anders NorénUp ↑