Tag: #weddingphotography

The Permanence of Pictures in Today’s Digital World

On Episode 70 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with photographer Al Pereira about what it takes to be a great photographer and the permanence of pictures in today’s digital world.

Show Notes

Advanced Photo’s Website
Contact Al Pereira
Find Al Pereira on Facebook
Find Al Pereira on LinkedIn
UPI – United Press International
The Eagle Tribune
How To Get Your Drone License
FAA – Becoming a Drone Pilot
The Amazing New World of Drones Podcast
Link to SaviorLabs Assessment

Sections

Photographing With Drones
Photographers Should Be Great Leaders
Websites and Photography
Photographers As Communicators
Memories Matter – Why You Should Print Your Pictures
There Is No Excuse! – Finding Time To Print Photos

The Permanence of Pictures in Today’s Digital World

Photographing With Drones

Paul: Well so now, I know it’s been a couple of years now, but you’ve been in drones.

Al: Oh, yes. I actually got certified by FAA to fly them.

Paul: Okay. So you’re a certified drone pilot. But you didn’t want to fly drones so you could just fly around and look at neighbors’ pools and stuff. You know, look at power lines or something. You did it because you thought you could make a business out of it of taking cool photographs of businesses and offices and sites. So how has that been going?

Al: I’ll tell you. The drone industry has taken off. The business side of Advanced Photo, the drones has taken off. I do a lot of real estate pictures and videos. And it seems that every week, I get more and more jobs with not just taking photos of the inside of the house but also we need the video, and we need drone photos of the outside of the house. So in the last month and a half, I’ve actually ended up getting like six more real estate agents. And I don’t want to overdo it, but it’s in a comfortable kind of stage where I can handle the work.

But that’s not where it stops too, what I do. I actually do virtual tours of houses. So that’s a new technology that hasn’t been out that long where, if you are familiar with the way Google works when you find a street and you can walk down the street, it’s similar to that. You can do a complete 360. But the quality, it’s like you’re in that house. The grain of the woods is so sharp that you could almost touch it. That’s how much reality it is. And you capture the photographs from that, and it’s magazine ready.

Paul: Wow. That’s cool.

Al: That type of quality. So from drones, the virtual tours… I mean, there isn’t much that I don’t do and I don’t love doing. Everything. One of my realtors that says, “Al, I love working with you. You’re always excited every time I call you, and that makes me feel good. It makes me want to work with you.” And that makes me feel good.

Photographers Should Be Great Leaders

Paul: Well, it should. One of the things that I think differentiates you from a lot of photographers, and just from a lot of people, is you have a great personality. One of the things I think that’s important is, I’ve worked with a lot of photographers, and I know a lot of them. And a lot of people have been in a lot of weddings where you’re watching the photographer, and they’re sort of like saying, “Uh, move.” And doing this. And they’re talking with this diminutive voice, and they’re not saying things. “Look this way.” You know, there’s no energy. And I’ve seen you take control of a room. And, “Okay. Come on. Move over here. Look this way. Okay, I want you to tilt your head just a little bit this way.” And you’re directing them to make them look good. And I think that’s one of the keys for a good photographer is to be able to communicate effectively with the people you’re working with. And that is just so rare. I’ve seen it so much that it’s just all lacking.

Al: You know, I always had this philosophy. You get hired to do a wedding, and you have a job to do. Are you going to be a follower, or are you going to be a leader? In other words, when I get hired, I walk into the house. I gradually guide the bride from step A to B to C, and I get her to be on time from the house to the church, going down the aisle. A photographer, today’s photographers are not leaders, they’re followers. And they stand back and let the bride do the work technically on their wedding day. I just did a recent wedding, and it was amazing that the photographer would say, “Okay, what other picture do you want? What other picture do you want?”

Paul: And that’s not what they’re thinking about.

Al: And I was doing video at this particular wedding. I was like, “Oh, my god. I mean, how can this be? What’s going on?” And I call them “weekend warriors” because they really don’t know the poses. They don’t know the key shots. They’ll take 2,000 photos, but you’re lucky to get 100 decent ones. So it’s important that when you look for a photographer that you get a photographer that’s going to do the job and going to do the job without you having to think for them. They should know what needs to be done.

Paul: Right, yeah. And I think you’re right. Photography is leadership, and it’s coming in and saying, “You want this to look good. Let’s do it.”

Websites and Photography

So I’d like to touch on this. We actually just had Al take some photos for us for our website which you can see on the website. And we do a lot of websites for people, companies, whatever it might be. And I think the biggest problem with websites is bad photography or, even worse, is stock photography. It is just not what people are looking for. When they come to your website, they want to see pictures of you. They want to be able to identify you. So if you’re out there in business, and your website has stock photos on it, I would run as fast as you can to get a real photographer and get some taken. And don’t get, you know, the, the sister of the daughter of the president or something like that. “Oh, they’re, they’re good with a camera.” It’s not all that expensive to hire a photographer for a couple of hours, and you will get more photos than you could use. I will tell you, the conversion rate on real photos for people on websites, makes a huge difference.

Now what you can do is go and find some stock photos that you like the design of, and say, “This is the kind of photos I want you to make.” That will help. It will decrease the amount of time, but it’s an important investment. You could spend $1,000, $10,0000 on a website and spend that little extra money to get a photographer.

Photographers As Communicators

Al: With that being said, Paul, one of the things that I’ve found with previous jobs that I’ve had is the lack of communication. They’ll hire you, and they’ll say, “Okay, we need to have you go to a location.” Okay, fine. And you try to find out what it is that I’m there for, and there’s no communication whatsoever. And you get there, and you’re trying to figure out what it is exactly they want. So you ask questions. And sometimes, they get annoyed that you’re asking the questions. “Well, I hired you. Just do the job.”

“What am I doing?” I’m taking pictures, but what is the purpose of the photos?

So you hire someone, you really need to communicate to the point that, “Okay, this is for a website.”

“What’s the website about? What do you do? What kind of a business is it? Okay, your folks, do they have personality? I mean, are they willing to be in front of the camera?” There’s so much nowadays especially. The communication factor is so important.

Paul: Right. Absolutely. And I think that’s a good point, even for your website. What does it say, you know? You need to look at it. One of the most difficult things when you have your own business website is assessing what is it actually saying, because you read so much into it. So you need to almost sit down with somebody you don’t know and say, “Tell me what you think of this website. What does this company do? What do they want you to do?” I’ve done that with different people, and I will tell you, the difference of reaction between real photos and stock photos or real video. And also video is huge. Don’t underestimate that. A good video is worth so much. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Then maybe a video is worth 10,000.

Al: You know, one of the things that I always try to imagine is, “Okay, this is my business. What would I want?” I love eye contact with the camera. I love animation in a video or even in a photo, like for example, your staff. They love what they’re doing, and I want people to be able to see that. So the smile. It’s not always about being serious. It’s let’s capture that employee’s personality because you put that up, and people are going to say, “It looks like a fun, you know, place to work at.” And that’s more important than just having a snapshot, you know.

Paul: Well, I think what you’re talking about is relationships. What photos do is remind you of a relationship, whether it’s to a place or to people, or people in a place. And an effective communicator, that is called a good photographer, a good videographer. We want to tell stories, and that’s what photos do.

Memories Matter – Why You Should Print Your Pictures

Paul: Now we’ve also talked about this, just as sort of an aside, is it used to be that you’d have a closet full of slides or photos or the people that were a little more organized would put them in books. And they’d pull them out once in a while and look at them. That can’t happen anymore.

Al: Not unless you have a projector.

Paul: Or you put it on your phone, and you flip through them there. But it’s a very different experience. You know, it’s like looking at a two by three print.

Al: That’s correct. You know it’s funny. There are a lot of people out there that have old negatives in a shoe box or the slides. And I’ve always said, out of sight, out of mind. And what good are they in a shoe box? You should do something with them. And people say, “Well, what am I’m going to do with them?”

I say, “There’s a few things you can do. You can have them scanned in, digitize them. Now that CD or DVD that you have become negatives, your negatives.” Remember the old days when you would have a roll of film? You would get negatives back. Well, there’s no such thing now. But you need to back up your digital files. You can’t trust a computer. You can’t trust external drives.

Paul: That’s true, yeah.

Al: Even DVDs you need to really have a couple of them just in case.

Paul: Yeah. They’re not archival, as we call it.

Al: But, you need to do something with them. And then once you get them in front of you, then you say, okay, what do I want to print? Do I print them at least four by six and get that album. There’s nothing like having an album to sit down on the couch with a cup of coffee or at a table and look at photos. It’s not the same on the phone. It’s not. You’re lucky if you can find them, first of all.

Paul: Well that’s the biggest thing is you can’t find them. But I also have seen people now doing like a photo wall in their house where they’ll have just bunches and bunches of prints that they’ll put up and change them once in a while or move them around. But I just think that’s a great idea because we’re in this rush, rush world. But we have to stop and smell the roses and really enjoy the memories.

Al: Well, that’s important. If you read the paper or if you sometimes watch the news, in the Midwest, there’s a tornado; there’s a flooding. And it, it doesn’t surprise me, but I always hear, “I’ve got to get my photos. Those are my memories. You can’t replace memories. You can’t replace photos.” And they will almost kill themselves just to try to get those out of there. It’s different in this part of the world because everybody is so busy. They don’t think about the memories that they have captured—

Paul: Until it’s too late.

Al: —on their phone. Right. Until it’s too late. You know, I do slideshows for memorial services, and it’s rather sad that in the last seven, eight, almost 10 years now, I’ve seen less and less recent photos of the folks that have passed than ever before. So they’re scrambling to find anything they can. And it’s 20, 30 year old photos. They don’t look like that anymore. And one of the reasons too is, “Oh, I know we have photos, but we can’t find them. They’re on a computer, or they’re on a phone.”

Paul: Who knows where? On an old phone somewhere.

Al: Right. And it’s sad because those are your memories going forward. And I have also folks that have parents that have Alzheimer’s and so forth, and they come to me and said, “You know, the other day, I showed my mother this photo from my phone, and she had a beam in her face, and it’s like she remembered. So can you print these photos?” And you know what? It makes a difference in those people’s lives.

Paul: Yeah, it sure does.

Al: Because they look at it and, for some reason—

Paul: They remember.

Al: It kind of stimulates their mind as to when it was taken, how they were in the photo and so forth. So, people need to understand photos, that Kodak moment, still exists.

Paul: Yeah, it sure does.

There Is No Excuse! – Finding Time To Print Photos

Al: You just have to take the step, and there is no excuse — I don’t have the time — because there’s emailing the photos to your local lab, there’s uploading by going to their website. There’s so many different ways. Put them on a thumb drive. Go to the store. Put them in the slot, in the mail slot, with a note saying print all of them. You know what I mean? So, it’s a few seconds it takes.

Paul: Yeah, it is. It’s something very tangible. It’s very interesting when you hold the photo and if you haven’t experienced that — because you might not have any printed photos — give it a try. It’s really incredible. it’s something that’s just a neat experience.

Al: Just holding a photo. I mean, you can turn around and show it to a friend, and you can laugh. Okay, you could put it down and say, “You know what? Wait a minute. Let me go back and look,” where you don’t have to use your finger to scroll back and try to find it from a thousand pictures.

Paul: Yeah, there’s a lot more permanence to it and it just sits there and it’s a very different experience. I think it’s important for people to start.

Al: But you know what I have noticed in the last six months to a year that I’m getting a lot younger people coming in, especially when they go to college, they come in and they print a bunch of four by sixes so they can have it on their wall. And that really excites me because they look forward to seeing those photos once they’re printed, and they get excited, and they say thank you, you know.

Paul: Absolutely.

Well, we’ve been talking with Al Pereira of Advanced Photo in North Reading, Massachusetts. You can see his work by looking in our show notes and how to get in touch with Al and get to his websites. But it’s been a privilege to talk with you. Thank you for your time and we appreciate it.

Al: It’s been a lot of fun, Paul, and I really appreciate you having me.

Paul: Alright.

Al: Thank you.

Paul: Thank you.

More Episodes:

You’ve been listening to Part 3 of our interview with Al Pereira! If you missed Part 1, you can listen to it here and if you missed part 2, you can find it here!


Also published on Medium.

Freelance Photography & Entrepreneurship with Al Pereira

On episode 68 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with freelance photographer Al Pereira, about being an entrepreneur and running Advanced Photo, a photography store in North Reading, Massachusetts.

Show Notes

Advanced Photo’s Website
Contact Al Pereira
Find Al Pereira on Facebook
Find Al Pereira on LinkedIn
Gear Review: Yashica FX-3 35mm Film SLR
UPI – United Press International
The Eagle Tribune
Link to SaviorLabs Assessment

Sections

Picking Up A Camera – The Start of a Career
Working as a Freelance Photographer
A Hands On Experience – Working for United Press International
Darkrooms Before Computers
When Color Printing Became Popular
Camera Equipment Back In The Day
Al’s Photography Work
A Freelance Photographer is an Entrepreneur
The Danger of Being a News Photographer
Starting a Photography Business

Freelance Photography and Entrepreneurship with Al Pereira

Paul: Welcome to the Edge of Innovation. I’m here with Al Pereira, president, founder, chief photographer of Advanced Photo in North Reading, Massachusetts.

Al: Thank you very much for having me, Paul.

Paul: So, Al, we’ve known each other for a long time, and I’ve been following your career as a photographer and I thought it’d be interesting for our listeners to talk with somebody that is really good behind the camera.

Al: Ah, thanks for the compliment.

Paul: Well, we’ll see if we can find somebody after this. Right?

Al: There you go.

Picking Up A Camera – The Start of a Career

Paul: So, what, what made you pick up a camera?

Al: Well, it’s kind of a funny story. I was kind of laid up from work for a while due to an injury. And, I got bored, and I bought a camera. Not even a week later, I was driving down the street, and there was a fire. It happened to be in Malden, and I took pictures, and I actually had a black and white darkroom that I had started in my basement a couple of days after I bought it. So it was actually about a week after I bought the camera, I had a black and white darkroom, had somebody show me how to process the film. Anyway, I processed the film, and I printed a couple of pictures, showed them to a couple of friends. They said, “You should have taken that to the paper.”

And I said, “Okay. Maybe next time.” And then low and behold, something else happens, I get it, and I sold it to the paper, and here I am 35 years later.

Paul: Wow. So what is it? It’s 2017. So that would be…’83? Yeah. About ’83.

Al: Yeah. A little before ’83. Yeah.

Paul: So, alright. What in the world made you think, “Okay. I’m going to get a camera”?

Al: I’ve always been the photographer in the house, and the Polaroid Instant Cameras that we had and the little point-and-shoots. So everybody else would always cut everybody’s head off, and I always seemed to do it the right way. And I’ve always kind of been interested in cameras and taking pictures. So I’ve always been one for capturing that moment because it’s all about family and back then, it was about family. It should be all today too.

Paul: Okay, so it’s 1982, ’83, and you’re going to go out and buy a camera. What did you buy?

Al: A Yashica FX3.

Paul: Wow. See, now whenever you talk to photographers — just so you know. So if you’re out there listening, and you talk to a photographer, they know their equipment. They’ll always remember your first camera and so it was Yashica.

Al: FX3.

Paul: FX3. Did you buy a lot of lenses or just the one that came with it?

Al: I bought two lenses, a zoom, and a regular 50 millimeter.

Paul: So you were in… You were like, “Alright, I’m going to go and become a photographer.” At least a hobby. Right?

Al: Well, I intended it to be a hobby, but then after that first print got published, I had the bug, Basically, what I ended up doing was getting a scanner and putting it in my car. I had a portable scanner.

Paul: Oh, a police scanner.

Al: Police scanner.

Paul: Not a, not a photo scanner.

Al: Right, no. Well, we didn’t have them back then.

Paul: No, I know. I was just like, wow. That was early for a scanner. Okay. Go ahead.

Al: And, I’d go to sleep with it on. Something would happen, and I’d get up at 3:00 in the morning, 4:00 in the morning, and I’d get there, a bad accident or a fire or something. And the next day, I’d have the film processed and prints, and I’d take it down to the local paper.

Paul: Wow. So you were…I think the technical term was a stringer.

Working as a Freelance Photographer

Al: Well, I was a freelance photographer.

Paul: Freelance. Okay.

Al: Stringer came later on when I actually got picked up by United Press International.

Paul: Okay. So now you’re doing this. How many years were you doing it before you started…? You know, so you were freelance. Then you got picked up by UPI, and was there something between those?

Al: I was freelancing for a bunch of local papers. I actually expanded. I did the Summerville Journal, Medford This Week, Medford…what else? Cambridge Paper. And at times, depending on what I covered, The Globe and The Herald would buy my stuff. UPI picked me up after an incident in Melrose where there was a drowning of a young child, and he fell through the ice. And I happened to get there as they were bringing out two of the four and then they went looking for another one that actually ran home. And they didn’t know there was someone else in there. And then they basically said, “Let’s put the boat in,” and they found him, like about two minutes later. And I captured everything from them putting the boat in to finding him, putting him in the boat, and doing the CPR. The whole bit. And I happened to just take my film. I didn’t even process it. I took it down to The Herald, and then I believe, if I remember correctly, The Globe. And I went home.

And all of a sudden, I got a call from this guy from UPI saying, “We understand you have some photos of an incident.”

And I said, “Yeah.”

“Well, can you come in?”

And I did. And I started stringing for them ever since.

Paul: Oh, wow.

A Hands On Experience – Working for United Press International

Al: Yeah, and it was interesting because I felt like I was going to college but not going to college. I was getting the hands-on experience. I mean, I covered presidential races, the Jackson-Mondale races for president. I covered movie stars going to the Hasty Pudding, Sean Connery, Joan Rivers. I had spectacular photos of that. I covered the Celtics, the Bruins, the Red Sox, the Patriots. Every sporting event in Boston I did. You know, it was a lot of fun.

Paul: So now you did that for how long? I mean, you probably still do it occasionally, but when that was the main bread and butter of your business.

Al: Right. I mean, I was actually working a lot of hours for UPI, which I didn’t mind because I was learning the trade, and, like I said, it was like going to college, but I was actually doing the actual work without the books. I did it till ’86 when I got picked up by The Eagle Tribune. That happened was I put in an application, and they called me in for an interview. And I was still stringing, of course, for UPI. And, if you remember correctly, the riots in Lawrence was happening at the time. And the day before my interview I went and covered the riots up in Lawrence. And I took some great photos of an arrest and so forth, went back to UPI, and I reprinted them, and we put them on the wire.

But The Eagle Tribune was not a customer of UPI, but I had inserted a bunch of those photos that we used, took it with me to the interview along with my other pictures in my portfolio. The gentleman that interviewed me noticed the photos. He didn’t recognize where they were, and he said, “Do you mind if we use them?”

I said, “Absolutely not.” And the next day, I was hired.

Paul: Wow.

Al: Yeah. It was a surprise.

Darkrooms Before Computers

Paul: Okay. So you went from being injured, thinking about photography, buying a camera, starting to set up a darkroom. I mean, this is just such a different world, because now everybody’s got a darkroom in their computer.

Al: Right. And that is today’s darkroom. It’s harder now, to be honest with you.

Paul: Oh, definitely. But I’m just saying that you had to go out and buy chemicals. You had to buy enough enlarger. You had to buy the trays. You had to learn all about it. You had to get a darkroom. You know, so you were really committed to it. And, so it’s sort of, I mean… You know, back in those days, it was a commitment. You really became a photographer, and you sort of learned all these different things.

Al: It was actually easier to learn to be a photographer, back then than it is now.

Paul: Yeah, that’s probably true.

Al: You can actually set your mind to do it even today, but, you know, like for example, mixing chemicals. It was easy because your heart was in it. But you could pick it up a lot faster than you can do like, for example, Photoshop, unless you have a really big brain, and you’re really smart. You know, you can pick it up faster. But I find that Photoshop, at the beginning, was very difficult to maneuver and so forth. Even today, there is so much to it that, where do you start?

Printing, for example, locations in the photograph and the dodging and the burning, that was art because you could put your hands together, and you’d have a little hole that the light would go through, and you make it wider or lighter. The smell of the chemicals when you mixed it. It was just amazing.

Paul: Yeah.

Al: It was a different world.

Paul: It was. It was.

Al: Simpler.

Paul: Well, it was very simple. It was simple. There was a lot of depth to it, though. You could get very complicated. And I think a lot of that is lost in the new digital photography because you don’t appreciate what’s really going on. You don’t learn the actual, don’t want to say the physics of the situation. But, when you see that paper develop in the pool of developer, you know, in the tray…

Al: The image coming before your eyes.

Paul: The image coming up, you’re sort of like, “Oh, okay.” And then the dodging and burning. And it sort of teaches itself to you. Whereas with Photoshop, you just open it, and there’s a picture on the screen. Oh, is that good, or is that bad? And you don’t really get sucked in as much.

Al: Right. And what’s interesting is, though, that if you go from one screen to another, you’re going to get a different color, a different tone. Actually, it could be lighter or darker, and that confuses a lot of people. Where, when you see that photo come up, it’s either you did it the right way or you didn’t. And there’s no in between.

Paul: And we’re talking about black and white.

When Color Printing Became Popular

Paul: Did you ever do developing color printing?

Al: No because—

Paul: Without a machine?

Al: No. It was actually… And I don’t know if it was even possible to do it in the trays because—

Paul: No, you had to do it in a drum. Remember? I mean, Cibachrome? I don’t know if you remember that, but that the “easiest,” but it was just so… I remember, being a black-and-white photographer in the darkroom and you being so involved in the process. Color, you couldn’t see what was happening. And that really disappointed me. And then you’d sort of put it in this jar, you know, this big tube with the cover on it. You’d rock it back and forth. You’d dump that out, put the other stuff in, rock it back and… Well, it was like developing film.

And then you pull it out, and it looks terrible. It was like…huh. I remembered many times where I’d shoot something on the enlarger, expose it, and then develop it, and then pull it out and stop it.

Al: I remember when I was stringing for UPI. We were strictly a black and white printing in black and white. And the color was starting to get popular. And the AP was doing it.

Paul: Right USA Today came out, and it was starting to print in color.

Al: And of remember we were trying to get a really good color print. And at the beginning, it was very, very difficult that we almost gave up, but we couldn’t because our competition was doing it. Eventually, we mastered it and so forth, but it was a whole different world.

Camera Equipment Back In The Day

Al: Let’s go back to, for example, the equipment that we used. It was a manual focuses lenses. There were not auto-focus lenses. I had a very hard time giving up my manual focus. It took me a while.

Paul: Have you? Have you given it up?

Al: Yeah. I had no choice. Yeah.

Paul: Well, you know, I mean, it does work really well.

Al: It does. But it takes a little longer to focus where you go to a wedding now, you tend to want to do the job quickly. And today’s equipment is fantastic.

Al’s Photography Work

Paul: Right. So you’re United Press International. You go to the Lawrence Eagle Tribune. And then what? What was the next step in your career?

Al: Well, while I was stringing at UPI, I was also doing what ends I actually hooked up with a photographer out of Medford College. And he and I ran into each other when I was on assignment for a local newspaper. And he said, “You know, I need help, so could you come over?”

So I did. He interviewed me, and he sort of basically hired me on a freelance basis, but he was willing to train me as a wedding photographer, a studio photographer. And that’s where I learned how to be a really good wedding photographer and portrait photographer. I also ended up doing all his black and white printing. Back then, it was all black and white, and head-and-shoulder shots for banks or any companies his would do.

I remember one time he got a job for a company called You First. And it was a uniform company. They would pick up your uniforms, and they would clean them and take them back. So they hired him to do a photo of someone wearing a uniform. Half of it was really spotless, really clean. The other half was torn, greasy, and so forth. And I got to end up being the model.

Paul: Oh, really. Oh, wow.

Al: And they used it for many years. And what’s funny is that that company now is one of my customers at Advanced Photo. And they actually remember that photo.

Paul: Interesting.

Al: Yeah, so I was always, when I was freelancing for UPI as, as a stringer, I always kind of had my own little business on the side, doing photos for banks doing photos for doctors, the weddings, portraits, the sports photography. Also, I would, on my spare time, which was very little, would still do work for the local weekly newspapers.

A Freelance Photographer is an Entrepreneur

Paul: So now would you characterize yourself as an entrepreneur?

Al: I would think so.

Paul: I would think so. I mean, from what I know of you and knowing you always have that entrepreneurial edge, always thinking, “Hey, what about this?” Or, “What about this?”

Al: I’m always thinking.

Paul: Right. So now you’ve expanded. You’re working for Lawrence Eagle. You’re doing wedding pictures. You’re doing freelancing, and then what happened?

The Danger of Being a News Photographer

Al: While I was on assignment for the Eagle Tribune, I was covering this spot news and long story short, it turned out to be somebody, took their own life. And if I had known that, we wouldn’t have been there. But because of the secrecy that the cops ended up having, and the way they talk on the radio made you think that it was something serious.

So I took a reporter with me, and we went to the location. And, I get there, and I’m doing a few shots of the area, and we’re just waiting for the cops to come out so we could find out what was going on. But right next door, a family, these people, came out of the house, and apparently, there were family members of this person. And they didn’t like us being there. And all of a sudden, they just beat the you know what out of me. They really did a number on me, and the reporter was trying to get them away. And she actually got pushed around also. By the time the police came over, I was really bleeding and my back was really sore. And I ended up going to the hospital. And I was actually out of work for a long time. And I ended up getting a back operation because of it.

And with that free time, I decided, “You know what? I’ve always wanted to start a business,” so I decided to start a business.

Paul: Okay. Well not the recommended path to it necessarily. But, so what was that business?

Starting a Photography Business

Al: You know, a friend of mine owned a photo store in Methuen called Advance Photo, and I liked what he did. I liked the way he printed the photos. He had a one-hour photo, so he printed photos for people. He really loved it. People really liked the results, and I was thinking, “You know what? This could be me, but I want to do a little bit more.”

So before I opened up, I actually had a little portrait studio in his place. I learned how to use the machines, and about a year later, I opened up Advanced Photo in North Reading.

Al: When was that?

Al: 1992. March 4th.

Paul: Wow!

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You’ve been listening to part 1 of our interview with Al Pereira! Be sure to listen to Part 2 here!


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