We were lucky to catch up with Brian Parillo recently and have shared our conversation below.

Brian, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Quality control is a challenge almost every entrepreneur has had to focus on when growing – any advice, stories or insight around how to best ensure quality is maintained as your business scales?

There are only two things in life I have control over, my effort and my attitude. I look at my job as a service in a literal sense. I’m here to serve the individual’s needs that I’m working with. That’s important. Creative people often feel like they’re too cool for that and often have an attitude. People with that attitude always struggle and make excuses as to why they are not successful. In my experience, lack of effort and attitude only have negative results. I’m humbled by the work I get to do and I remind myself of that often. I want people to leave knowing that they were looked after. I also hope that they had a lot of fun. Creativity and results are extremely important but how people feel when they leave is everything.
The best advice I’d give to another photographer is to be prepared. Prepare your clients ahead of time. Send very thorough emails with notes about clothes, hair, makeup. Let clients know what works and what doesn’t. There are a lot of variables at play, so the more prepared everyone is, the better.

Brian, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am a Los Angeles based headshot photographer. I’ve had my business for over 15 years. I came into it through commercial casting. I was a session director for casting directors for about 5 years. Session directors do exactly what the name says. You direct casting sessions by explaining to actors what they have to do in a scene and then you put them on camera. Eventually I became a casting director myself but decided to move on because my heart wasn’t in it. However that period of time was extremely valuable to me as it gave me an incredible view of the industry. Directing casting sessions really taught me how to work with actors, another benefit was the amount of time I spent looking at headshots.

When you’re casting a project you look at thousands of headshots a day. You view them online and they are thumb nail sized images. It becomes very clear which ones stand out. This experience was definitely an advantage in my career as a headshot photographer.

Once I started shooting headshots full time my life changed dramatically, mostly because I truly love doing this. I would say I have a healthy obsession with it. I put everything I have into it and I enjoy all aspects of a photoshoot. I am emotionally attached to the end result of a shoot so while I’m shooting I need to be wowed by what’s happening. If I’m not, then I work until I get to that place. Because I have been doing this for so many years, I am able to compose images that showcase my clients in various looks fairly quickly. My clients feel very comfortable knowing how much I care about the quality of their images.

At the end of a shoot, my clients tell me how easy, fun, and painless their experience was. I put people in such a winning scenario. There are a few ingredients in a successful shoot. Firstly, I shoot with natural light and over the years I have learned how to use that light to create extremely flattering images. Secondly I work with incredible hair and makeup people that I’ve been working with for years. They are very positive minded people who also care deeply about what they do. We create an open and fun collaborative experience that feels like play time while I keep my eye on making sure we’re accomplishing the actors goals. I think that is what I’m most proud of. I’m happy that I was able to build a safe creative working space where people leave feeling really good their shoot. Having your photo taken can be very stressful. My team creates a relaxed environment and that results in incredible images.

I’m not in this to click some shots and get someone out the door. Many of my previous clients have told me that their headshots have changed their careers and gotten them auditioning more. That truly is everything.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Like anything, when you’re starting out you have to pay your dues. I understood that I couldn’t succeed in this business unless I had a proper photography studio. In the very beginning I was doing what most photographers do when they’re starting…shooting outdoors. It’s a great way to learn and understand the difference between good natural light and bad natural light. However, it is not a long term solution.

There was no way to deliver consistent results that way. So I had saved a bit of money and I found a studio that I loved. I signed a lease and had no idea how I would float it. I had no other job and my business hadn’t taken off. I put myself in a position where I had to survive. About three months into my lease, I did the math and realized I couldn’t afford it and had to find a second job.

I picked one of the hardest physical jobs imaginable. I worked as a manual laborer in house retro fitting, securing a house to a foundation for earthquake preparedness. It required crawling underneath homes in very narrow crawl spaces with a light on your head, a bin of your tools, and then bolting the foundation to the house. Needless to say it was exhausting and because I got into photography later in life, I wasn’t young doing this job. I worked form 6am until 2pm 5 to 6 days a week while trying to schedule shoots on the weekends. At the 6th month work started pouring in. Around that time Interior Design magazine had also purchased a fine art image of mine for quite a lot of money. So now I was in a very comfortable position to leave the construction job and fully concentrate on my headshot business. The construction job left me with a case of tendinitis but nothing that ibuprofen and physical therapy couldn’t handle. I was proud of myself and have never taken my work for granted since.

It’s a privilege to work creatively for yourself and it’s a process getting there and maintaining it. You have to put the work in and strive to be the best at what you do. I don’t have much sympathy for people who don’t work hard on their craft and find that it’s usually insecurity because they can’t do something well. My thought has always been that if there’s an aspect of your creativity that you’re not good at, then work at it until you are. Most people don’t and they wind up creating excuses for their incompetence. It’s much easier than doing the work to get better. The learning never ends.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

I think people are truly at their happiest when they are creative. Creating is good for our spirits. Choose something that you love. Choose something that you must do. I think there’s an itch in all of us to express ourselves. Finding a vessel for that creativity isn’t easy and even harder to make a living at, but it’s more than possible I believe if you chose something that you just can’t live without. You can probably succeed on some middle level if you put enough time in but I think to go to a higher level love has to be involved. I also think as you get older and you’ve been in your career for a while you have to treat your creativity like a relationship by finding new ways to fall in love again. It takes work. I think there are two types of artists in life: there are daydreamers/introverts who can channel that quality creatively at times and there are very proactive/extroverted creative people. Dreaming is a must but you won’t get very far without moving your body towards a goal. I’m actually more of a dreamer and I have to force the other side of myself. In the end it’s worth it to me. It’s nice to make money but there is nothing more rewarding than getting to play for a living and loving what you do. It may sound corny, but the absolute best part of doing what I do is seeing how happy it makes people.    

Contact Info:

• Website: www.brianparillophotography.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brianparillophotography/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brian.parillo.7

Image Credits
All images taken by Brian Parillo Photography