0:00:00.0 ANNOUNCER: The financial views and opinions expressed by the host and guests on this program do not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of 107.7 The Bronc, Rider University or Certified Wealth Management and Investment. The material discussed is not designed to provide the listeners with individual financial legal or tax advice.
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0:00:25.6 ANNOUNCER: It’s time to grow your bank as 107.7 The Bronc presents Master Your Finances with Kurt Baker. A certified financial planner professional with certified wealth management and investment. Kurt and his team of financial guests will help you turn those singles into seas of green and plan your financial future, accordingly. Now here’s your money managing host for the hour, Kurt Baker.
0:00:49.0 Kurt Baker: Are you aware of the importance of a great headshot in your business and corporate life? High quality headshot photos serve as windows through which potential investors and employers can examine not only your company, but also you. These are the first places where your brand can make an impression. Did you know that corporates headshots are critical for presenting the best possible image for you and your company on various social media platforms like LinkedIn. Jack Turkel, an award-winning expert in photography and one of the most in demand photographers is here to talk about how important it is to put your best face forward. Get rid of those old photos and send the right energy out with images, you’ll be excited to share. All right, Jack, Jack Turkel, right?
0:01:37.8 Jack Turkel: Yep.
0:01:38.6 Kurt Baker: That’s it. Got it right.
[laughter]
0:01:39.9 Kurt Baker: All right. Good. Well, man, this is awesome. I know we met at an event, and I know you’ve got a little bit of a history behind how you got into this. So if you don’t mind giving us… ‘Cause you’ve got quite an experience level here. So, before you kind of went out on your own and doing it direct for us.
0:01:53.7 Jack Turkel: Well, it all started back in the ’40s, no. [chuckle]
0:01:55.9 Kurt Baker: Back in the ’40s and you had a…
0:01:57.8 Jack Turkel: No, no.
0:01:58.0 Kurt Baker: You had a little hood over, you threw the thing over your head and…
0:02:00.2 Jack Turkel: Yeah, actually, yeah, I did start with the old view cameras with the cloth over my head. Definitely.
0:02:05.5 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:02:05.9 Jack Turkel: It literally started when I found an old 35 millimeter camera in my high school guidance counselor’s office, and I just took to it immediately.
0:02:14.2 Kurt Baker: Wow.
0:02:14.4 Jack Turkel: And she let me borrow it, and I found this initial attraction to finding things that are just not normally seen by just walking around, just taking those moments to see things in a different way. And I started taking pictures and ended up becoming the photographer for the yearbook.
0:02:34.0 Kurt Baker: Oh, there you go. That’s a good start, right?
0:02:34.8 Jack Turkel: And took telecommunications and video and photography in college, and then ended up getting a job at a studio in Princeton, and was there for many, many, many years. Worked in the lab and worked up into the photography studio and ended up managing the studio. And it was in Princeton, so I did a lot of work for Princeton University and a lot of corporations around the Princeton area. So that was the basic start. And ended up going into different other audio visual companies for a couple years here or there, and then landed my biggest job as the manager of the photography studio at Bristol Myers Squibb.
0:03:11.7 Kurt Baker: There you go.
0:03:12.8 Jack Turkel: And that was for a while too, and that’s where I made a lot of connections and I’ve really finetuned everything that I’ve taught myself and learned along the way. I traveled the country, photographing people and CEOs and drug launches and everything else that goes along with it. So that was my main thing into it. And then this was up until the mid 2000s, 2007, I think. And there was… There was one of those times where major companies were just kind of literally getting rid of all departments. So, I found myself on the chopping block along with 80% of the staff of the creative department. And it ended up leading me into deciding, you know what? I’m doing my own thing.
0:03:57.3 Kurt Baker: Oh, that’s good. Yeah. And I’m feeling you right there. My wife used to work at Merrill Lynch and it was like yoh yoh, they insource, they outsource, they insource, they outsource. So is as if you were in one of those like…
0:04:04.6 Jack Turkel: Oh yeah, yeah back…
0:04:04.9 Kurt Baker: Time to try to outsource all of this good stuff.
0:04:06.8 Jack Turkel: Oh.
0:04:07.2 Kurt Baker: Now, I remember, I’ve seen one photo you have at your home, which was really cool because I grew up in the space program.
0:04:12.7 Jack Turkel: Yes, we’ve talked about that. Yes.
0:04:14.2 Kurt Baker: Yeah, can you tell us a little bit about that photo ’cause that’s a well known photo of you standing there on the… Where the crawler is for the… Remember?
0:04:24.2 Jack Turkel: I’m not sure which one.
0:04:24.7 Kurt Baker: Where all the photographers are standing there.
0:04:25.7 Jack Turkel: Oh, the photo… Yeah. On the last launch of the space shuttle.
0:04:29.3 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:04:29.4 Jack Turkel: And I managed to be part of a group of people that were there for the last launch as part of the press photographer. And we were at the perimeter of the launchpad. There’s a specific area around the launchpad. And I ended up being there with about a dozen other photographers. I’m talking National Geographics, New York Times, everything. And here I am in the middle of this, like pinching myself, taking my pictures. And I noticed another photographer that went down the hill and took a picture of this line of photographers, taking a picture of the shuttle. And I saw it in… I don’t know if it was National Geographics or where I saw it, but I’m like, “Oh my God.” And I’m like, “There’s me.” [laughter] So there’s this interesting historical photo of this last launch of the photographers lined up, and there I am.
0:05:15.7 Kurt Baker: That’s really cool though, that the photographers were getting photographed.
0:05:18.4 Jack Turkel: Yeah, yeah.
0:05:18.7 Kurt Baker: Photographs of the last launch of the shuttle. And that’s cool ’cause then most people that would recognize… They don’t think of… They can’t remember now they would definitely recognize what they saw it. ‘Cause it’s been everywhere, this photo.
0:05:27.2 Jack Turkel: Yeah, yeah.
0:05:27.4 Kurt Baker: It was just really cool.
0:05:28.8 Jack Turkel: I know. I actually got in touch with the photographer and we had a nice conversation about it too. Yeah. That was great. I love doing that sort of thing when I stuck my… I got involved in doing that and going for launches and being part of that. Grew and grow up… I grew up in the space age.
0:05:42.5 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:05:42.7 Jack Turkel: I grew up the year NASA was formed. So yeah, that was…
0:05:48.2 Kurt Baker: That is cool. So you got quite a diverse background as far as how you got into this. So then you… So I know you got all kinds of great stories and I’m sure you’ll tell us about your career. So kind of tell us then once you left BMS, then you said, “Okay, what next?” You go.
0:06:03.6 Jack Turkel: Yeah.
0:06:03.8 Kurt Baker: I wanna assume like, “Okay, well, I know I have this talent, now what?”
0:06:06.3 Jack Turkel: Well, I had a large family room that I was gonna be reclaiming because my son was moving out and I’m like, “I don’t need this family room anymore.” So I basically… It was a whole addition and I ended up converting it into a full-fledged studio with what would’ve been a dark room, but didn’t need one because we were all going digital.
0:06:25.9 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:06:26.1 Jack Turkel: And it became what is now Jack Jay Digital, which is the name of my studio company. And so yeah, it’s filled with equipment and I do pretty much everything I do there except for when I go on location. And it’s suiting me perfectly for what I need to do. I don’t do gigantic shoots, I do kinda commercial stuff which it can fit in the studio.
0:06:51.4 Kurt Baker: Okay. So now you got your studio set up, what happened next? So you… No dark room, but you have a studio.
0:06:57.5 Jack Turkel: I have a studio. And now was just a matter of… Like any small business, it’s financially getting the equipment that I need, financially backing up what I needed to get to get it started, finding clients, using the names that I knew from the people that I’ve worked with in the past. And I got a decent handful of large clients because not only did I do photography back then when I first started, I was doing a lot of graphic design and a lot of PowerPoint presentation. ‘Cause I used to do, and I still do to this point, very high-end PowerPoint presentations for corporate use that uses animations and sound effects and everything that can go into it and so there’s always a clientele that I was able to do that for. For either other pharmaceutical companies or local companies, it just… That opened the door to keep the money coming in and then it…
0:07:49.2 Kurt Baker: So revenue first obviously. And so you gotta buy some equipment, you get the revenue coming in so that’s good. So you ended up deciding to really narrow and focus in as a specialty, the headshot, so…
0:08:02.2 Jack Turkel: Right.
0:08:02.6 Kurt Baker: I mean, most of us are like, “Eh, I mean, I need a headshot,” then you begrudgingly go get one somewhere, have somebody take literally a passport photo kinda thing. [chuckle] Let’s just put it up there or they had one down at the beach, having a good time with the family and they put that on their LinkedIn page. So you wanna tell us a little bit about why it’s important and then why some of the things that are out there aren’t necessarily gonna work in their best interest?
0:08:25.0 Jack Turkel: Well, I mean I had done literally hundreds and hundreds of portraits when I was working in corporate. And portrait, they can be well lit and nice, but there’s something missing. It’s just that it can be very generic, it can be technically good but there is always something missing because there’s not a lot of other things that go into making it you, it’s just a very generic, clean portrait. And for most people that can be fine. The headshot is more of a personal connection to not what you look like but who you are and your persona and working at the shot to allow you to come across in the way you wanna come across and do you wanna show… You wanna be authentic and you wanna show this sense of approachability and a strong feeling as well. It depends on what you’re trying to show to your clients. So there’s a very particular style that I’ve learned through the crew that I work with and a very specific type of lighting and a process from start to finish that gets you shots, that as one of my taglines says, “Will allow you to see yourself for the first time.”
0:09:46.9 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:09:47.8 Jack Turkel: Because it does. I work at it to the point where when we’re done with the shoot, there’s a review process and we narrow it down to the specific things that I help fine-tune through what I call expression coaching.
0:10:02.7 Kurt Baker: Expression coaching, okay.
0:10:04.1 Jack Turkel: There’s a very specific type of coaching that allows for a different type of attitude to emanate in the picture and the posture and a smile. There’s no more say cheese, click 10 times and see ya later, this is, “I wanna get to know the person, I wanna get to understand what is it that they want to show in this image.” And it’s so far, so good.
0:10:28.1 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:10:28.6 Jack Turkel: I haven’t had one complaint yet about any photograph, so…
0:10:30.4 Kurt Baker: That’s good. No, you do a great job. I know when we had coffee one morning and I come back, I look at your studio and next thing I know you’re taking my photo.
[laughter]
0:10:39.0 Jack Turkel: Of course.
0:10:39.8 Kurt Baker: Like wait, what just happened? That’s like it.
0:10:41.6 Jack Turkel: I know. I take my opportunities when I can, sure.
0:10:45.1 Kurt Baker: No, you did a great job. ‘Cause I know you spent some time on that really trying to set some up and I know it’s really important. So maybe you could take us through some of those steps. So we’re about take a quick break, but some of the steps like how to really kinda narrow it down to what kind of a photo you might want in the different types of professions, different types of people and what kind of image they may wanna portray. You’re listening to Master Your Finances, we will be right back.
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0:11:12.1 ANNOUNCER: Yeah, you’ve got loads of money but it’s all about how you manage it. Let’s get back to learning how to grow your green with Kurt Baker of Certified Wealth Management and Investment only on Master Your Finances.
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0:11:25.8 Kurt Baker: Welcome back, you’re listening to Master Your Finances. I am here with Jack Turkel and we’re talking photography and you have a very particular style, I guess first of all most people don’t realise the importance of having a proper headshot done especially when you’re trying to promote yourself. And all of us are a little bit different. Right? So I’m a private wealth manager, that’s one person but if I own… I don’t know. If I’m a hockey coach or something, I mean that’s a whole totally different persona necessarily, I mean I don’t know. But there’s gonna be a different image based on what you do and what you’re personally trying to… So I guess you have the profession and then I guess you have the individual, ’cause we’re all different, right? In my profession, we’re all a little bit different, we all have different personalities. And so how do you kinda walk through that? ‘Cause you mentioned things like the review process and then expression coaching and things like that. So what actually is that and how do you do it?
0:12:16.1 Jack Turkel: Well, the process starts as soon as they come into my studio. I have a gallery next to the studio so they can see my fine art stuff, we start a conversation, I wanna talk about what they do, what they’re trying to accomplish. My goal initially is just to sit down and have a friendly conversation and understand what is exactly that you need this photograph for and what is it that you’re gonna need to do with it. Once I have that in mind, we sit in the studio for a little bit, I explain the process and then we start shooting.
0:12:49.3 Jack Turkel: And technically it’s very specific because I have… Like I said, I have a very specific lighting set up, but I have a large screen monitor that is connected to my laptop and the laptop is tethered to my camera. So as I’m setting up the lighting and as I’m explaining to whoever’s in front of the lighting what to do, I’m seeing exactly what’s happening and I’m making adjustments on the fly, the person is seeing the final shots as it’s popping up on the screen if they want to, and I’m looking at the shots beforehand. And I’m able to zoom in and see, “Is there enough light in the eyes? Is the shadows falling in the right place? Are the collars on both sides even? Is the collar gap right? Is the chin properly positioned?” I have a list of things that I have to go through to keep this consistent quality going. So I’ll do that list and I’m watching it on the screen as I’m doing it, and I’m making my minor adjustments. And then when I’m ready to go, I will say. “Hey, we’re ready. I’m happy with what I… Where we are.” And then the shooting starts.
0:14:00.3 Kurt Baker: You bring up an interesting point. When I take photos… Somebody taught me this a long, long time ago. I think you actually pointed out to me when we did this. It’s like when you do… When you’re looking forward, it’s like you bring your head like straight forward and it feels really weird.
0:14:12.4 Jack Turkel: It feels weird.
0:14:13.3 Kurt Baker: But it fixes like your chin, right?
0:14:14.8 Jack Turkel: Yeah, it cleans up your chin…
0:14:16.4 Kurt Baker: ‘Cause I got a little older, so I got all this extra stuff going on…
[laughter]
0:14:18.4 Jack Turkel: Yeah, I know I do too. I know, I know. So I…
0:14:21.5 Kurt Baker: Producer is laughing. She’s much less younger than us.
[laughter]
0:14:24.0 Kurt Baker: Hey Danielle.
0:14:25.8 Jack Turkel: That’s part of my…
0:14:26.7 Kurt Baker: So, I know what you’re talking about.
0:14:27.8 Jack Turkel: That’s part of my posture coaching, if you will. Is making sure… There is this another thing to do, it’s called the, holding the hoagie, or another word…
0:14:37.9 Kurt Baker: Holding the hoagie?
0:14:38.7 Jack Turkel: Or holding the sub sandwich. It’s basically, you’re standing in front of the camera and you’re holding your hands out to the side like this as if you’re holding a bit long sandwich.
0:14:48.0 Kurt Baker: Okay. And what does that do?
0:14:50.1 Jack Turkel: What it does is it separates your shoulders more and it gives you a posture. More of a… It’s more of a posture thing.
0:14:54.0 Kurt Baker: Oh, so we say like, hold $100 bill between your shoulder blades kind of thing? That’s what they tell us at the gym.
0:14:58.3 Jack Turkel: Yeah, well not… You don’t want that… Yeah it’s the same concept. You wanna just hold yourself straight, and…
0:15:03.9 Kurt Baker: ‘Cause most of us slouch, unfortunately.
0:15:05.5 Jack Turkel: Most of us slouch.
0:15:06.7 Kurt Baker: Yeah.
0:15:07.7 Jack Turkel: And the angle is important, and if one of the things that I’ve learned over the times that I do this, when I get my shots looked at by other photographers as we inspect each other’s images to help each other, is…
0:15:23.2 Kurt Baker: That’s great.
0:15:24.0 Jack Turkel: Oh yeah, yeah, we do this all the time, at least once a week, we get together and we have a critique.
0:15:28.9 Kurt Baker: Okay, that’s gotta be brutal when have your peers critiquing you.
0:15:32.2 Jack Turkel: It can be. Oh yeah.
0:15:33.4 Kurt Baker: ‘Cause they know what to look for, right?
0:15:34.6 Jack Turkel: Yeah, we know exactly. But it’s incredible, man, the knowledge that you learn and it helps… And I’m not afraid to keep learning how to keep perfecting this.
0:15:42.5 Kurt Baker: Oh, absolutely.
0:15:43.6 Jack Turkel: So, I get all this information, and it just… It helps along the way to just keep perfecting it. But all this posture and the lighting it’s… I know what to look for, and I go for it. And then we keep shooting and until we’re both satisfied, I always suggest having at least two different changes of clothing for men, a short attire or jacket, so we can try different things. I usually do a white or grey background and keep it clean for most corporate portfolio… Profiles rather, you want it clean. And then we’re seeing everything as it’s shot and I’ll work and keep shooting until I get… And I can shoot 100 shots and there could be 20 that are worth holding on to. And then the person decides, “Well, how many of these do I need as a final… In the final purchase.” And they can buy one, they can buy 20, it depends on how many different uses they need for. I always suggest more than one because there’s gonna be different expressions.
0:16:47.9 Jack Turkel: Some of them are gonna have more of an approachable feelings, some of them are gonna have more of a corporate kind of feel to it. You wanna have a couple that trade-off. And then after everything is said and done, we go to another monitor, I take the same laptop, I connect it to another monitor. And through a specific program that I use, we look through every single shot. And it’s easy to just cancel out the ones that are obviously not good, not every shot is gonna be obviously perfect. So we delete the ones obviously with their eyes closed and/or the expression isn’t right. And we just keep narrowing it down and you’re part of that process. I will certainly let you know what I think is best. I’ve been doing this so many years and I can very easily pick out the best shots, and it’s 99% of the time it’s the client agrees with me.
0:17:37.3 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:17:38.1 Jack Turkel: But I want the person whoever I’m photographing to be part of that decision.
0:17:42.3 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:17:42.6 Jack Turkel: And then there were those that are chosen and the ones that are purchased are then taken up to my other office and brought into other programs and then I retouch them to perfection. Not over.
0:17:53.9 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:17:54.7 Jack Turkel: You can over re-touch. The quality of the image is good enough where there is not a crazy amount of retouching to do. There’s basic little here, there. There’s certain things that I do to kinda brighten parts of the face and to obviously minimize… I don’t take away, let’s say people that have lines or wrinkles, but I soften them.
0:18:16.7 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:18:17.1 Jack Turkel: Any blemishes that need to be removed… But I always ask the person, do you want these to be there? Is this part of who you want to see in your image? And if they want them there, of course, I go by their wishes. But there’s always a softening, a general softening and cleaning up of just things that just have a certain quality of colour theory and light. It’s very important to get the colour right, because if the colour is not right, you can have a great shot and the colour’s off. So the skin tone is very important.
0:18:47.0 Kurt Baker: Is it more difficult? I know you’ve done both film and digital photography, so I know some things. I remember when my wife switched, she was… She was doing it in school, she did photography with a regular camera, film and then it was a little bit of a transition when you do digital, isn’t it different, like what you see when you’re looking at the film as opposed to like the digital… I don’t know. It just seemed like it was… It would look differently to me, at least.
0:19:11.8 Jack Turkel: I mean film has a certain quality to it. Digital is better in certain ways. And…
0:19:18.2 Kurt Baker: Right.
[overlapping conversation]
0:19:18.4 Kurt Baker: So what are some of the pro’s and cons I guess?
0:19:21.0 Jack Turkel: Well, digital, obviously, the biggest pro is you’re bringing it in into a program that allows you to change it in any way you want.
0:19:28.4 Kurt Baker: Okay. Right.
0:19:28.8 Jack Turkel: If the colour’s off, or if sometimes… I’ve had clients where their skin tone is different. It’s like their cheeks are redder, and their chin is redder, or they got a little blotchiness of skin tone.
0:19:43.3 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:19:43.8 Jack Turkel: It’s my job to even that out.
0:19:45.7 Kurt Baker: Right, right.
0:19:47.1 Jack Turkel: If they agree to that.
0:19:47.5 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:19:48.3 Jack Turkel: And you can… That’s something you do in digital. I can pin point a specific… Very specific colour in the skin and isolate that and then remove that and leave everything else alone.
0:20:02.1 Kurt Baker: Interesting.
0:20:02.5 Jack Turkel: It’s a lot… It can be a lot of work. And you have to how to do that. And then certain ways that certain areas are brightened and emphasized in a way that just cleans it up and makes it just jump out at you.
0:20:18.5 Kurt Baker: Yeah.
0:20:19.1 Jack Turkel: And in film you would have to scan it in and then work digitally.
0:20:24.2 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:20:25.6 Jack Turkel: You can have that option, but yeah. Once I went to digital, it was like…
0:20:32.0 Kurt Baker: ‘Cause the resolutions are pretty high now, right?
0:20:33.8 Jack Turkel: Oh gosh yeah.
0:20:33.9 Kurt Baker: ‘Cause I know we’ve originally went to digital, it’s kind of like, they were inferior to the film because the film was like, it’s a film.
0:20:40.7 Jack Turkel: Oh it’s digital now? Yeah, I’ve already made your head shot into a billboard already, so [laughter]
0:20:43.8 Kurt Baker: Oh no. Oh my gosh.
0:20:45.7 Jack Turkel: No it but can. I can easily take one of my shots and .
0:20:49.2 Kurt Baker: I just have flash of “I Love You, Man”. Did you see that moving?
[laughter]
0:20:51.7 Kurt Baker: “I Love You, Man” on the billboard? It’s like, “Oh my god, what’d you do to me?”. [laughter]
0:20:56.5 Jack Turkel: No. It’s the… And the thing is you don’t need the resolution. Yes, resolution, is important but 90% of the time, these headshots are gonna be fairly small. Like a LinkedIn profile.
0:21:04.6 Kurt Baker: And then constantly have to downsize the pixel size ’cause it won’t fit. It’s like…
0:21:08.1 Jack Turkel: Yeah, you got to… I mean the stuff that I shoot…
0:21:08.3 Kurt Baker: 100 by 100 pixels. Well this thing is like a 73 meg file. It’s not gonna work.
0:21:16.6 Jack Turkel: Yeah, I know, I know. Out of camera, my image is 60 Megs.
0:21:18.5 Kurt Baker: There you go, that is a huge for a start.
0:21:20.8 Jack Turkel: And as a JPEG, if you know what that is. A JPEG is maybe five megs and that’s crazy big.
0:21:26.8 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:21:27.3 Jack Turkel: And nobody needs that resolution unless you’re making huge prints, but the quality, you have to start with good quality. It’s a starting point and then you just downsize it to whatever is needed. A certain crop. I always give several crops there’s a vertical crop, a square crop, if they need it.
0:21:45.2 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:21:45.6 Jack Turkel: And a certain stylistic type of crop that I’ve used from the group that I work with, that cuts off… And people think that’s kind of weird, cuts off the top of the head. But when you see it, you understand.
0:21:56.3 Kurt Baker: I have seen that before.
0:21:58.3 Jack Turkel: You understand, yeah. For some people it works. It depends on what it is you’re using it for.
0:22:01.3 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:22:02.1 Jack Turkel: It’s just… A headshot is focused on your face and your head. You don’t want too much below the collar, you don’t want too much above the collar… I always give that option.
0:22:10.4 Kurt Baker: You more the face, right. The actual face.
0:22:12.1 Jack Turkel: It’s all about the face. It’s all about that expression and face.
0:22:17.6 Kurt Baker: That’s awesome. Alright, man, you’re listening to Master Your Finances, we’re gonna a quick break.
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0:22:21.9 ANNOUNCER: We’re not just doing this for money, we’re doing it for a shit load of money.
0:22:26.6 ANNOUNCER: If you want to learn how to make and manage that kind of money, turn your volume up as we get back to Master your Finances with Kurt Baker of certified wealth management and investment.
0:22:37.9 Kurt Baker: Welcome back. You’re listening to Master Your Finances. I’m here with a Jack Turkel. And we’re talking head shots, which honestly, it was one of those things that I knew I should be doing, but didn’t do until somebody said, “Hey, go down here, get a headshot done.” Right, and first, I didn’t really even know where to go, frankly, which is interesting. I didn’t realize that people actually specialize in this, which was kind of cool. And this is going back a long time let’s just say. I won’t give you the dates.
[laughter]
0:23:02.6 Kurt Baker: Let’s just say it’s a while, because as we got on social media, and as you got on the internet and all this other good stuff for those that remember pre-internet, it started to become more and more important to get this thing on there. So now I know you get these large photos, I know you have to make them different sizes, so you do the different parameters, like tall and square and all those things. But there’s also different pixel sizes based on where you’re gonna post it. If it’s on your little Facebook what?
0:23:29.7 Jack Turkel: Profile.
0:23:31.0 Kurt Baker: Profile thing, It’s tiny. This thing is push down way tiny. Other things can be a little bigger like if we are to send it to a printer, they probably want a little bit bigger file ’cause they’re gonna put it on a machine, if it’s a large enough photo.
0:23:42.2 Jack Turkel: Right. If that’s…
0:23:42.9 Kurt Baker: If you’re gonna do like you said, the billboard.
[laughter]
0:23:45.4 Kurt Baker: Billboard might need a little bit higher resolution, than your profile picture on social media.
0:23:50.9 Jack Turkel: Well any good professional camera is gonna have 20,30,40 mega pixels, and that’s more than enough for almost anything.
0:23:57.6 Kurt Baker: So you can hold on to those and have the different sizes. Which is kind of cool.
0:24:00.4 Jack Turkel: Yeah, yeah. I hold on to the master’s high res… The client never… I never send the high res. If they request it, I certainly give that to them. But the high res…
0:24:11.3 Kurt Baker: Most of them don’t need it.
0:24:11.7 Jack Turkel: Is way more than anyone actually needs. Because a screen on a computer screen, it’s 72 DPI. As opposed to 300, which is what a high res would be.
0:24:21.6 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:24:22.0 Jack Turkel: You’re not even seeing it on the screen, so you don’t need that. So you have to compress it in a certain way that holds that quality, but doesn’t need all of the pixels.
0:24:32.2 Kurt Baker: Okay, cool, this sounds like the old vector versus… I remember learning that there’re different kind of formats like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe how many there are.” so it’s kind of cool. We won’t get into that. We won’t get into.
0:24:42.9 Jack Turkel: Yeah, no, no, that’s a whole different show.
0:24:43.9 Kurt Baker: I know you do other things as well, ’cause you got this long history. So obviously we know that head shots are really important, getting it professionally done, getting it correctly done to basically show who you are in whatever context you want that to be. Whether you’re a certain profession, an attorney or whatever, or if you’re something else, maybe you’re… I don’t know, maybe you do a comedy stand-up comedy or something. You have different personas you wanna put out there right?
0:25:07.4 Jack Turkel: Well, real estate is a big thing because I’ll get…
0:25:10.3 Kurt Baker: There you go, it’s huge.
0:25:10.7 Jack Turkel: The local newspaper for my town, there’s always big spreads, of…
0:25:16.1 Kurt Baker: That’s huge.
0:25:16.3 Jack Turkel: The page that has a specific real estate company, and there’s like 20 realtors, with their pictures on it. And they’re all over the place. Some of them are selfies, some of them are regular nice portraits that are sufficient for what they think they need, but there’s no consistency, and some of them is just… I would never use. So…
0:25:38.8 Jack Turkel: Part of my job is to try to find people who can use the consistency of that sort of thing, where you can have, five, 10, 15, 20 people and they all have that same quality look.
0:25:51.2 Kurt Baker: Yeah, you would think a real estate office would be interested in having their…
0:25:54.2 Jack Turkel: You would think. Yeah.
0:25:54.7 Kurt Baker: Each of the…
0:25:55.0 Jack Turkel: Yeah, yeah.
0:25:55.7 Kurt Baker: Of course some of them are kind of quote “self-employed” because, so they kind of just work there, but it’s…
0:26:00.1 Jack Turkel: Right, exactly.
0:26:00.5 Kurt Baker: It does this relationship they have going on, but it would be nice to at least encourage a similar format, so the photo… And the other thing I’ve noticed, frankly, and I’m sure this is in every profession, but but realtors in particular I don’t know why. It seems like when sometimes you meet them, the photo is very out of date, let’s say.
0:26:14.2 Jack Turkel: Yeah. Yeah.
0:26:15.3 Kurt Baker: I’m like…
0:26:16.0 Jack Turkel: I have to convince people.
0:26:16.9 Kurt Baker: Guys that doesn’t really help you by having something that’s not actually accurate, because if somebody doesn’t literally can’t recognize you easily from your photo, you probably want to update. And you can do it in a way that’s nice, we all do age so we have to like, that’s the life. But I think it’s more appropriate to match closer to who you are and whatever image you wanna portray and keep them up to date. So how often should somebody think about, like, I have a photo, I don’t know I think mine is four or five years old now, right? So at what point do you say, okay, probably time to update the photo.
0:26:53.1 Jack Turkel: I generally go by, you don’t wanna go any more than five years. Okay.
0:26:57.4 Kurt Baker: So five years is kind of the timeline.
0:26:58.1 Jack Turkel: Five years is the absolute max.
0:27:00.0 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:27:00.1 Jack Turkel: I usually tell people to revisit their profile pictures every… At least every two years.
0:27:08.2 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:27:08.8 Jack Turkel: Because your job may change, you end up wanting something different anyway.
0:27:13.1 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:27:14.1 Jack Turkel: You don’t wanna have this… People even make this subconscious note about, oh it’s the same picture that’s been up there for years.
0:27:20.9 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:27:21.1 Jack Turkel: What does this person look like now.
0:27:23.1 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:27:23.5 Jack Turkel: They wanna know the authentic person.
0:27:25.7 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:27:27.1 Jack Turkel: So you wanna revisit it, again, once a year I’d say just revisit it and say and ask yourself, “What do I need to kind of represent myself in a different way? Do I need this picture to be improved?” Because we all even get tired with the wrong picture.
0:27:42.0 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:27:42.4 Jack Turkel: When you get a really good one then you may wanna stay with it a little longer.
0:27:47.1 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:27:47.2 Jack Turkel: So, yeah. Yeah. It’s yeah. I’ve had people, and even in people who come to… I’ve had people that come to me that want their picture, a headshot for a dating website, and that becomes an important thing too, you wanna show your best self.
0:28:01.4 Kurt Baker: Right. It’s like the peacock, you wanna show the best feathers, right?
0:28:03.4 Jack Turkel: Exactly. It’s like, yeah. So many.
0:28:06.0 Kurt Baker: You gotta look good. [laughter]
0:28:07.4 Jack Turkel: Like I have this one client that’s gonna be coming in next week that’s she’s a realtor and her picture is like her standing next to her car.
0:28:19.0 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:28:19.2 Jack Turkel: I’m like. [chuckle] Really?
0:28:21.2 Kurt Baker: It sounds like a late time commercial for the…
0:28:22.5 Jack Turkel: Yeah, what is.
0:28:23.2 Kurt Baker: Like get rich quick schemes, what that sounds like to me. [laughter]
0:28:25.4 Jack Turkel: And it’s some far away.
0:28:28.0 Kurt Baker: I guess, yeah.
0:28:29.1 Jack Turkel: It’s from like maybe the knees up…
0:28:31.7 Kurt Baker: I can’t even see her. Yeah.
0:28:33.6 Jack Turkel: Yeah, you can’t see the… You can kind of see what’s going on, but it’s.
0:28:36.4 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:28:36.6 Jack Turkel: It’s like, no, I don’t know who this person is.
0:28:40.1 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:28:40.1 Jack Turkel: This is just like somebody that took this with their phone.
0:28:43.2 Kurt Baker: Right, right.
0:28:44.0 Jack Turkel: So, and I’m gonna, the… When I get these pictures done, I’m gonna use them as before and after, I’m like, this is what you were using and this is what you have. And then.
0:28:53.6 Kurt Baker: And that’s part… I think that might be part of the problem, right? Is that we have these phones that have high… Pretty high resolution, so that’s kind of a plus and a minus, when you wanna take photos, it’s great, you get pretty good quality out of them. But when you wanna do something… So why don’t you talk a little bit about like, just taking your own photo with a phone, which is, I guess fine, if you need to, but then the difference between that and an actual professional photograph, where you’ve actually kind of drilled into it and, and perfected it a little bit.
0:29:19.9 Jack Turkel: Well, the main difference is obviously the quality is gonna be better.
0:29:23.6 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:29:24.2 Jack Turkel: And the control of the lighting is gonna be better.
0:29:26.7 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:29:26.9 Jack Turkel: And my technique takes into account the height of the camera, you never wanna look down on a person, you always wanna look slightly below and look slightly up. It gives a more authoritative feel and a combination with a friendly feel makes it for a perfect combination. And then the background, you take it with your phone, you’re in… The angles are gonna be off, the colour may not be exactly right, and you’re not… You just don’t have the control.
0:29:58.8 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:30:00.6 Jack Turkel: It may be good for the fly, if you just want more of a whimsical kind of shot for different things.
0:30:03.8 Kurt Baker: Right, oh yeah.
0:30:05.2 Jack Turkel: Plenty of people are happy with just say, this is good enough.
0:30:07.8 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:30:08.0 Jack Turkel: But if you wanna take it to the next level, if you’re in a business, if you wanna really show yourself in the best light possible, you want to get shots as like my other tagline says, take headshots that turn heads. [chuckle]
0:30:22.0 Kurt Baker: Right, right. So, and I think sometimes people underestimate the value of the branding side, ’cause you mentioned the branding, right? So what do you want… Literally a photo of yourself is a big part of your branding, right?
0:30:32.0 Jack Turkel: Oh yeah.
0:30:32.3 Kurt Baker: ‘Cause that’s like the highlight of any website you’re gonna have, the highlight of any flyer you might put together, or if you put it on, you’re having to put it on your business card, ’cause on the business card. That’s going to everybody. So sometimes you’re like, oh, and you spend all this money on the website, spend all this money on other things. But you’re like, “Well, this is like… And they even spend money on the logo and all the fonts and whatever goes into the site itself, but sometimes people forget that, Well, wait a minute, this is you. So that really is…
0:30:56.5 Jack Turkel: Well you’re selling…
0:30:57.1 Kurt Baker: Kind of important to make sure that looks as best it can.
0:31:00.4 Jack Turkel: You’re selling yourself as a brand, and the first impression is so important.
0:31:06.1 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:31:07.0 Jack Turkel: When you see that picture for the first time we subconsciously decide right then, and there is this person, approachable, is this person likable, is this somebody that I wanna do business with? We don’t even realize it, but we are very… We can be judgemental according to the image that we see.
0:31:21.3 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:31:21.8 Jack Turkel: And we can decide on a particular person we wanna work with in and the certain professions or politics or anything by, I just don’t like the way that person looks in that picture. And that can be all it needs to decide against or for it. So yeah, it’s your face is your brand and…
0:31:42.4 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:31:43.2 Jack Turkel: You want that to be as best as it can be done.
0:31:47.2 Kurt Baker: Now you just told me, or like not everybody feels like, well, I can’t, well, me I just don’t take a good photo.
0:31:52.4 Jack Turkel: There’s no such thing.
0:31:53.5 Kurt Baker: Okay. So how do you address that? When somebody says, “Well, I don’t wanna get my picture taken, I don’t like my pictures, I don’t like this.” They complain, they go down to the, like call the DMV, I think they called something else now. But Department of Motor vehicle, I think it’s Motor Vehicle department or something, I don’t know, whatever it’s called now. But they… But you go down there and you’re like, Oh, I hate the photo, they do me, right? So.
0:32:08.9 Jack Turkel: Well, yeah. It’s…
0:32:10.4 Kurt Baker: But they’re constantly complaining about their photo and how they look in their image where this one you control, right?
0:32:15.7 Jack Turkel: Yeah.
0:32:15.8 Kurt Baker: So what do you say to people who say “I’m not… I don’t take a good photograph.” What do you say to them?
0:32:20.3 Jack Turkel: Let me show you that it can be possible because…
0:32:23.0 Kurt Baker: ‘Cause we’re all different, right?
0:32:23.8 Jack Turkel: We’re all different.
0:32:24.1 Kurt Baker: Our complexions are different, skin tones are different.
0:32:28.1 Jack Turkel: Glasses, hair…
0:32:28.2 Kurt Baker: The hair is different.
0:32:28.9 Jack Turkel: Everything is different.
0:32:29.7 Kurt Baker: You have beard, no beard, all kinds of things going on, right? So.
0:32:32.3 Jack Turkel: Yeah, yeah.
0:32:32.9 Kurt Baker: Dark eyes, light eyes.
0:32:34.0 Jack Turkel: I know, but there’s a way to get around that to… There’s no magic button, you still have…
0:32:39.6 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:32:39.6 Jack Turkel: To do what you.
0:32:40.5 Kurt Baker: You don’t have the perfect photo button on your camera?
0:32:42.5 Jack Turkel: No, that’s the next model upcoming.
[laughter]
0:32:45.3 Kurt Baker: Okay. I like that.
0:32:47.2 Jack Turkel: I get to so many people that come in and go and for people who have a weight problem will always ask me where’s the button to make me thinner. [laughter]
0:32:54.2 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:32:55.9 Jack Turkel: I go… I get… How many times I get that line.
0:32:56.7 Kurt Baker: Okay. That’s fine.
0:32:57.2 Jack Turkel: And my answer is usually… Well, first of all, it’s headshots. So you…
0:33:02.8 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:33:03.1 Jack Turkel: But it’s like I… You wanna be you.
0:33:05.8 Kurt Baker: Correct.
0:33:06.0 Jack Turkel: But you wanna be the best version of you.
0:33:07.8 Kurt Baker: Correct. I agree.
0:33:09.7 Jack Turkel: So… And I keep working on it until you are happy and satisfied…
0:33:15.0 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:33:15.1 Jack Turkel: With what you see.
0:33:15.9 Jack Turkel: Yeah.
0:33:16.3 Jack Turkel: And I can do, I mean, I can take weight off your face. I can do any kind of magical thing you want.
0:33:22.3 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:33:22.3 Jack Turkel: But you don’t want that.
0:33:23.6 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:33:24.0 Jack Turkel: You want, the authenticity is important. And…
0:33:27.3 Kurt Baker: It’s like all the glamour magazines they find out later on the people don’t actually look like what you see on the photo…
0:33:31.7 Jack Turkel: Oh gosh! No.
0:33:32.4 Kurt Baker: On the cover, like, wow! How does he or she do that? You’re like, well, it’s actually not completely real.
0:33:37.8 Jack Turkel: It’s not, that’s a lie, a lot of fakery…
0:33:38.2 Kurt Baker: That is a lot of fake going on.
0:33:39.0 Jack Turkel: A lot of fakery. And now it’s going…
0:33:40.6 Jack Turkel: Don’t try to mimic though, because you’re never gonna look exactly like them because they’re a photograph. Right.
0:33:44.3 Jack Turkel: I know, I know, I know.
0:33:45.8 Kurt Baker: We’re gonna get into some other things you do, you’re listening to Master your Finance. We’re gonna another take another quick break.
[music]
0:33:49.0 ANNOUNCER: Do you want to prevent this from happening to you, then this guy is our guy. Listen closely as we now return to Master your Finances with Kurt Baker of Certified Wealth Management and Investment.
0:34:02.2 Kurt Baker: Welcome back. You’re listening to Master your Finance. I’m here with Jack Turkel and we’re talking headshots. And I honestly didn’t realize quite how so much was going on with headshots. I know I got one before I visited you and they kind of moved me around. Did this, did that, but you were actually a little more specific. It was kind of interesting the interaction that we had, the lighting and the positioning and all this other good stuff, which was kind of cool. But that’s important for branding, like your number one thing, even above like probably your logo. If you have like a personal business, especially like a realtor realtor, I think it’s huge because they tend to put those out everywhere. But a lot of other professionals, I know advisors like myself, wealth managers, they need the same kind of thing. So certain professions, you definitely wanna make sure it’s done correctly, but you do some other things as well. I know you have quite a career. So you wanna tell us a little about some of the other things and how that’s kind of different from what you’re doing right now?
0:34:53.2 Jack Turkel: Well, I mean, in general, after I left corporate, I did a lot of commercial work, a lot of companies that are in electronics and food and different things where I would bring in different components and stuff. And we’d comb… I’d combine it in different ways and light it in certain ways for their brochures and their websites. And then I got connected to a wonderful chef, an Indian chef that started me on that path of doing more and more professional, food photography. And I did that for several years until COVID hit. And that changed things a little bit, but I ended up doing like five cookbooks and…
0:35:35.6 Kurt Baker: Wow!
0:35:37.1 Jack Turkel: Had an opportunity to… My studio and kitchen were filled with food for months, doing some of these books and got…
0:35:44.0 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:35:44.0 Jack Turkel: I got to eat a lot of it. So…
0:35:45.2 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:35:45.4 Jack Turkel: It’s kind of a win-win. [laughter]
0:35:47.9 Kurt Baker: So, I know food, I’ve heard… At least this is what I read. Like sometimes when you see these things on television, like, well, like frankly would surprise me. It’s like, I’ll see the… I’ll see a certain like hamburger on television. Then when you go see it in the store, it’s like…
0:36:00.5 Jack Turkel: Oh gosh.
0:36:00.9 Kurt Baker: That doesn’t look anything like that does it. Well, but I know photographing food is a little bit tricky. Right? ‘Cause…
0:36:03.7 Jack Turkel: Very .
0:36:04.0 Kurt Baker: Sometimes they tell me, they use like, this is not actually, I don’t know what the components are, but some of the items are not the actually real. They have to put in other things…
0:36:13.0 Jack Turkel: It’s a lot of tricks.
0:36:13.9 Kurt Baker: Because the heat of the lights will like melt it. Like if you’ll try to take a photograph of, I guess, of ice cream, I’m gonna make one up. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I mean, it is like by the time you get it’s positioned the ice cream start to melt already. [laughter]
0:36:23.8 Jack Turkel: Here’s a trade secret. Ice cream is mashed potatoes.
0:36:28.4 Kurt Baker: There you go, see.
0:36:29.4 Jack Turkel: With colour dye in it. Yeah.
0:36:31.9 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:36:31.9 Jack Turkel: That’s one of the things. But fortunately the chef that I worked with, his name was Harry Nayak. And he was more on… I don’t want my stuff to be affected in unnatural way. I want it to look as natural as possible.
0:36:47.9 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:36:48.1 Jack Turkel: Without me doing anything to it.
0:36:49.8 Jack Turkel: Wow!
0:36:50.2 Jack Turkel: Which is great because I was, well eat a lot of it too. Yeah.
0:36:53.2 Kurt Baker: There you go.
0:36:53.6 Jack Turkel: I’m like, are we done? Are we done with this shot, onto the next one?
0:36:56.7 Kurt Baker: Indian food for sure. Right. You know a lot of ’em.
0:36:57.2 Jack Turkel: I’ve tried… I’ve eaten a lot, an amazing amount of variety of foods.
0:37:01.0 Kurt Baker: There you go.
0:37:02.0 Jack Turkel: But yeah, it was yeah… There’s a lot of different little techniques. I mean, Elmer’s glue for milk in a cereal bowl.
0:37:10.5 Kurt Baker: Okay. Elmer’s glue. Yeah. I don’t… You don’t wanna have that afterwards.
0:37:13.2 Jack Turkel: No.
0:37:13.4 Jack Turkel: But I have some people on set that were very upset that they took a bite outta your cereal after the shot was done… [laughter] This photo shoot was over.
0:37:21.7 Jack Turkel: If you wanna shoot…
0:37:22.2 Kurt Baker: This is awful, this is awful cereal. [laughter]
0:37:24.4 Jack Turkel: If you wanna shoot a cooked Turkey, you shoot a barely cooked Turkey and cover…
0:37:29.4 Kurt Baker: Barely?
0:37:29.7 Jack Turkel: Barely cooked Turkey. And you cover it with shoe Polish.
0:37:32.1 Kurt Baker: Shoe Polish.
0:37:33.1 Jack Turkel: The right colour, shoe polish, and you paint it on. And it just looks like it’s perfectly browned.
0:37:37.7 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:37:39.1 Jack Turkel: And…
0:37:39.6 Kurt Baker: Like can we do that during Thanksgiving or are they gonna get upset?
0:37:42.1 Jack Turkel: No, you don’t wanna do that during Thanksgiving. So that’s…
0:37:44.4 Kurt Baker: That will be awesome…
0:37:45.5 Jack Turkel: Some of the main things. And when I would shoot, like there was a couple times I had to shoot like burgers.
0:37:49.8 Kurt Baker: Burgers.
0:37:50.8 Jack Turkel: And the burgers built from a layer up with the perfect amount and quality of each piece.
0:37:58.1 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:37:58.3 Jack Turkel: Where it’s perfectly layered and sprinkled with…
0:38:00.4 Kurt Baker: Takes less than 35 seconds to make the whole thing. I mean, it takes more than that, I guess when you’re actually photographing, excuse me, the other way around.
0:38:07.3 Jack Turkel: Yeah. Definitely takes some time. And there’s you use glycerine. This glycerine liquid to spray on the lettuce and stuff.
0:38:16.9 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:38:17.0 Jack Turkel: So it sticks.
0:38:17.6 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:38:18.3 Jack Turkel: Or on the outside of glasses. So it sticks. Otherwise it just would drips down.
0:38:22.4 Jack Turkel: Interesting.
0:38:24.0 Jack Turkel: Little tricks like that, but it was a great, it was… I had all, a lot of those shots in my studio. Yeah.
0:38:28.3 Kurt Baker: I know I saw that, they are gorgeous. I know. Makes you hungry when you look at the stuff.
0:38:31.8 Jack Turkel: Yeah. Well, that’s, that was my goal.
0:38:33.4 Kurt Baker: And it definitely worked.
0:38:34.5 Jack Turkel: If your mouth is watering. I did my job…
0:38:37.2 Kurt Baker: Yeah.
0:38:37.2 Jack Turkel: Is what I used to market it as, so yeah. COVID kind of took that away and I wanted to kind of focus on other things. I still do food…
0:38:44.8 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:38:45.8 Jack Turkel: When it comes up, but I’m putting a lot of my effort into perfecting this headshot thing.
0:38:53.2 Kurt Baker: Okay. Well, that’s really awesome. So I know you got a lot of you, a lot of photography stories you can tell us. Right?
0:39:00.4 Jack Turkel: Yeah. I mean, [laughter], I could be here for an hour.
0:39:02.8 Kurt Baker: I know. I know you can…
0:39:03.8 Jack Turkel: I know, I mean, photographing my son and I climbed Mount Fuji.
0:39:07.6 Kurt Baker: That’s cool.
0:39:08.5 Jack Turkel: And I had an amazing opportunity. I’m just a fine art photographer when I’m not trying to do my studio stuff and do client based stuff. I’m out there just photographing the beauty of the world. And my wife and I travel as much as we can. And I’m, she’s used to me kind of staying back and going, hold on, let me get this shot…
0:39:30.4 Jack Turkel: So do you see the world through a camera lens?
0:39:32.5 Jack Turkel: I… Yeah more so than…
0:39:33.7 Kurt Baker: No matter what you’re doing, you’re walking around like, oh, that’d be a nice picture. Oh, that’d be a nice picture. Oh, that’d be a nice picture.
0:39:38.1 Jack Turkel: And it always fascinates me because I look in the camera and it’s like, I question, what is it in my brain that tells me, okay, I have to click this. It’s something particular or something that’s coming from outside to my brain, or I don’t know exactly how to, how to put it, but there’s something that happens in the composition, in the colour and the positions of things that I’m seeing that allows me to come up with that conclusion that this is what’s gonna be what I termed wall worthy. Right.
0:40:08.9 Kurt Baker: Wall worthy.
0:40:09.6 Jack Turkel: Wall worthy, where you take that shot. It’s like, I know this is gonna be a good shot. And I strive for finding those things. So I have a whole portfolio of kind of interesting eclectic things of the stuff full of all the travels that I’ve done.
0:40:27.7 Kurt Baker: So what are some of your most interesting interactions you’ve had with different people when you’re taking your photos with them? Like, ’cause you went out back quite a bit.
0:40:34.3 Jack Turkel: Well, yeah. I mean, going back to the NASA days, when I photographed a space shuttle, I would, I would bump into people who I bumped into this guy, I went to this… I had the opportunity to take the bus of press photographers to this location with the astronauts actually watched the launch from. And there was a guy there that had been there since the early 60s. And worked on the mercury project.
0:40:55.6 Kurt Baker: Wow. That’s not bad.
0:40:57.8 Jack Turkel: I ended up just having amazing conversation with him, took pictures. I videotaped him talking to me and I got to meet some of the astronauts and taking pictures of them and knew some of them by, it was just kind of cool because I’m a kind of… Bit of a science space nerd when it comes to that kind of stuff.
0:41:16.0 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:41:16.1 Jack Turkel: So I loved, I loved interacting with those people and because I was there photographing the very first launch of the space shuttle in 1981, which was… I was a young kid and just having that opportunity and standing there and seeing that behemoth of a rocket right up close and personal was something I never imagined as this kid from Brooklyn ever seeing?
0:41:43.1 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:41:43.5 Jack Turkel: And then I was there at the very last launch. Right.
0:41:45.2 Kurt Baker: So can you tell me the story about your…
0:41:49.8 Jack Turkel: Yeah, so I, yeah, I just, I decided because I was able to get to the last launch, I was gonna wear my press credential badge from the first launch. So I had that next to my badge pass from the last launch and the director of the astronaut group or whatever the heck her name was. I can’t remember her position. She saw this and she’s like, and she remembered me from the other time she said Jack come here in…
0:42:10.4 Kurt Baker: Wow That’s cool.
0:42:11.0 Jack Turkel: And then she took me into the astronauts office and I was like sitting there talking to all these astronauts and they’re all, like, they were impressed that I had been there from the very beginning and did the first…
0:42:21.1 Kurt Baker: They were probably all in training and . And maybe they weren’t even that far along. Right. Yeah. The astronauts were probably just saying, I’d like to be an astronauts someday. And you were actually there meeting some of astronauts.
0:42:29.9 Jack Turkel: I know. Mike Samino who is one of the guys who fixed the Hubble, he was one of those top guy. I remembered him because he is just a really cool guy. I kind of connected with him. And I said, Mike, how you doing? You’re like my favorite astronaut. I was like a little starstruck [laughter] and he’s like, wow, you actually know who I am. And so I got these pictures of us together and stuff and sent it to him and it was kind of cool, but yeah, I did that and just travels to different areas of the world. I’ve been to Morocco and the Yucatan and when I can, I do that.
0:43:03.4 Jack Turkel: Right, right, right.
0:43:04.1 Jack Turkel: I got a ton of stuff on my hard drive that my son constantly complains. Like, dad, you got millions of shots on your hard drive. You gotta get them out there, nobody sees them. [laughter] I gotta go through ’em and get some of ’em out there. And then I go in some… I have some shots at the Ellarslie museum in Trenton.
0:43:22.4 Kurt Baker: Okay. The museum.
0:43:24.4 Jack Turkel: The museum. Yeah. Museum purchased one of my shots. I did a, I did a, a series of shots when Trenton high school was being demolished. Right. And I just decided to myself, I said, I gotta do a documentary. Yeah.
0:43:34.9 Kurt Baker: That was historic building back then. Yeah. That was pretty amazing building when it was first built. It.
0:43:38.4 Jack Turkel: Was, it was, but it needed, it needed to be redone. So I had spent a week with the students, walked around school, took pictures of classrooms. Kids did a whole documentary, had a show about it.
0:43:47.5 Kurt Baker: Oh, that’s great.
0:43:51.2 Jack Turkel: And that was, that was, that was really satisfying. Okay. And then the museum bought one of those shots and so that’s…
0:43:56.6 Kurt Baker: So now you’re like part of permanent history of Trenton it’s cool. I’m permanent.
0:44:00.7 Jack Turkel: I’m permanent part of the history.
0:44:00.7 Kurt Baker: That’s awesome. Yeah. Yeah. So what’s, what’s next. Now, as far as yourself and photography in general, what do you see happening going ahead from here?
0:44:09.0 Jack Turkel: Well this is I’m putting all, everything into perfecting what I’m doing right now. And just getting the word out there that it makes a difference to do it right. And to think about what a difference it can make. If it’s done with the quality that can be done.
0:44:28.3 Kurt Baker: And they can see some of your shots, how can they see some of the shots you’ve done on your site there?
0:44:32.3 Jack Turkel: Right now my website, which is always a work in progress is basically the name of my studio, which is JackJaydigital.com. And it’s J-C-K-J-A-Y not just the letter J. And they’ll see, they’ll see a dozen or so shots there. I’m always changing them and putting different shots up there. And, you can find my same shots and new shots on Instagram as well.
0:44:57.9 Kurt Baker: Cool. Alright. So, Well, Jack, it’s been amazing. I have been here with Jack Turkel. We learned a lot about headshot, the importance, it’s a big part of your branding. You are your image, the first part of your image, right. Even before you do your logo and all other stuff. So it’s really important to get it right. And make sure it really emulates who you are and what image you wanna portray thanks again, Jack, for coming on.
0:45:18.3 Jack Turkel: Yeah. You’re welcome.
0:45:19.2 Kurt Baker: You’re listening to Master your Finances.
0:45:24.4 ANNOUNCER: That’s all for today’s episode of Master your Finances, Mr. Baker’s biggest money managing tip, or even a full episode head on over to masteryourfinances.us or 1077thebronc.com/masteryourfinances. Look for Master your Finances on Anchor, Spotify, or anywhere you get your podcasts. We’ll see you next time. Only on 1077, the bronc.
