September 08, 2007 – Robert Morrissey Photographer & Inventor
Rob: So, what does the book do? I mean, let’s say I’m kind of an amateur photography. How would the book help me?
Rob M: Well, what the book does is analyze the photographic session to the extreme. What I did was take 300 so odd photographs and 300 lighting techniques and showed how they applied according to the equipment that’s used, also from panel lighting to soft boxes to grids. Tell me when I’m getting to terms that people don’t know.
Rob: You’re getting there.
Rob M: I gave a professional mapping of how these apply. So, here’s one schematic. Here’s the photograph that this schematic produces. This is how you build a set. This is what you use to build a set and with this set this is what you can produce.
Erin: So, you’re niche is the pros?
Rob M: This is fully for pros, but the nice thing about the way the book is written is it starts out with the idea that the person reading the book wants to become a better photographer. I believe any person that’s into photography will learn more from this book than many of the books that are out there.
Erin: Even Rob?
Rob M: Even Rob.
Rob: Well…
Rob M: Realistically, I guarantee by the time you spend 15 minutes with that book, you know more about photography than you did when you weren’t looking at it.
Rob: Well, it’s interesting because I’ve worked with Rob on a few-Robert-we’re both Roberts so it’s a bit confusing. I worked with him a little bit and he actually does consulting as well as a photographer. He actually came over-for my day job I run a construction company. We do a lot of flooring and high-end custom homes and things like that and we needed to be able to take better pictures of floors. Guess what? Floors are not an easy thing to take pictures of, especially so you can make them not look bad.
Rob M: Especially when you’re photographing the ceiling.
Rob: Especially when you’re photographing the ceiling, backyard, dog hairs we talked about earlier. We actually had Robert come out and teach some of our people at my company how to do that and now we’re assembling, with the aid of his training and instruction. We hired him for a half-day to come over. He taught our guys how to be able to take pictures of high-end floors that actually look fantastic and it sounds counterintuitive because now I don’t need to pay him to come over and do that and take pictures of my floors.
Erin: I think he’s obviously the master of entreprenurism here because he took a source of expertise. You were photographer. You’ve become an author. You are a consultant. You’re a known inventor. I think that’s what a lot of entrepreneurs dream of is just building that business. You have so many areas of income streams. On that note-I’m curious and I’m sure a lot of our listeners are curious about how do you go about getting a patent? Everybody has this big idea. What is that process like?
Rob M: the process for me was tedious. I’m not and I’m sure there’s a bunch of attorneys out there.
Rob: Hire a lawyer.
Rob M: Hate this-I’m not the kind of guy to hire attorneys unless I’m in some crazy big trouble. What I did was went to the uspto.gov and read it. It’s very, very simple to read. It’s written quite well. You just follow the rules. You get your provisionary patent, which is a very simple patent to get.
Rob: That gives you a year of protection.
Rob M: From what I gathered, it was a year of international protection.
Rob: Right, with reciprocating countries.
