This month, Fitzgerald Photo turns nine.

More than a decade ago, I started my photography business even as I continued working full-time as a technology consultant. I had some initial success bringing in new clients.

It was a nice little start but not enough to cover the bills. I had an idea, not a business, and it was clearly decision time.

My wife Beth—who always seems to know me better than I know myself—made a suggestion she knew I needed to hear.

In short order I found myself on a plane headed to Washington state to visit my friend Scott. We’d known each other 16 years, since meeting in Cottonwood, Arizona; each of us a journalist at competing small-town weekly newspapers in the Verde Valley. Since that time we’d both moved several times, lived abroad, gone back to school and now I was coming to pick his brain about his experience running a successful business. By this time, he’d been an acupuncturist with his own shop for about a decade, expanding from a solo enterprise to one with staff and multiple providers. I was there to ask for advice, in between hiking and enjoying some Northwest beer.

He grilled me on the long drive from the airport: what was I selling, to whom was I selling.   I was tongue-tied and felt inept. The weekend was a master’s course in learning to not make excuses. I had a quite a few. In the end, he told me, simply: “Unless you cut out all the other stuff and focus on your business, you’re not going to have a business. Stay in your lane.” He may have added some expletives to that last bit.

Motivated, I returned to Maine. I phased out my other gig and focused every day on building my new work. Even if I didn’t have paid shoots, I shot anyway. I worked on my business and kept business hours. I built systems. I took every opportunity to talk about what I do and to ask others what they needed.

The needle started to move. Slowly at first but undeniably.  My business tripled that year, after just seven months of full time work. The year after, it doubled again. Two years later, it doubled yet again.

I had a business.

It all started with a decision to take responsibility for what I wanted and to focus on doing my work without making excuses.

Fitzgerald Photo started in 2009, by necessity. It was born in May, 2010, by choice.

Photographers talk a lot about light. After all, the words “photo” and “graphy” derive from ancient Greek and mean, literally, to draw with light.

It took me a long time to become proficient with my camera and lenses—f-stops and shutter speeds had to be pounded into my hard head. When I graduated to using off-camera flash and strobes, things got exponentially more difficult.

My approach was to blast everything with light. If I set up enought strobes, my subjects would be evenly awash in light, making the images easy to reproduce even on the tissue paper we printed on at the newspaper (which locked up at the mere suggestion of a shadow, it seemed).

I thought the way to success was to just point my lights at my subjects and make it rain light until all of my lighting problems were washed away.

One of my photography mentors—a guy who still amazes me with his location lighting skills and who has a portrait shot on an 8×10 view camera in the permanent collection at the Smithsonian—told me something that rocked my world. It forever changed the way I approach my photographic lighting.

“It’s not what you light,” he said to me, looking at yet another shoot where I’d done the photographic lighting equivalent of spray and pray. “It’s what you decide not to light that makes it interesting.”

In short, the shadows and unlit portions of the frame impart interest, drama and power. If you doubt this, for a second, look at the imageIt’s below and imagine if it were lit with no shadows. It’s the shadows that define every line, wrinkle, crag and scar on his face. It’s the shadows, then, that help to tell the true story of his face and his life.

Since that time, I’ve made it my goal to let the shadows tell the story. My lighting approach became subtractive instead of additive. To put it more plainly: I first light my subject, and then remove light selectively until things start to get interesting. The result? Drama, dimension, depth, mood.

And that’s made all the difference.