I never suspected I would be a photographer. Every once in a while (like right now) I sit back and ask myself, reminiscent to the Talking Heads song, Once In A Lifetime, playing in the background; “How did I get here?”.
Looking back as to how I got here, you’ll understand why.
I never owned a camera growing up, nor did I have any interest in taking pictures. I wanted to be where the financial action was – The Bank… Boring for some, I know. I had taken the Real Estate course, I got my life insurance licence, my traders licence and I even traded derivatives during my twelve years at a major financial institution. At one point, my client base as a financial advisor was in the many tens of millions. Why leave that right? I mean, I was making great money, I had a cool office, staff, and I had really fancy shoes.
It was early 2000 and the world didn’t blow up switching over from 1999. I remember looking at the astronomical costs of having a website designed and actually thought it would be cool to design sites. That and I would be rich in months! Or so I thought. So, I started Googling on how to design sites, convinced I could do it – I quit the bank. I was a few weeks into designing my first website, www.paulbuceta.com when I realized, taking pics with a film point and shoot, developing the images at the store, coming back to scan them before I could upload them to a site, sucked. Sucked bad. This was around the same time consumer digital cameras had come out. I bit the bullet and bought a 0.7 Megapixel Mustek digital point and shoot camera for waaaay too much money.
I guess, it was at this point, I became a photographer.
A friend of mine had a girlfriend that wanted to get into modelling. Knowing I had a digital camera, he called and asked if I would mind taking a few pics of her to send off to an agency. I didn’t think this was strange at all. In fact, I thought she was going to come over, stand by a window, snap snap and she’d be on her way. I did however, find it strange when she opened her suitcase stuffed full of lingerie. “You are going to pose for me in your underwear?” I must have sounded like a complete baboon!!!
Anyhow, we spent the whole day shooting and got some really nice images. I surprised myself having never really done this before. I asked her permission to post the pics on my site because hey, AMAZING content! I thought it would be funny to add ‘photographer’ to my credentials. Unbeknownst to me at the time, because websites were so expensive, few photographers had them. In the first week of posting the pics, I was getting emails from models asking if I’d take their pics! I know, crazy right?
Fast forward 3 years and I’m shooting for Playboy, American Curves, MuscleMag, Oxygen, and a bunch more. To date I’ve shot over 160 magazine covers internationally, and have shot some amazing celebrities.
Because paulbuceta.com is such a huge site (over 90,000 files now), I’ve decided to crate paulbucetaphotography.com. This new site will be simply my photography. It’ll make finding the body of my photography work much easier. Take a moment to check it out.
