via Internet Archive—
A partner and I started D² Enterprises on August 12, 1983. One of our first major clients was the University of Michigan Panhellenic Association.
They hired us to produce marketing materials and do some re-imaging work.
The impetus for D² Enterprises actually came a year earlier. I was freelancing for a business contracted to photograph sorority rushes. Our contract called for me to be paid for every “salable” image I took, shooting 35mm film with my own camera over the course of six hours or so.
As an aside, I knew an advisor to the program and some of the women independently through a local theater group. They were very pleased with my results, and, based on the orders they shared with me, I anticipated a rather sizeable check from the firm for which I’d done photography.
So I was floored when [the business man’s] calculations yielded a payment for less than a third of that. He explained that “salable” was a term subject solely to his interpretation, and that nowhere in our contract did it say that salable was related to actual sales.
In other words, just because an image had, indeed, sold, well — that didn’t mean it was salable. “I don’t care what you think,” he said without further explanation. “If you don’t like it, go start your own business.”
And I did just that. No hard feelings. Within five years, this photograph guy was gone, D² Enterprises had become D² Corporation, and I’d bought-out my former partner ….