So why would a very experienced major studio feature film cinematographer and a university professor in cinematography and film production shoot still pictures?

Because it’s fun! 

Because I love to shoot still images and always have! 

Photography and cinematography are much the same thing at their core, and require the same art and imaging skills. It’s all about the light, the image, and the image composition. It’s about telling a story visually.

The biggest difference is that major studio film production projects require a large crew and lots of money. This creates a great deal of time pressure. Everyone (including studio executives) must first “buy into" production concepts and that requires meetings and advance decisions, this can make spontaneous creative moments more difficult to capture.

Still photography is a personal — not a large team — creative experience. There is time to think and more time to create. 

In photography, ideas can travel from the photographer’s imagination into reality without explaining them to “the committee” first. And in commercial shoots, where there often is a committee, the committee is smaller than on a film, and a consensus is more easily archived.