My "professional" photography was clearly of the M*A*S*H unit type where we did volume and not really trained. I actually taught my boss and coworkers about f-stops and depth of field and such in my second year as the cameras we used on the jobs were fixed focus and we used a knotted string to keep the subject in the proper range. We also had strings on the lights to make sure they were in the proper distance from our subjects so that the lab could get an average reading from the film and print all the photograph pages without further adjustments. Creativity and experimentation where frowned upon sternly.