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Taking Stock
May 4th, 2009
This one’s primarily aimed at those who’ve picked up the camera as not only a means of making a life but of making a living. I’m not going to powder-coat this for you – it’s tough out there. I get email after email from college students, all of them looking the same-ish
Dear Mr. duChemin (that part always creeps me out), I am a college student and now in my final year have decided that you have the perfect job EVER and I want to do it too. Please tell me how I can do this so I can travel the world and take photographs and become fabulously wealthy with very little effort.
Ok, they aren’t quite like that. But some of them come close and I never quite know how to answer. I want to be encouraging; I think they’re right, I do have the best job ever and I don’t for a moment take it for granted. But if you’ve been around these parts for long you know it took me a long and winding road to get here. Lots of ups, downs, victories and defeats. I could be brutally honest but while I want to disabuse people of the notion that this is an easily-gained fairy tale life, I also don’t want to discourage them from fighting to live their dream. Anyways, I’ve been thinking about this stuff this weekend and this is one of the things I keep coming back to.
You need to do an inventory and become very aware of what’s in stock and on offer. Approached as Brand You, the questions are: What makes you unique? What differentiates you from other photographers? What unique spot in the marketplace do you occupy? These questions then get answered by asking yourself other clarifying questions, all of them aimed at identifying your inventory.
What do you love?
Love kids? Generally we shoot best that which we love best. And spending your days shooting things you love is a great way to make a living, it can energize you, prolong your sanity, and improve the quality of your creative work. Better work, marketed right, can mean better prices.What Past Experiences Have You Had?
If you’ve done a PhD in Marine Biology you’re uniquely poised to be a marine or conservation photographer. Expertise is not only profoundly saleable but it likely points towards a deeper passion. When stacked against another photographer who shoots food you have a distinct advantage if you spent years as a chef in Paris, and that advantage makes you more saleable than the photographer who just shoots food for the money.What are you good at?
I love writing. Writing is not photography. But writing about photography allows me to give back to the industry, establish an area of expertise, and develop another area where I can both express myself, work in and for the industry, and contribute to my income. It might not be writing for you. It might be re-touching or composite work. It might be video work. Live lecturing. Cleaning sensors. Multiple income streams can free you to be choosier about your work and gives you a fighting chance when the bottom drops out of one thing. It also provides an outlet for creatives with short attention spans, allowing them give their best work without getting drained.
Alternately, why not look at things in reverse. So long as you’re looking at the shelves and counting your inventory, where are the empty spaces? What are the areas you don’t like, the areas you’ve experienced the least amount of success or creative satisfaction? Those empty shelves likely mean one of two things – an absence of passion or an absence of talent or skill. You’ve got two choices in this regard; use that knowledge to define the gigs you don’t want so you can focus on your strenghts, or put your energies into shoring up the weak spots and stocking those particular shelves.
The truth is, there are hundreds of thousands of photographers out there, skilled and otherwise. It is not generally your singular ability to wield a camera and pick an f-stop that clients want, it is your unique passion, individual vision and style, and your unique skillset, that will determine which clients find a match in which photographer. Knowing the ongoing state of your inventory, selling that particular stock, and doing something about the empty shelves, these make it all significantly easier to put your craft on offer in the marketplace. Hitting a dry spot? Just starting out? Close shop for an afternoon and do some inventory. It’s easier to sell what you know you have.
Interesting post David.
I’ve always thought that it is a rare individual who truly knows what their calling is so early in life. As you alluded to, past experiences are important in informing our future trajectory. With minimal past experiences that path is a little wider than for someone who has been around the block a time or two.
In concert with that is a belief that life needs a series of highs and lows before you can find your bliss. Without being able to relate a current state to either a time of joy or a time of pain/frustration I don’t think you have a good measure of how good/bad things really are.
It is easy to believe that your first job out of college needs to be it and if you aren’t doing exactly what you dreamt of you are wasting your time. With hindsight I think we can realize that all those good and bad experiences let us focus in on what our lives are really meant for. Life is a path and a path that changes as we mature (or grow older at least).
Having an equally sought after job (let’s just call it a tie) – we get a lot of the same questions here as well. In my profession it is sometimes easy to tell if someone has the talent for the field or not. There is a certain touch you need and it can be hard to develop – passion is not always enough. Often we steer these people away as gently as possible.
For most of the people coming to us straight out of college or university we lay both sides of the job out for them. Lots of competition, low(ish) wages, dirty conditions and arthritis in old age countered by a unique life experience that many people can only dream of, the idolization of children and giving something back to the world.
My passion for photography started early but got delayed due to life. Now restarting it again, I’ve found a new direction for it and the Internet has been invaluable.
I know what I have, and passion is my driver. If someone is passionate about something, it keeps them going. I love what I do, writing and taking photos. I have a long way to go, but each day brings new adventures.
I love getting up in the morning.
Thanks for the post David. It is a topic that is currently close to my heart. Galen Rowell wrote a similar article some time ago called “The Size of the Rat”. He drew the parallel between being a successful mountaineer and a successful photographer – as you would expect of Galen. The rat refers to that gnawing feeling in the pit of your stomach that drives you to do something. It is what gets you out of bed at 4:00 am to get that sunrise. You’ve gotta have a big rat to be successful as a world class photographer or mountaineer! Galen also observed that technical skill and raw talent seemed to have little bearing on whether or not someone would have a successful career as a photographer. There seemed to be an abundance of these traits on both sides of the “success” divide. He wrote “The initial act of visualizing a meaningful photograph has more in common with meditation than with professional skill”. He also linked ones success to finding their personal inner path. That is where the size of the rat is important.
I too have had a number of false starts in the world of photography. My rat was easily subdued by other things in my life. Thankfully, the little fellow is making quite a bit more fuss these days! Thanks for your blog!
David,
I have the pleasure of working on staff at a small university. Every year I have eight or ten seniors call me asking for help. They all — every one of them — want to “travel the world and take pictures.” They invariably put it exactly that way. They all have a digital camera (usually a point-and-shoot); some of them have taken an intro photo class, and they are sure that National Geographic awaits.
I try to let them down gently; after all they are generally bright and good students, and they’ve been told all their lives how they can “be anything they want” as long as they “follow their passion.” Every once in a while there is a student whose work just blows me away — the last one just finished up at the Portfolio Center (right in time for a major recession, unfortunately.) Those students are the ones who have some semblance of a vision and the ability to express it.
I’m going to add your essay to the list of links I provide to these students. Thanks for your thoughts.
Damn, I love that image.
One of the things that I love about your work is how unafraid you are of color, and how well you use it. It’s a stunning image.
And, if I was just starting out now, I have no idea what I’d do in any field. At some point, you just have to step off the cliff and trust.
And, if you have that gnawing, you really have to give it a shot. IT’s impossible to go back and recapture an opportunity once you’ve walked on.
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