Mark_L Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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canerino wrote:
Greetings all!
I've been listening to a lot of podcasts lately. The last five I listened to (Matt Stuart, Dan Winters, Elliott Erwitt, David Alan Harvey, and Frank Ockenfels) have all said something very similar...they are known for their personal work rather than the work for which they are commissioned. Almost all of them have said that the work that is exhibited or published has almost always been personal work.
The business of photography is quite different in different areas. Those guys will get their money from commercial clients and those will be 'big money' jobs that will come in competitively infrequently. Their personal work is integral to their marketing, getting the, visible and known for a certain style and to get them hired plus they have loads and loads of time to go and do these projects/pictures.
The business most of us wedding photographers are in is very different. We are shooting 25-40ish 'jobs' a year so we are pretty flat out already and is always someone's wedding not some commercial job with an ad that can be very conceptual or where the CD/AD will hire you because of the feel of your last project's pictures. The likelihood of being actually hired based of your personal work is small - at best it is going to be a small factor, mostly they just want to see your wedding pictures so they have an idea of what their wedding might look like if you photograph it.
I say all this because yes, it seems like these guys spend a lot of time and effort on their personal work because they is a big business reason for them to do it.
The direct business stuff aside I am a big advocate of it because I think it is detrimental to the of running a business and your own wellbeing to try to get a large chunk of your creative fulfilment from photographing others peoples' weddings over and over. You get bored, you get annoyed when you are asked to change to a much less ideal place/time, you get irritated clients want simple and boring or they do not have enough time to dedicate to something. This is bad because:
1) These things are NOT conducive to delivering client satisfaction and will reflect in your decisions and handling of these situations which is Not Good for a business owner. The Artist has got too close to The Business Owner.
2) These things will start to wear on you over time and eat you up as well as taking the enjoyment away. I'll get all Glort on you are tell you a story: I worked abroad as a sailing instructor and the guests would always ask us what we did on our days off and were shocked when the answer was "go sailing". The reason was because they didn't see the massive gulf of a difference between mucking about in training boats teaching them and blasting around in high performance boats - they were both in boats with sails about that was about the limit of simultaneity. Did I like teaching them? Yes but if I had not been able to do that on my days off I would have driven myself mad and hated it. Airline pilots often do private flying in their spare time, they like their job flying airliners but deal/like it better when they do their own fun flying too.
In life fulfilment does not come from one place (or one person, this causes may relationship problems). Don't try and get almost everything from you paid work photographing peoples' weddings - it is usually unhealthy and not sustainable.
TL;DR: personal work is good, do not seek all fulfilment from your paid work - this is likely to be unhealthy. These guys have business reasons we don't for doing loads of it though.
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