I've seen a few people promote the idea of personal work as a tool to improve ability, find creative satisfaction and tangentially benefit their business. Its kind of a foreign concept to me and I'd like to hear about how you find/develop/do personal work. What do you do? How did you come up with it? How often do you do it? And the biggest question I have is what do you do with it after you create it? Also, how does it impact your business?
Whatever you have passion for, do a project for it. Think of creating a book for it based on your work. Create a narrative using a series of photos. That's like a wedding album for something you are passionate about.
Saturday night Friends had a RockBand party. They have an AMAZING house with it's own movie theatre (a largish room with couches, stadium-style steps at one end and a gigantic projection screen, sony dolby surround system etc)... and their living room isn't that shabby either with a gorgeous 60" or so flat screen and a fairly impressive surround system there.
So they set up two Rockband "stages" ... one in the living room, one in the "movie theatre"
I brought some lighting stuff, gels etc... decided to try and emphasize the whole "Rock Concert" thing... which was cool 'cause a lot of the participants actually wore rocker-like clothing.
Anyway... lots of great practice, lots of experimentation with different gels, different power settings, different lenses, a lot of silly-wide stuff...
End result was a bunch of well awesome photos for my friends on Facebook and some good practice for me which may come in handy if I have a reception with some rocker-style peeps.
How will it impact my business? Hum... dunno for sure... every single photo I posted is branded and quite frankly the vast majority of them seriously KICK ASS ... so I supect that any of their friends who see them will be at least somewhat impressed.
One of the couples wanted to see one of the images on the back of my LCD... and I showed them and they were blown away... and commented that they'd seen the photos from the most recent wedding that I'd posted on my blog (the one where I second-shot for Tony S.) and they said that when they saw the photos of the groomsmen they were so jealous compared to what their photographer had done. Good stuff
(best part - I didn't realize my buds actually CHECKED my blog! Who knows... maybe WOM might start trickling in one of these days)
I think personal work is - I guess personal and unique to each person. Matt and I have been nspired by the movie UP and have planned a few shoots based on the concept of recording memories together. It's like the idea of a lifestyle shoot - but putting together a story, and letting it unfold. It's a bit difficult to do these stories of ourselves, so we use our engagement sessions as a chance to record these memories for other people. I'd rather capture an awesome moment in the life of a couple than have pictures of them looking at the camera. So we'll go on dates with them and just shoot the date (along with some nice shots of them as well).
Because not every couple is up for something like this, we have put together a few theme shoots where we borrow friends and shoot them for two to three hours. As long as the guy is patient, we can have tons of fun while capture photos that we want to get.
We've tried recording one date night per month ourselves. I'll bring one camera and one lens (we limit ourselves to make it a challenge), then we'll try to capture shots like you would see in an editorial article. Where we went, what the food was like, how we felt, etc. We're still working on getting shots of both of us at the same time (hence, we WILL be paying someone to shoot us at some point). The point is to challenge ourselves to tell a story through pictures. At some point I may actually edit these shots and put them on my blog. Our goal was once a month. Then we plan to create an album about our adventures together.
Eventually this may turn into something we do for other people. One friend joked last year about how we should create a website called rentdebcull dot com - where you rent us for X hours and we just capture your day.
Personally, I love travel and adventure photography. So my personal work has been all aimed at getting better at lifestyle and adventure photography. We'll see where it goes.
All my personal work to date has been in video. You'd think that since I've been creating images for over 30 years I'd have a few photos that I like on my walls. Maybe I'll shoot some stills some day just for me.
Some of my personal work includes NYC street photography, landscapes and travel, abstract, water-drop experimentation... I'd like to start working more with models just to do cool conceptual stuff.
Right, just like every guy who took photos at my college paper: "man, I really want to do a sweet nude project. [Insert short-sighted, fake artsy excuse to see boobies here]. I just need to find a few girls who are cool and know I'm not a perv."
I think those who don't pick up their camera outside of their wedding business are clearly in here for the money. There's nothing wrong with that...it's just they need to stop lying to others about how they love photography. If you love it, you'd photograph something else too.
We both maintain our own personal sites along with the business site, and we link back and forth between them. I think it is valuable that clients see what we are passionate about apart from their weddings.
I shoot a bazillion pictures of our kids...post a lot of them on FB for family and friends to see. The G-parents are very grateful since they live about 4 hours from us and don't get down very often.
I also try to work on projects that are just for me...the series I did for Veterans Day was one, and I've got an ongoing project where I use this goofy setup to shoot:
The lens is pushing a hundred years old, and I've been trying to shoot things with the intent to make them black and white--lots of contrast, kind of 1920s or 1930s style. I'm going to self publish a book about it when I'm done. Even if nobody else ever opens it up, it'll still make me happy...
Everyone needs to do some work that's just for them...it's good for the soul.
Not seeing the reference in this case. Thanks for the responses so far. Sill looking at how folks are indulging themselves creatively and how exactly they are using the work that they do. Wondering still how you find the impulse, time and focus to take photos outside your business responsibilities.
Not seeing the reference in this case. Thanks for the responses so far. Sill looking at how folks are indulging themselves creatively and how exactly they are using the work that they do. Wondering still how you find the impulse, time and focus to take photos outside your business responsibilities.
thanks
- trr
I think you are over thinking things. Just photograph your passion. Sometimes you can combine your passion and make it a smart business choice. Chase Jarvis is an example of that. He financed a photoshoot of ninjas because he likes ninjas, and it ended up paying off because of the attention he received. Anyone can do the same thing on a smaller scale.
Personal work is what ever my brain can think up, or things that I've said "I should try that". Last shoot was hair and makeup glamor shots, next is horror photo. In amongst this I try to shoot a bunch of landscape and or artsy stuff in hopes of both hanging around the house and selling prints. I have a second separate web site for personal work and blog. I try to keep wedding and portraiture separate from the personal stuff.
Since I'm a part time shooter, I just try to keep shooting and filling in the blank shooting times with personal work. Besides, you never know when producing personal work will land you paying work... Drew Gardner landed paid work after perusing his "Epic Fashion - The Forest" series. http://www.drewgardner.co.uk/
Curious, what makes you ask this question Todd? Also, what floats your boat?
