On a regular basis I get emails and comments from students attracted to the photography bug. To them, photography represents the exotic, exciting, and adventurous. While there are some aspects that involve travel, adventure, and excitement, for the most part photography as a hobby is fun. Photography as a business is hard work and boring.
A couple years ago I created the following form letter in response to the quantity of requests for advice and help with a photography career in travel and nature. I’m updating it but I thought you might enjoy the older version for posterity.
Dreams of a nature and travel photography career is a good dream, but one that requires an education first.
I know I sound old, but I wish I’d had the photography, art, and business training I needed before I first hit the road with my camera. Traveling costs money, but it also presents a lot of opportunities I could have turned into income which would have allowed me to spend more time exploring and expanding my art and skills rather than taking any job I could to pay for the next trip. No matter how you look at it, photography is expensive.
School is boring. School really doesn’t teach you what you need to know to succeed in life. Still, you have to have the piece of paper that says, “This is proof I know how to complete things. I know how to suffer and make it through it.” There is no photography career you can take on without that piece of paper if you wish to do more than run your own business. Even then, a fine art or graphic arts degree is a minimum. A business degree is a requirement.
I recommend that you triple your educational activities outside of the traditional classroom. Honestly. Do not play all the time, throw away the television, and sign up for every class you can at the local college or training schools or wherever on photography, art, business, public relations, contracts, negotiation, sales training, advertising – take any class you can. All will apply to a photography career. Go to school until 3 or 4 in the afternoon, then head right out for one to two classes a night elsewhere. Learn to manage your time. Learn everything. Learn how to take notes and how to flex your memory so you don’t have to take notes. Ace everything.
If you spend two to four years immersed in classes and education, you will emerge ready for the next 50 years of a photography career. If you do not, you will spend more time learning and studying, losing deals rather than winning them, than out and about with the camera.
Make a plan. Photography is not about the camera. It’s not about taking the pictures. It’s about selling them.
It’s about understanding the marketplace and trends to be taking the pictures you can sell three years before the style is in fashion because you were paying attention with how the market was moving and there, before everyone else, to respond to the shifts in the purchasing power. It’s about negotiating business contracts for publishing books, videos, CDs, from simply selling an image then leveraging it to sell it again and again. It’s about know how to negotiate with an airline company that wants to put your photograph on the tail of several of their airplanes. It’s about negotiating with a movie company that wants to use your image on their marketing and promotional campaign.
It’s about learning how accounting works and how the tax system works in your country and outside. Because I travel and work all over the world, I have to know what the tax rules and laws are in the various states within the United States (income tax, no income tax, sales tax, no sales tax, property tax, earned income taxes, investment taxes – will they tax money I earn outside of the state or only within the state) as well as the tax rules for living outside of the country and how to pay taxes on money earned outside and within…and the list is long.
I’ve never been good with basic numbers, even though I can program a spreadsheet, database, or computer. I had to take a lot of classes later in life to figure out how to estimate jobs for photo assignments and work with the stock photography industry. Do you know how to write a release form and ask for someone to sign it before you photograph them or their property? Do you know the laws pertaining to the photography of public areas, public parks, national parks, and private property? Do you know how to determine value for insurance when traveling with the camera gear, and deal with insurance companies after losing or having the gear stolen? When I work with big companies or magazines on photo projects, they use a language all of their own. I had to learn all that.
Traveling is fun. Taking pictures is fun. Selling and making a living to pay for the travel and the gear sucks. If you don’t know how to do that, the traveling sucks and the taking pictures just gets you pictures – pictures that you can’t show to anyone because no one cares or wants them. Any twit with a cell phone now has a camera and they are more interested in their pictures than yours.
If I could do it all over again, that is what I would do. I would immerse myself in 4-6 years of fine arts, graphic arts, business, advertising, marketing, and entrepreneurial classes. I’ve got the business degree, but it isn’t enough. I was working while going to school and my mind wasn’t in the game as much as it should have been. Learn from me.
I’ve learned from the best in the business that they stayed in school and went to night school to get the training they really needed because they sat down at 16 years old and made a plan for their lives. They went where serendipity took them, but only because they had the training and education to recognize an opportunity when it stood in their face and followed their heart along with the money trail.
That’s my little bit of advice. Over the years, thousands of people have taken my classes and workshops. They have talked to me about how they gave up school and everything to hit the road and photograph. Some worked for 30 or 40 years then gave up everything for photography. Either way, without a plan, without the education to make it happen, they wasted years of their lives flailing around. They are not photographers but wannabes. They are mechanics, doctors, lawyers, dentists, writers, hair stylists, and whatever job they fell into, not photographers. They didn’t take the time nor had the plan to learn what it takes to be a photographer. Art Wolfe did. Galen Rowell did. George Lepp did. Frans Lanting did. Look at the ones with dozens of books and you will find someone who made a plan and learned what it took to implement that plan, and grabbed the best opportunities (not the loser opportunities) because they knew what they wanted. They have the papers that say “I know how to complete things.”
Good luck and know that EVERYONE feels the same as you at your age. If we didn’t, the world would be broken. It’s natural.
Lorelle
ALONE," and the adults complied. I don’t know when the general touching stopped in my family, but it did, condensing itself into random and forced hugs and the occasional pat on the back. Their attitude wasn’t the only one to change. My attitude towards touch started changing about the same time, too.
Teaching self defense and rape prevention training, I loved discussing unwanted touching and deciding which kinds of touch are perceived as "acceptable" and which aren’t. Slowly, I started learning that some people tolerate a lot of touching that I find offensive, while others avoid touching at all costs, consciously and unconsciously making decisions about touch based upon their personal experiences. My sensitivity towards touch changed, as did my attitude about touch. I began to see it as a symptom of a greater problem and decided to tackle my issues with touch head on – resolving the underlying issues. From avoiding touch all together, I started to allow more to come into my life. I started with my parents.
before I turned 30, I started hugging my parents upon arrival, at least once during the visit, and at the end of the visit. Freaked my father out. Yet, once when I forgot, he reached out and grabbed me in an awkward embrace, squishing me as he squeezed too hard and then pushing me away in his embarrassment. My mother was a different story. After over 20 years in abusive marriages to survive as a strong and single woman, she found my hugs a lifeline in the quicksand of her life. She would hold on extra long as if to make sure it was real.
Most importantly, I’ve learned that touch is the symptom, and it can be the cure. The first time I underwent surgery as a teenager, I remember coming out of anesthesia in a panic, feeling desperately alone. In a haze of pale blue and white, a nurse held my outstretched hand as I struggled through my recovery. Days later, the nurse laughed about how I almost broke his hand. "It was like you were drowning and I was the only thing holding you up." I was embarrassed to tell him that he was right. All I needed was someone to hold my hand and I was okay. Such a simple thing, but so incredibly vital at the time.
How do you use touch in your life? Are these methods a symptom of something bigger? The program for March’s Life Makeover monthly meeting will feature Hiddai Levi who will discuss these aspects of touch and give us some tools, mental and physical, in order to learn how to use touch in our lives for our own survival and to help us live the best life we can.
Active listening is traditionally considered a way of listening and responding to another person that improves mutual understanding. Many have come to think of it as structured conversation, where one person talks and then the listener gives feedback or summarizes what is being said. As we work to improve the quality of our lives, active listening means "actively" listening, not just role playing. It means to really hear what is being said, not just the words, but working through to the deeper meaning, by which you enrich the relationship between each other.
I long time ago I learned a little English saying about assumptions that has stayed with me. It says that when you ASSUME, you make an ASS out of U and ME. Cute, but true. Living in the moment and listening to the story, opening yourself up to the flow of the story and the process of the story-telling, you never know what insights you will learn or experience as the speaker moves through a story which maybe different from your experiences or which may challenge or change your attitude on the subject. As you listen, be aware of the assumptions you make in order to get past yourself and your judgments to open yourself up to the other person and their stories and feelings.
assume what it is they want to say, as they scramble with their limited vocabulary and experimenting with words in order to get their thoughts out. It is a battle for me to become a platform for them to trip around on instead of a dominating, overcorrecting commander.
Replacing her lost pole with one from her coach, Belmondo faced the backs of her fellow marathoners, an intimidating view to say the least. Within moments, she plowed her way into the pack in front of her, a valiant effort. Just before the 14 km mark, the two women in front poured on the steam, battling for first place. So did Belmondo from deep in the pack behind. Moving at an incredible pace, Belmondo not only surged out in front, she crossed the finish line way ahead of her Russian rival, Larisa Lazutina, in a stunning display of strength and determination. I went crazy, jumping up and down and crying in my living room.
In week four of her book, Life Makeovers, Cheryl Richardson shares the life lessons she’s learned and the changes in her life that come from her journal writing. For me, as a child I found that I had a friend in my diary that I could write to. I didn’t have to write pretty or properly, or even nicely. I could share all my feelings, dreams, wishes, frustrations, anything I wanted with my imaginary friend who lived in the pages of my diary. As a teenager, I couldn’t express my hormonal angst in public, but I could on paper. As my life moved into college and the busy life style we all fall into, writing for the joy of it was replaced by writing term papers, essays, reports, and all kinds of writing for work but not fun. It took many years to again find the joy in jotting down my thoughts on paper. I still battle for time to just sit and write. So I have to make an appointment for some quiet time to sit down and write every day.
What are you hanging onto in your life? What seems to be constantly tugging at your sleeve? At our first meeting, Lucy Laketer shared her Cosmic Pick quote that read, "What you resist, persists!" She had been agonizing over a project at work that she really didn’t want to do. For weeks it sat on her desk until it seemed to create its own persona, staring over her shoulder while she worked, taking up space on her desk with its presence, and making her feel guilty and tense every time she came near her desk. We all have these things around us that seem to take on their own personality that would go away if we only dealt with them.