Early work on lighting technique and composition
Everyone goes on talking about personal work, whenever you look up videos, and tutorials, and stuff about the business side of photography, everyone seems to make a huge point to say how important personal work is. Stop! What about people just breaking into the world? People trying to get paid anything? People trying to make enough money with photography, just to move up to a full-frame body? People that haven’t been offered gigs, or to go and shoot these weddings? People that don’t have any “work” in the first place? I took a moment to think about this, and I realized that I personally, have been doing a lot of work. . . and almost none of it, has been personal. But how are you working, not getting paid, and it’s not personal? You can’t afford it. You cannot afford to put the time, the energy, the effort into it, when it is not what you enjoy, it does not inspire you, it does not drive you. For people not working doing photography full-time, and making your way by it. I have something very important, that you need to understand: Everything, is personal work! Go ahead and re-read that. Refine it into your soul, every time you bring that view finder up to your eye. Every time you pre-focus and re-compose your frame. Every time you fine-tune your exposure in Lightroom, or Photoshop.
A freighter, coming into the Seattle shoreline.
This is something that is going to be hard for me, it’s going to be raw for me, and it’s going to be real. But I can not continue doing work, thinking other people will like it, thinking that it will get me somewhere, thinking, I can’t experiment, I have to play it safe, I can not mess up. You learn from your mistakes, you learn from experimenting! You continue to shoot, you continue to edit until 4 in the morning, when you hear birds chirping outside your window, when you are inspired by what you are shooting! I challenge you, to go out this week, and to shoot personal work! If you are not getting anything for taking pictures of some “model” from Model Mayhem, and you feel like you can not experiment, you cannot try something new, just do it! Mess things up! Find the happy accident! Get the great shot, learn a new way to light. That is what personal work is for! That is why it is important! That is why ALL of your work, is ‘personal work’
Photographic Summary 