Glorious Five Year Plan

Over the past five years, I've sought the advice of far more established professionals, listened to industry experts, talked with buyers and art directors, and read various magazines, websites, and blogs. With respect to a path toward advertising photography, the general consensus I took was roughly:

• Make lots of photographs
• Shoot the kind of stuff you want to get paid to shoot
• Develop and hone your style
• Enter contests
• Refine your list of potential buyers
• Market to those buyers with postcards, emails, phone calls, personal visits, and whatever else you can think of
• Go through editorial to get a name
• When you get a job, don't screw it up too badly

This has been my general plan for a couple years, and I'm executing it as well as possible. So. Maybe I've been reading too much A Photo Editor, but recently I've been noticing a couple of things:

1. That list of items above, as a framework, has a lot more detail that needs to be filled in.
2. There's some possibility that the above framework might not work for me. Or for me now. Or any more at all.

From that point-of-view, I find myself wondering: are the following items opportunities or threats?

• "Everybody is a photographer"
• Magazine evolution/death
• The long tail
• MicrostockStock
• Online distribution
• Online
• advertising
• Copyright degradation w/ new generation
• File sharing
• "Free the net"
• Orphan works legislation
• Internet audiences and their characteristics
• Increasing work-for-hire arrangements
• Licensing arrangement degradation
• Intellectual property ignorance
• Social networking sites
• Blogging
• Diversification
• Specialization
• IM
• Texting
• The Economy
• China

All I know at the moment is that I can't truly predict the future status of any of these items, but I can gather data and try to establish a productive attitude toward all of them.

How to Be A Photographer

I booked some long assisting projects recently and haven't been able to work on my own stuff. When those long projects ended, I found myself frustrated and irritable, and feeling like an imposter photographer. I thought to myself, "I need to get inspired, get motivated, get to the point where I feel like a photographer, so I can make some pictures."

And you know, I can do all the little things that I find inspiring:

• walking around downtown
• looking at work from photographers that are around my level
• listening to albums from artists I admire
• reading
• looking at stuff

but I'm beginning to see that this stuff usually has no immediate effect.

Then: I don't get to make photographs when I feel like a photographer, I get to feel like a photographer when I make photographs.

Which is what more advanced photographers have been telling me all along: keep making pictures.

Anybody Else?

Dear Photographer/Designer/Ad Agency, Do you know how big my monitor is? I think you don't, since, when I access your website, you expand my browser window to full screen, leaving this little tiny content area surrounded by a vast field of grey/black/white.

I wish, if you're going to presume to take over my browser that way, that you'd be more accurate about it. For future reference, you have 1920x1200 pixels to work with. Your content usually occupies about a third of that.

Thanks!

Self-promotion Heart Attack

I just hit the button on my first email promotion. As I rolled up to that, my heart was pounding, my palms were sweating, my whole body felt light and there was a buzzing in my head.

Maybe, just maybe it was that third cup of coffee this morning.

More likely, it was terror.

I checked the thing 39486120463476 times, but there could still be some atrocious mistake. I sent it to seven of my peers, but it could still somehow have some totally inappropriate career-ending aspect to it that nobody saw. Everybody uses email as a self-promotion tool now and it's totally valid but I have been getting spam for over a decade and I know how annoying it is.

And now, five minutes after the heart-stopping eternity of watching the "processing" message proceed, my body remains light but my heartbeat has returned to normal, and I just had a fit of relieved laughing.

Wait! There's a reply! Already! It must be a portofolio call-in, or some kind of positive feedback, or a scathing flame...oh, no, it's just an out-of-office message.

Sitting on the other side of it now, I realize that, whenever some promotional email is annoying me, that I never give any thought to the sender. I realize now that, in my head, they just click a button and send 3048693748612374632 emails, then go back to watching TV. My experience is nothing like that, so maybe theirs isn't either.

Sympathy for the devil.

Timothy Archibald writes a brief paragraph on "getting it" and it makes me think all morning. About why I make photographs. About what they mean. About what my photographs say about me. And whether I want people to know. Which is not really the best state from which to make new photographs, but it's ok for editing.

Today is a day for making photographs, however. And I do wonder, during the creation phase, "What does this photograph (or series of photographs) mean?". It's not usually very productive. Photography is not helped so much by thinking about meaning. It's better aided by looking. So at best I keep on, shelve the interrogation for the time being, keep looking and seeing. At worst I degenerate into some Rivers Cuomo level paralysis of self-reflection for a bit.

This current project promises to be rather sick, and possibly offensive, which is fine, provided there's some point to all that, some reason for crossing the line. Right now I can't see the reason but I'm hoping it will become evident. My little brain always wants to know beforehand but my finicky mistress is always coy.