[EV +/-] Exposure Compensation

Reading Mark Tucker’s blog I found a link to an article by  Doug Menuez where he shares a personal and candid view of career challenges as a photographer:

To survive the creative, economic and emotional chaos of a life in photography your career must be designed for longevity. To achieve longevity, you must reconcile the conflict between what you shoot for money and what you love to shoot. Ideally, you get paid to shoot exactly what you love to shoot, every day. Reaching this nirvana requires making tough choices, a careful business strategy and attention to basic business practices. (Or be super talented/lucky, born wealthy or marry a brilliant business manager.-more here. 

Doug conveys also an important reality. Even when defining a strategy that is aligned with personal core values and objectives in life, the path to success is quite uncertain.

The sad reality is that if you follow all my advice you’ll probably fail. Hopefully this won’t include starving to death, homeless, under a bridge somewhere. Nevertheless, the odds of success as I’m defining it are astronomical. An even starker reality is that if you don’t do this you’ll fail anyway. You certainly won’t ever hit it out of the park and most likely you face a life of increasing disappointment. [...] You just have to be willing to fight for your beliefs and your goals and that means some sacrifices will have to be made. Nothing about life is fair but sometimes you can get lucky when you align your actions with your beliefs, and luck favors the prepared photographer every time.

I have to say that when I read about how challenging is to have a fulfilling career in photography, photographers usually appear to forget that photography is most a service profession that allows for more or less artistic freedom depending on the context. There is a price to pay when one wants to do a job that perfectly suits your voice and your creative passion. The price you pay is risk, uncertainty and a higher effort to commercialize your product. If you want to be successful you must avoid becoming a commodity [e.g. the "fuck you" portfolio that Doug mentions], but you must learn how to create a product that sells and you must do the extra work to sell it. 

If you are a photographer providing a service [shooting for other people rather than for yourself], is useful to learn to love your job for what it offers to other people [the client], and realize that creating good photography is always challenge. Finding a balance in the creative field where you combine working for money and working for meaning is an art in itself. Recall that working for meaning is also a position and an attitude. The intent can be to find fulfillment in creating a product that makes the clinet happy, rather than a product that makes your artistic soul happy.

This topic reminds me a statement by the great designer Milton Glaser:

Schools encourage the idea of not compromising and defending your work at all costs. Well, the issue at work is usually all about the nature of compromise. You just have to know what to compromise. Blind pursuit of your own ends which excludes the possibility that others may be right does not allow for the fact that in design we are always dealing with a triad – the client, the audience and you. – Milton Glaser

with that mindset, the three epiphanies that Doug Menuez mentions are a useful guide:

• Learn when to say no, or learn why you must say yes. Even if your job is to provide a service, do so only if it is within your values and interest. This will define your preferred “territory” for the customers.
• Let go of fear, it is about you and it is about the others, in creative work nothing is right and nothing is wrong, failure and success are different views of the same, so what do you have to lose?
• Break free of categories, you are in a creative field so why limit yourself? Are you scared to be perceived as a generalist? Do you feel pressure to create work with only one style?… why should you? Explore other areas and enjoy the learning and the challenges. Here it goes another one from Milton Glaser:

I think this idea first occurred to me when I was looking at a marvellous etching of a bull by Picasso. It was an illustration for a story by Balzac called The Hidden Masterpiece. I am sure that you all know it. It is a bull that is expressed in 12 different styles going from very naturalistic version of a bull to an absolutely reductive single line abstraction and everything else along the way. What is clear just from looking at this single print is that style is irrelevant. In every one of these cases, from extreme abstraction to acute naturalism they are extraordinary regardless of the style. It’s absurd to be loyal to a style. It does not deserve your loyalty.- Milton Glaser

Most of anything, the secret for a fulfilling career is to work with people you love, to do a job that challenges you, to realize that doubt is better than certainty, to embrace change as a positive force in life that renews the old habits, to enjoy working for others as much as for yourself, to forget that only perfect is worthwhile [what defines perfect photography anyway?] … and to have a constant opportunity to learn and improve. 

How to improve? how to become better? … this is for another post.

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