Switching Priorities
A big lesson I have learnt on my journey to leaving professional photography is realising what I need to make a priority in my life. First and foremost, you have to value your own personal happiness. Now, photographers can achieve this in a myriad of ways, and every one of us will have a slightly different method to be happy. However, one piece of advice I would offer would be to avoid basing your happiness on anything numerically related.
Whether this is followers, the size of clients, money earned or even the number of jobs booked for a certain period. All numerical values of success are fleeting and will never fully satisfy you, as you’ll always be looking for the number to be bigger.
This is something I learnt very late on and was definitely a factor in realising I was not happy being a professional photographer in the normal sense. Forever posting photos trying to get more likes and engagement was a huge factor in what was clearly a massive wave of depression I didn’t see or feel coming.
The likes come very, very rarely and usually only if you really sell your soul to whatever useless algorithm trend is working that week. An example of this was confirmed to me on threads recently. I have been posting my work for a year or so, and honestly, I get little to no traction. My work, I think, is better than most I see, but it just doesn’t seem to hit. Then I post a thread literally stating “Fuck it selling my DSLR for a Fuji. I don’t need full frame any more. Don’t comment your thoughts, I literally don’t care.”
Honestly, I didn’t know this would be anything; however, this post, merely stating I was going to move cameras, got 10 times the engagement I was used to on photography-related posts. This was the exact moment I realised social media is no longer for me. Long gone are the days when the internet cared about any form of creativity. Now you really have to dig and find anything worth looking at or interacting with. The last thing I found was an article published on Vice by Vincent Pflieger, which I discovered through a Vice Facebook post by sheer chance.
Luckily, by this time, I had already started this blog and had realised I would much rather put my effort into creating work here than posting anything onto an Instagram or Facebook machine for it to then grind into an easily chewable piece and then spit it out for no reason. Posting your hard work onto this soulless void of creativity cannibalism does nothing but lower the value and quality of your work.
Sadly, I still have socials installed partially because I am addicted to them, as we all are. But also for communication with friends, not clients. I can, however, see myself removing the apps from my phone come the new year. Instead,, following a Daniel Milnor approach to creating my own algorithm here on this site and running it for as long as I want posting whatever I want with full creative freedom.
Here are some recent photos I took whilst testing a Fuji film camera that led to that thread post.
