I’ve reached a lull in my photography education, mainly because I’m between shoots – at least as far as studio shooting. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and a lot of research, along with a lot of existing photo analysis, but very little shooting. The problem is that even though all I want to be doing is photography work, I need to find paying clients at work to charge my time too – despite my new career aspirations in the photography arena I still need to fill my days with my design work.
I’ve been so busy outside of work too, that I haven’t been doing much shooting at home either – so overall I’m feeling very ancy to get behind the camera again. I have a shoot scheduled for Monday, but I’m so excited about this stuff that I want to move move move!
One other reason I’m not shooting as much as I’d like is because I’m interested in studio work – and without a studio and subjects to shoot, it’s a bit tough. I set up a still life shoot in my apartment on Sunday with mixed results, mainly stemming from the speedlight issues that I’m having. I got some interesting shots, but mostly by accident. As a designer, I’m pretty skilled at taking boring, ordinary photos and making something decent out of them – this comes from a career working with a lot of stock images. It is easy for me to shoot a bunch of photos and salvage something. But right now I really want to learn how to get the shot that I’m trying to get, not a cool shot that happened by accident. This isn’t to say that “happy accidents†aren’t an important part of the creative process – they are. In fact, these accidents are exactly what I need to learn. But I need to get to a point where I’m not relying on a magical accident – I need to be able to deliver quality based on my skills, with the unexpected work as a bonus.
Regardless, I feel like I’m not shooting enough.
After the holidays I need to start working on a workflow that gets me behind a camera more days that not.