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| Sugar the chicken, moment's before it tried to peck my daughter in the face. From my ongoing series "Iowa" |
sab·bat·i·cal
səˈbadək(ə)l/
- a period of paid leave granted to a college teacher for study or travel, traditionally every seventh year.
Paid? Am I right? One can dream. Best go with Hiatus - A period of time with something (such as an activity or program) is stopped.
I started this blog in October of 2008, moments before the economy tried to "correct" itself. It has been a wonderful place to show work, talk about issues in the industry. 473 posts later, the blog went on hiatus in November of 2015.
I wasn't sure if I would start "blogging" again as it began to feel like work to come up with something that I wasn't sure anyone was reading. For a self-congratulatory photo blog I do get a fair bit of traffic, but does it help my career at all? Should my time be spent doing something else? The answer you may ask? What wisdom can I impart on my fellow Gen Xer's, the hordes of Milenials and the unfortunate, non-creatively named Generation Z kids? The answer?
There isn't one.
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| June Kiddie Pool, from on going series "Iowa" |
The point, if there is one to this post, is that being a creative professional outside the corporate paradigm has plenty of challenges. Not least of which is the abundance of cheap technology and lots and lots of photographers. My advice, for what it's worth, is to do whatever it takes to remain connected to your work. In an age obsessed with new, young and social, it is more important than ever to focus on what make your work yours. Nobody cares that much unless it can directly help them, so make it matter to yourself first. Does your work speak to you? If it doesn't, then it won't matter to anyone else either. Selling your work to those who buy photography services is an all together different subject and post. However, you have to have something sell first.
I wouldn't suggest being completely self absorbed either. For me, being busy is when the ideas come. I can be busy taking my family to Iowa for vacation for instance, or I can be busy shooting for a client. My kryptonite is inactivity. So, time to get busy.
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| With apologies to the photographer who did the original photo, I convinced the kid to reenact the picture. I couldn't be happier with the result, they really got into it... a new series perhaps? |
