If you could start over What would do differently

For me it would be never touch a wedding and have the self confidence in my skills to charge a more profitable rate, I guess you could call it being shy and not wanting to lose a job but I often cut my rates to where sometimes I just barely broke even.

I got mad at myself one for doing that and decided screw it if I cannot get what I consider fair I will pass on the job, it worked, I dont lose many jobs and the few I do I look back on and realize it was a good thing I did lose the job.

I also learned those who are willing to pay a fair rate do so without any excuses or delays and sometimes pull cash out of their wallets and round up the charge.

They also have friends who become new customers, they literally brag about the work they received and how quickly they received it.

To care more about building myself, and care less about the irrational fear of embarrassing myself.

KaraKurt099 wrote in post #19176331
To care more about building myself, and care less about the irrational fear of embarrassing myself.

That's probably a problem many have when working with their own art and other people, I have heard more than once I am too critical of the details of my own work and find flaws in it that only I can see.

I have over the years backed off a tad on doing that but refuse to give up as I think it makes my work better as I progress.

Though once I was told by a good friend, let it go, it was fine when you produced it, now you have been up all night trying to make it better and it looks like crap.

.

MBR wrote in post #19172468
.
If you could start over, what would do differently?
.

.
Oh, man ..... that is something I think about every day of my life. My whole life would be so much better if I could rewind back to age 16 or 18 and start my photography over from there.

If I could have a do-over, this is how I would do it:

When I was in high school, I would have taken wildlife photography much more seriously, and spent my time working at it instead of hunting so much. There are three main things I would have done to create commercially viable images at that time, which was, of course, back in the film days.

1:

I would have created set-ups for songbirds using feeding stations, where you set up perches for the birds to land on and set up nice distraction-free backgrounds.

2:

I would have set up a small backyard, or even indoor, studio in which to create pseudo wildlife silhouettes. I could have used small animal figurines or paper cut-outs for subjects, and used the little trees from model railroad supply stores for the surrounding "habitat". I would have worked and worked at this until I could get images that looked real enough.

3:

I would have gone to places that had very habituated deer. Particularly big, mature bucks with nice antlers. The places near enough to me back in the 1980s when I was a teenager would have been Valley Forge State Park, Gettysburg National Battlefield, Cades Cove, and Big Meadows. I would have photographed the big bucks at these places extensively, from October through December each year.

If I had had the smarts to do these 3 things when I was in my late teens and early 20s, I would have marketed the deer images directly to hunting magazines and hunting product manufacturers, and the submitted the songbird and silhouette images to stock agencies and publishers.

With full hindsight about the way the wildlife photography market worked back in the 1980s and 1990s, I have no doubt that if I had done these things, I would have done extremely well, financially, and I would have been able to set myself up for life with the royalties and proceeds from direct sales.

I know a couple people who did similar things as young adults ..... they are in their 60s now, and have lived great lives because of the money they made decades ago. . Back then, you could make a LOT of money selling wildlife photos, as there were only a few people in the world doing it at a full-time professional level, and those few made a crapton of income from the royalties and direct sales.

In the 1980s and 1990s, high quality wildlife photos were in high demand, and in very short supply. . Today, quality wildlife photos are still in high demand, but there is an enormous, inexhaustible supply, which of course has driven prices way way down. . So if I could do it all over again, I would go back to when the marked was really strong, and figured out ways to produce and market as many high-quality wildlife photos as possible, while the market was still at its peak.


.

Find a mentor who is successful. Doesn't matter what profession or hobby you are into. Learn from others and don't waste time and money reinventing the wheel.

marchboom wrote in post #19205054
Find a mentor who is successful. Doesn't matter what profession or hobby you are into. Learn from others and don't waste time and money reinventing the wheel.

• I was fortunate to find a darkroom mentor in an industrial photographer when I was about 13, who was an acquaintance of my parents, who mentioned my affinity for photograpy and self exploration into the darkroom. He taught me how to load stainless steel reels, and as a result I abandoned plastic reels and tanks. And he taught me the skills to process color transparency film using the E-4 process when I was 14.
  
  
• In adulthood, several of us hobbyists found a commericial photographer who taught is principles of product lighting, charging a modest fee for use of his studio during the weekend for a couple of days. That was an incredibly enlightening (pun intended) weekend workshop.
  
  
• In another experience, a commercial photographer taught me the principles of large format monorail camera movements.
  
  Those were three of the most meaningful hands-on learning experiences I ever had, in over 55 years in photography. There is so much knowledge to be gained from others with more experience about some aspect of photography.
  
  

Take more chances earlier.

Marry later.

In many ways I'd thought of being more aggressive earlier and pushing to doing more complex shots. That's a hard choice because that has unknowns too. That helps build ones skill set though. The pathway into photography has not fared well for me with the pandemic. I may have been better off remaining in marketing and enjoying photography as a hobby. No certainity and so that isn't as easy to predict how some decisions may result.

I may not have met the people I did and the whole life choice may be drastically different. Enough of my college buddies have-had great careers that are well compensated. They fulfilled that stereotypical dream. OTOH it came with health issues too. The stress of finding jobs in these times certainly makes me rethink of the past decisions that led to this point. Quite difficult.

RDKirk wrote in post #19206592
Take more chances earlier.

Marry later.

Truthfully I did both of those and it worked out well for my wife and I, we also put off having children until almost 9 years of marriage.

My line of thought was, getting married was a huge in life, so it's better to get used to each other before complicating things even more and in the unlikely chance it didn't work out we wouldn't be putting our children through all the crap that comes with getting divorced.

We figured it's just not right to destroy the life of our children just because we couldn't get along.

ra40 wrote in post #19227122
In many ways I'd thought of being more aggressive earlier and pushing to doing more complex shots. That's a hard choice because that has unknowns too. That helps build ones skill set though. The pathway into photography has not fared well for me with the pandemic. I may have been better off remaining in marketing and enjoying photography as a hobby. No certainity and so that isn't as easy to predict how some decisions may result.

I started in photography in my pre-teens, by the time I was 16 I was getting serious and I was making some money here and there, my greatest problem was I didn't know how to market myself and I had a fear my hobby which I loved, would become a job with all of the crap that comes with a job.

Looking back, other than trying weddings, which sucked, I think I took the correct path, I did find a niche which was stringing, it's not steady money but when I do capture a breaking news story it pays very well.

And one of the best aspects of photography I ever got into was video, it's a different world as one is adding audio to images, but once I learned the audio is the core of the story and video is the icing on the cake, I got really good at it.

I'm still stringing, but moving to video saved me from becoming irrelevant like print publications, newspapers and magazines have.

I never followed a standard path to success, probably because I am uneducated, none the less I have done very well in life and for the most part loved my jobs, which made working very easy to do.