Time Terrors

[TragicDante]

Time is our silent enemy, well mine anyway! If I’m getting a lot of pro work I don’t have enough time for my personal work. If I have no pro work I’m panicking. Juggling both is more difficult than getting a Canon user to accept that Nikon is better (Joking). Today I’m hanging some wall portraits, getting the studio cleaned and ready for a 7.00pm shooting, writing this in-between working on a previous shoot , watching what the lights doing outside so I can maybe fit in some personal work , listening to a pod cast, trying to be social to friends, networking, while watching what lights doing outside! Sometimes there just is not enough time for everything.

Photography is demanding and you just got to let something go, and it’s usually the personal work that suffers. I feel guilty sometimes that I don’t feed my own personal work nearly enough and it go’s hungry while my professional work fine dines and taunts from afar! Portraits pay the bills! Fine art feasts on it’s scraps, when we have a day free to really feed it, something else always pops up!
I feel is so important to give our personal work what it deserves so it can grow till tall, if only the day would offer us twice the hours. Should we raise our prices and do much less pro work, should we sleep less at the expense of our health? Or should we cut ourselves in half?

Face-book, twitter, and Flickr can eat the hours like burly King at breakfast. So I have promised myself to take at least one photography once a day, may it be the curve of my coffee mug, or the dust on the dashboard, because I feel it’s important to stay connected to our own personal work.
Why do we feel the need to drive 40 mile to the coast, find some good foreground subject matter, then wait two hours on a good sunset. We are photographers, our subject is light, therefore our subject is all around us! So if we feel work, advertising or Face-book is looming down on us like a disapproving school teacher, lets slow down, shut it off and give our creativity a good feed!

www.jonathanmclaughlinphotography.co.uk
www.tragicdante.deviantart.com

 

[joxby]

I dunno which is worse, no personal shoots through lack of time or, no personal shoots through lack of ambition.
Its kinda sad that some peeps can't muster up any enthusiasm to shoot unless they're being paid to do so.

 

[G2EWS]

This is nothing to do with being a photographer it is about having a busy work and social life and making the right life choices!

As a consultant in the past it was always important but difficult to get people to understand that they needed to make time for themselves and their families. With busy company Directors I would often get them to make an appointment once a week, in their diaries for time to take their family for a meal, to the pictures, swimming etc.

You will also reach the point of diminishing returns if you work too hard. I would explain that coming into work and leaving at a sensible time, along with breaks including a proper dinner would increase your work rate so much it almost beggars belief. So for example I run a company that should have about 6 times the personal compared to our competitors. Yet I have breakfast almost every morning with my Daughter, dinner almost every evening, arriving home at about 17:45 - 18:00 and almost never work weekends. Well one Saturday in the last few years to be precise!

So get your diary out, choose a time for you and put it in there. This is good advice and you will be glad you did, as relaxing doing what you want, rather than what you have to do is important.

Finally if you get this right, you will hopefully enjoy Monday's just as much as Friday's. I do and life is one happy roller coaster.

Best regards

Chris