Light and the Landscape

One of the hardest things about being self-employed is achieving and maintaining a good work/life balance.  The tendency to want to “put in a few extra hours” is hard to resist, I’ll admit.  But making time for photography, and by photography I mean personal work, is so important to our overall creative growth it continues to amaze me at how many working professionals out there fail to set aside even a bare minimum, say 2 hours a week, to just get out and shoot - for the love of it.

Like most landscape photographers, I shoot landscapes for fun (& sometimes profit) and do commercial work (tabletop, architecture, product, etc.) to pay the bills.  I also offer a fine art photographic printing service to photographers, which not only brings in additional income, but also affords me the opportunity to connct with other like minds, see how other artists are working, and what sort of images they are capturing.

It was while prepping some files I received from a local photographer that this concept of work/life balance really hit me.  His work was technically perfect.  No dust, no soft corners, tack sharp from end to end, and no digital artifacts.  But there seemed to be something missing.  A quick phone call provided the answer.

Turns out this fellow had been holed up in his studio for the past 4 weeks finishing up a catalog shoot for a major retailer.  The technical requirements for this particular job were plentiful and the opportunities for creativity limit - he simply had to shoot some 2000 nuts and bolts on a plain white backdrop.  I believe he referred to the job as “mind-numbing”.  I can only imagine!

He said on the third day he stopped, walked outside his studio, and snapped a few shots of the buildings, just to give his eyes a much needed shot of color, texture, and visual diversity.  He thought one of the shots of an abandoned building across the street would make a nice print, so he sent it my way.

When he saw the print, he immediately knew the reason I had called.  Not only was the work not in line with his normal subject matter, but the missing element, he discovered, was simply - passion.  He had been so caught up in the commercial side he had forgotten what makes a compelling image.

We talked at length about our respective businesses, and later decided we should both make time to go shoot somewhere together.