A few years ago I found myself becoming very burnt out on photography. Creating photographs of children is usually an absolute joy, but even photographing the most beautiful subjects, which happen to be children in my opinion, can become tedious when you do the same thing every day, especially when you're creating the images to satisfy someone else rather than yourself. When you're starting out in your business, your workload is light enough that every session can be a new and unique creative opportunity. I remember being so excited and nervous for every session, and heading out to Hobby Lobby or the fabric store or a yard sale to look for items to include in the photos to make them new and fresh. Of course, once you start doing more sessions, you can't do that every time. First of all, you would eat up any profits you may have, and second, you don't have the time! So you learn which types of shots parents tend to buy, and you recreate them consistently for people. Each session and each image is still unique because each child is unique, but the initial excitement of creating images can wane, especially once you encounter a difficult client or two. Luckily for me, I fell into a personal project that greatly helped me to become excited about photography again.
My project happened almost by accident, but has gone a long way to re-excite me. It has opened up my audience to a larger population and has also gained me professional recognition. Your personal project can be anything that has meaning to you. In my case, something I'd wanted to do for years all of a sudden fell into my lap. I was hosting a birthday party for a friend of mine at my studio. While talking with a friend of the birthday girl, I found out that he was starting a project interviewing homeless people so that he could publish a set of their stories. I immediately blurted out that I would create studio portraits of each of the people he interviewed. I'd always wanted to photograph homeless people in the studio, but it wasn't like I was going to go out and find them on my own. He jumped on the offer, and my personal project began. All of a sudden I was learning how to engage and capture an entirely different type of subject, and I found it very creatively inspiring.
My first subjects I photographed through this project were Andy and Charlene. Still, of all the homeless portraits I have created, this portrait of them stands out as the most beautiful and moving. I entered the image into a PPA-style competition through the Professional Photographers of Colorado, and won not only a Judge's Choice award, but also the Kodak Gallery Award, and went on to be accepted into the PPA Loan Collection. Winning awards like these definitely helps to inspire me to want to aim even higher.
Since then I have also photographed another different type of subject -- dogs. I ran a little special at the studio offering a session and 5x7 print to anyone who brought me a $25 donation made out to the local Humane Society. My experience photographing all these dogs was similar to the homeless project, in that I learned how to work with an entirely differently type of subject, so to me the images were all new and fresh. The enthusiasm in creating images of these new types of subjects has carried over into my daily work in photographing children. Photography itself has become more exciting for me again. When I find myself slipping again, I hope I will be able to push myself to find another project that will continue to inspire me and help me grow as a photographer.
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