“How do I find this blog of yours?” my boss asked me one day-as I seemed to spend most of my time thinking about blogging and not nearly enough time thinking about portrait photography. Well, I do blog about taking photos once in a while.
So my mind was doing a bit of racing, outside of a few passing comments on cold, heartless corporations, had I said anything really bad about my job? Nothing sprang to mind, but then, my idea of something bad and his might be different.
Blogging, for all it’s open for the world to read qualities, is often something that the writers of blogs don’t want their co-workers, employers, or well, anyone they know-reading. This is especially understandable if you have a very conservative job and spend your weekends dressed in black rubber. I have no such hidden life. My real world is a bit dull in fact.
But the life inside may be just as damning. Blogging gets people into trouble, mainly when they are bad mouthing the company they work for-and really, for many blogs this is there whole reason for existing. No one likes what they do for a living, with the odd exception of a few movie stars and a couple of best selling writers-who tell the world very earnestly that they are the luckiest people in the world for having the jobs they have.
I have never felt all that lucky about my own work. It is good, but it is not great. I have had dreams of opening my own portrait studio, but the reality of the cost and the small profit margins have kept me on the sidelines. I have thought about doing odd photo jobs like beach photography or taking pictures for one of many eBay businesses out there, but the pay and the time investment has never matched up.
So I find myself pretty much at the best place I have ever been as a photographer-and as Billy Crystal said in City Slickers-it ain’t that great.
The current job pays the best, has the best benefits, and for all my complaining, the equipment is not as bad as it could be. I have been at this for a while, and I tend to do the same thing over and over on every set. That’s the job. Sometimes people feel rushed and complain about me. The idea of leaving the job is an occasional pleasant distraction, the idea of being fired is insusceptible. What will I do when this job runs it natural course? There is maybe one more Directory company I have not worked for-and that is that. But I don’t really want to do that either-it would just be one more excuse to travel around the country. And I do like that whole traveling around the country thing.
And yet, my style of shooting is so very ingrained into me. I have spent too long doing rapid fire portraits for screaming kids and screaming parents. I often think of going on to product shots, this would require a whole new set of skills-and all the jobs are likely going to young hotshots fresh out of college.
And so I blog-though I have been told more than once that my writing is not what it could be. The dream is to make three hundred dollars a day, from my current best of maybe thirty or forty a day-and a normal day being around five-ten dollars. A long way from The South of France-my ultimate Goal.
And so I take portraits and I hope for the best. I don’t know about anyone else, but for me, the threat of losing a job has never motivated me to do better-only to do a better job of job hunting. I have a pretty good set of skills, they just wear thin after a pretty short time-say two or three years. The work becomes depressing and oppressive. I like the money, and though it should be a motivator, it seldom is. I never have enough money-I keep waiting for that Steve Martin/Stephen King moment when I realize I am rich, but it hasn’t quite happened yet.
My fellow bloggers are like phantoms that drift in and out-not quite real, though I have gotten a couple of comments. The Google Users who stop by and make up most of my traffic are fleeting as well. My RSS subscribers are getting fewer and fewer, which is not much of a surprise to me since I was never sure why most of them signed up anyway. And so I rant and rave and like a lot of bloggers-don’t worry too much about what I am saying.
But it is all good, life goes on, at least for the moment. I guess I am more likely to bore to poor old boss than offend him, I need to find a few new things to talk about.
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