Chapter 1: Personal Discovery
Everyone is the child of his past.
— Edna G. Rostow
There is something in all of us that was there from the very beginning — a desire, an interest, a passion that makes us happy. Whether a vocation or avocation, to do what you love every day seems a luxury, yet it is possible. Through evaluating your current situation, interests, skills, and experience, you may begin to see a pattern emerge that helps guide you in your journey. Making money is fundamental for survival, but so is recognizing and clarifying your inspiration — this is what fuels our energy and success in any endeavor.
© Erin Manning
My journey
I cannot imagine anything more gratifying than dreaming up an idea, bringing it to life, and figuring out how to share it. As much as I enjoy expression and creativity in my photography, I am also thrilled whenever I can make money by marketing and selling my work. This passion for art and commerce has driven much of my life, but it was not fully realized until I synthesized my experience, interests, skills, and desire.
In the beginning
As far back as I can remember, I have always been an artistic, enterprising sort of person — from making potholders on a loom and selling them door-to-door when I was five, to dragging a refrigerator box home at ten so I could turn it into a lemonade stand. I made love beads in the ’70s (which I’m modeling in Figure 1.1) and sold them to my classmates, and created wooden rings in eighth-grade woodshop that I marketed as the hippest jewelry in homeroom. I was always trying to figure out what I could create, share, and sell, partly from a desire to express myself and partly because I wanted to make money.
1.1
Me in the seventh grade, wearing the love beads I made and sold to all my friends at school
I was also interested in photographs and photography. My parents had a book that was popular at the time entitled The Family of Man. Looking through the images of people from all over the world touched me and inspired me to take notice of people’s faces, their emotions and expressions. I also discovered an old family photo box at the top of the hall closet. I pored over every old black-and-white image of my relatives, mesmerized by the stories and faces. I yearned to connect with these long-lost souls from my family history and invite them into my life. My grandmother heard about my interests and gave me an Instamatic camera for Christmas that year. I recall being delighted with the power and creativity to document life as I experienced it, from setting up imaginary scenarios to capturing authentic moments in my everyday life. I developed the film with money from my lemonade stands.
Progress
My foray into an adult education and career was full of experiments, jumps, and jolts. After a brief stint at a college in northern Wisconsin, I decided to make the jump and move to California, the land of fun in the sun and what I saw as opportunity. I arrived here without much money, or a job, or a car, or even any friends, but I did have a place to stay for a few weeks and despite family opinions, projections, and objections, I found work, made a life, and ended up staying. Over the course of the next ten years, I attended a few different colleges and had many different sales careers. Most sales jobs fed my desire to be independent, to connect with people, and to make some money, but none were ever creatively fulfilling. At a crossroads in my 30s, I took a battery of tests at a career counseling office in hopes of discovering what I was meant to do in my life. After much ado, I was informed that I was an AE, which stands for Artistic Enterprising. This validated what I knew from the very beginning and inspired me to begin the journey toward honoring my creativity in the world of work.
The journey was not a straight road that led immediately to my destination, but a process of self-evaluation, education (both formal and practical), testing business models, and working at different kinds of photography, while gradually refining my career path to take advantage of my talents and to discover the kinds of work I enjoyed doing most. Along the way, I made mistakes, experimented, took leaps of faith, and had some “luck” that never would have occurred had I not prepared the ground for it and responded with immediacy and enthusiasm. Here, I want to share elements of my process and the resulting lessons learned in order to help you take steps toward reaching your goals. It helps to have some lessons before you go out and ride the trails, so to speak, as in Figure 1.2.
1.2
This image is a metaphor for beginning your journey as you forge a path to find your creative point of view. © Erin Manning
Self-evaluation
What motivates you to take a photograph? Is it a desire to create and express? To document? To control? To hide? To perform? To explore? To love? Maybe all of the above, or none of the above? It may seem a little unclear or even unnecessary, yet questioning ourselves and gaining an understanding of what makes us tick is an important process — it’s a step toward the evolution of self- and life-purpose. If you discover one new thing about yourself in this chapter and apply it toward your photography, you are that much closer to the self-knowledge that can lead to achieving your goals.
Assessing interests, skills, and experience
We all share a common interest in making money with our photography, but every one of us comes from a different situation. In the spirit of kindling ideas and providing inspiration, I’m going to share my story. I hope that my experience resonates with you and sends a motivating message: It is possible to find your passion and make money too.
When I decided to begin my photography business, I was in no position to drop everything else in my life and dive in head first. I was working in business development for a large corporation and was on the ten-year plan to finish a long-awaited college degree at night. I needed to survive, I had financial commitments, and I wasn’t willing to live like a pauper in my adulthood. I had been photographing people, events, and landscapes for years as an amateur, but felt I needed more technical knowledge about lighting and the general photography business to be truly serious. I enrolled in weekend photography classes at the local university, attended workshops, joined photo associations, networked with other photographers, read every book I could find about photography, and practiced on anyone I could convince to be my model. I knew if I improved my photographic skills by learning and doing everything possible in the world of photography, things would work out. As I learned and gained more confidence, I opened up shop as a weekend family portrait photographer by printing up a business card and taking out an ad in the local newspaper. I had one camera and shot on location, the beach. It was fun photographing families and kids with my own journalistic style. People liked my images and referred me to other families. In a short period of time, I built up a portfolio that helped me land my first commercial photography job. It was exciting, but I felt I could do more and I needed to make more money in order to quit my day job. I just wasn’t sure how to do it. I was frustrated.
As time went on, I thought my business development skills could be an asset at a stock imagery company in Los Angeles, so I continued to work in business development, but at a place that brought me closer to my passion. I learned a lot about the stock photography industry and was able to keep all my endeavors in balance until I was laid off a year later and my world came tumbling down. I was stunned, but viewed this as my opportunity to make major changes in my life, to slow down and evaluate my interests, skills, and experience, to ensure that I was investing my time and energy in the areas I truly felt passionate about, and to make money. Sometimes when things go wrong, it’s not all bad. It’s an opportunity for growth and change that would not have happened otherwise.
Give yourself an honest assessment to start. As you go through an examination of your personality, your inspiration, your likes and dislikes, your strengths and weaknesses, and your skills and experience, listen to what comes up and don’t reject anything. Just make a list. Everything evolves, and so will your photography business. You are going to be learning new things and changing within the context of your environment. Once you choose a path, it’s not set in stone, but a place to begin.
What’s your personality? Do you consider yourself an extrovert or introvert? Are you comfortable in large groups of people, or do you prefer to work alone? If you are very shy and feel awful about the thought of directing a large group of people in a photograph, you may want to either work through your shyness with directing techniques and be prepared to feel uncomfortable while you pr...
