My life is changing but not my interest in taking photographs. I got a great response to yesterday's images but they were only a small collection of what I shot.

 

Catching a ride to the Austin City Limits Music Festival.

The irony of "motoring" across the Pedestrian Bridge.

Life is always interesting. When you are working in the middle of your career you feel like you are too busy to even breathe. A bit later you feel like you are just calling it in. I guess I could go on photographing for clients and running a business until I drop over dead but this year has been a pivotal one for making decisions. Do you stay or do you go? Or...is there some middle ground?

At the end of next week I'll be turning 68. I've had a long and successful run as a photographer. I count myself lucky at 67 to be able do the same kinds of physical work I've always done as a photographer. Packing up gear. Hauling it upstairs and downstairs and across muddy fields in the heat. Getting home on red eye flights at one in the morning and keeping track of all the gear until the Uber drops me off at the office and I unload. My eyes still work and my hearing is fine. My balance is good and my swimming (when not injuring myself) is challenging but still achievable. Still fun. But as much as I've kept my energy, and my passion for making images for myself, I seem to be losing my motivation to make clients happy. To keep generating images for advertising campaigns. Even for nice, fun clients. It just feels .... futile and boring.

I've explored options. Many of my friends tell me I am lucky to own my own business so I can just ratchet back and take only the jobs that are really fun. They call it "lucky" that I can also keep my toes in the water, so to speak. To be able to just step in and say, "wow! that sounds fun! Let's do it." And that's an option, I guess. Picking and choosing. But it never really works out as neatly as that sounds.

People who are only motivated by money might look at the business and see an opportunity for me to go on and on until I'm physically spent, in order to get the money, take the tax advantages, and operate my life completely out of cash flow; putting off the time when I'll actually have to reach in and start taking money back out of retirement accounts and the like. 

More realistic friends generally look at the overview of my situation and ask, "Why in God's name are you still dealing with clients?!!!"  "Go and do your own work and have fun with it." The message is: retire already.  Even our wealth manager occasionally calls up and suggests I could spend more money. That I'm not in danger of running out too soon.

I guess my subconscious has been preparing for this for a couple of years. During the pandemic I stopped marketing to clients entirely. That decision worked well to separate the boring and commodity type jobs and clients from the real deals but the friends in advertising I've made over the last 40 years are more tightly bound than I would have imagined. They're not ready to let go. Not entirely. 

There are three or four companies that I still work with. They are kind and smart and their budgets tend to be...generous. Everyone else, from tech to healthcare to manufacturing, the ones I looked at as a necessary job in order to wrangle a profit, a "pay check", those have been culled. When they call me now my pat line is: "Well, we've stopped offering that particular service." and any other service they might need....

The sad reality is that most working photographers who've been successful have come to value the continuity that the work itself provides for us. They miss the work. I'm no different. The work creates a foundation and format in which to exist. We know where the boundaries are. We know which buttons to push. And good work fills the days with purpose. Retire and all of a sudden you have to confront an additional eight to ten hours a day without real, external structure. Retire and you need to find new purpose.

The trip to Montreal was a test run for real retirement. Could I be satisfied with a full week of self-directed photography and could I emotionally flip the switch from saver to spender? I discovered that I'm pretty good at self-propelled engagement. And I like the freedom to change plans at random, and to embrace a certain amount of chaos. The money doesn't really figure in.

Anyway, when I walked around yesterday with a "primitive" camera and a single lens (Sigma fp + 45mm) I realized that the freedom to photograph is the thing I most enjoy. Being able to leave the house in the middle of the morning and walk until it's time for dinner, just taking frames and soaking up the rich tapestry of life in the moment. That's delicious.

I spent the weekend trying to decide what to do with the business part of life and came to the conclusion that it's time to progressively step away. It's just not very meaningful to me anymore. And, as far as work in the advertising and marketing community goes it seems obvious to me that, at some point, everyone ages out. Priorities change and focus changes and we start more jealously guarding our time. And it's only fair, I think, to step aside so a younger generation can have more opportunities. They'll need em.

I'll miss the ability to rationalize buying the latest toys. Not that a lack of clients would stop me from buying expensive crap I don't need. But not having to prove something at every engagement robs the toys of some of their purpose; their fun.

I used to spend too much time surfing the web for photo gear and new techniques. New faces in industry and new ways of doing art. Now I'm spending a lot more time surfing the travel sites. Tossing money at hotel reservations and plane fares. Becoming newly appreciative of nonstop airline routes. 

Every place seems to have some sort of charm, some reason to visit. And with a camera in hand how can it not be fun? As long as we are careful to maintain the balance with swimming, dinners with friends, and time for myself everything should work out. 

It's time to claw back some time and to learn how to spend money effectively to achieve maximum fun. I think these are things I can work towards. Not much will change with my writing and blogging. That's still fun and it was never really about earning a paycheck or marketing to work clients. No workshops. No print sales. No advertising links.  It was just community and sharing and .... fun. And it's still fun. 

heading to the concert. Me? No. I'm heading in the opposite direction.

Been in Austin longer than I have. And still serving great stuff.

mannequin modeling day of the dead flowered headpieces.

the Summer version of the Stetson "Open Road" hat.

ooo. ACL Fest is such a class act...

A custom, silver cowboy hat.

the coffee shop inside the hat store makes a decent latté. Not perfect. 

But quite decent.

group tours always make me just a bit nauseous. 

The endless line for coffee at Jo's Coffee on S. Congress.

Crocs with applied decor. 

regular contrast.

Once again, the Sigma fp wows me and makes me reconsider.....everything. South Congress. Dancing at Jo's Coffee.

 

Paul and I had coffee at Trianon last week and we were both bemoaning the huge surplus of cameras and lenses that seem to show up from time to time in our respective workspaces. We talk a good game about downsizing and getting rid of the clutter. We talk about cameras and lenses we don't use enough and which we now need to get rid of. 

I came home and started scrounging through the cabinet that holds a bunch of cameras and lenses. Among the cameras that seem to have been left by the wayside since I bought the Q2 and the M cameras was the old Sigma fp. I thought I should probably sell it off. Same with the Panasonic S5. But, having made a number of photographs that I liked very much with the Sigma I thought I at least owed it one more spin. One more relaxed walk through the landscape of my Central Texas Reality. Just to see if subtracting it from the mix would be a mistake.

Yes. I would be a mistake. It's a great image maker. And I was using it in the worst case scenario. Naked camera body. No grips. No thumb rests. No EVF. One 45mm f2.8 lens. I walked through downtown and then over the bridge to South Congress Ave. Since I didn't bring the loupe or an EVF (don't have one for that camera) I had to resort to dirty baby diaper hold. Looking at the screen on the back on a day with full sun. But you know what? It worked. We can actually work with many fewer "features" than we think we need. 

The shots of dancers at Jo's Coffee are some of my favorites. Some of my best in a long time. Check them out and tell me if you agree.

I enjoyed every minute of my walk with the Sigma fp and its 45mm lens. It's not going anywhere. 

Please consider looking at the images big. Really big. Thanks!

Not fans of street photography. Leipzig, Germany 2013

 

There were actually three posts put up on October 15, 2013. Here's the second one:

10.15.2013

Have you noticed that some cameras get down on their hands and knees and just beg you to shoot with them?

I've bought cameras that I had high hopes for and they ended up languishing on a table after the first few attempts at making photographs. As time went by they seemed like more of a burden than a partner and off they went to owners with less romantic ideas about how cameras should feel. Then there are cameras that seem dorky and lumpish that seem to come alive as you use them, tossing a lasso around you and tightening their grip until you hardly think of shooting with anything else. I can never tell when I buy one just how I'll feel but after the first few dates you start to get a sense of which way the relationship will go. I stopped dating a woman once who was incredibly gorgeous and all my friends thought I was nuts. Until I told them that she liked to eat chicken noodle soup with her hands....

I got rid of a well respected Nikon camera because the sound of the shutter was so boring and offensively obvious.

I don't pretend that there's some sort of logical engineering references that inform my decisions. Some cameras work and some don't. I guess it's all very personal. I do know that eating soup with your fingers is not the way to go....