5 things that suck the fun out of photography ^
Double Negative (a photography podcast by will malone)
As a follow-up to Photography is Dead, Will of the Future is a podcast where Will Malone looks to what’s next in the world of photography and creativity. BUT then I let it get too general and unfocused as like many things in my life. So we are back with the final name of this podcast: Double Negative (a photography podcast by will malone) where I talk about issues revolving around the photography world today and explore this new era of my own photography work. Topics to include: film in the modern day, AI, selling prints, and much much more.
Episode 1 is out! In this episode, I talk about keeping my eye on the ball of what my actual artistic goals vs. spending time promoting what I’m doing on social media. In this episode, I talk about the balance of that.
Also, we’re back to audio-only which I much prefer. Enjoy as I finally find some momentum in podcasting and photography again.
014 The Photographer Song and Dance
In this episode, I talk about how much the photography world has changed in regards to what is required of photographers in the modern era.
010 Ten Things Photographers Don't Have To Do
In this episode, I’ve made a list of 10 things you feel like you have to do as a photographer, but don’t. Maybe some of this stuff can apply to other types of artists in other fields as well.
Number 1-
You don’t have to follow trends or attempt algorithm tricks. There’s really no creativity in trends, which is obviously a problem since it makes social media all feel predictable and boring. It doesn’t tell a story, it just means that you’re motivated by this desire to go viral. The desire to get views often overshadows any other work that needs to get done and de-prioritizes all of it. Getting views or traffic may be useful in the short term, but if you’re in this for the long term this strategy totally collapses. Basically, if the motivation is views and attention and “going viral” you’re more subject to changes in how these platforms work more than anything. After a few months, you can kind of forget what you’re doing and why you’re doing it in the first place. Those who follow trends will almost always burn out, or just fade away after a while. But, in the short term it feels really good.
Number 2-
You don’t have to appeal to everyone. If I look at the top 100 podcasts or top 100 Youtube videos, it’s stuff I would personally never be interested in watching or listening to. I have my own tastes, and the expectation that we should all be pursuing a Joe Rogan level or ceiling-less growth is insane. Not only are we not all able to do that, but not all of us have the tastes that can reach those heights. Maybe we are into some weird sub-genres of photography that can only reach 5,000-10,000 followers. We need to pay attention to what our tastes are and be okay with the fact that they may not match most people.
Number 3-
You don’t have to use social media platforms all the time. The demands of being active on all social media is basically a full-time job. Pick focusing on the one that fits you best. Your content isn’t going to be good if you aren’t feeling it. There’s plenty of successful people that don’t post regularly everywhere, and that’s because, they spend more time focusing on the work itself. In fact, maybe it’s better to focus on the work itself anyway. People don’t listen as much to those that talk alot (I wouldn’t know what that’s like), but a quiet person’s words have far more impact.
Number 4-
You don’t have to chase perfection. There’s no such thing as perfect. Perfect comes from comparison. Maybe you see what other people are doing, and you see it as some definition of “perfect”, and you won’t be happy until you reach that level. Then you end up being really hard on yourself because you’re never quite able to attain your self-imposed definition of “perfection”. That’s usually what it comes down to: ingratitude or dissatisfaction with what is. The quest for perfection is very different from desire to be better. The desire to be better is attainable. Even if we don’t know it, we are getting better every single day. The quest for perfection is a chase for Bigfoot. Perfection doesn’t exist. Truthfully, no one really wants to look at “perfect” work anyway. We want to relate to other humans and see flaws, because everyone has flaws. It’s just a fact of life.
Number 5-
You don’t have to specialize. Specializing is great for a certain segment of photographers, but most photographers will shoot a general selection of stuff AND THAT’S FINE. Those photographers probably will end up being more well rounded and have more technical skills than those who focus only on one thing. The key is to just get really good at being who you are. Every time I try to focus too heavily on portrait photography, maybe I start craving landscape photography. It’s okay to be well-rounded and do different things. My tastes around what I shoot changes with the seasons. A good photographer is curious more than anything, and it’s possible to be curious about a whole range of things.
Number 6-
You don’t have to shoot a photo every day. Shooting a photo every day will make you crazy. I’ve done 9 365 projects now, and I’ll probably never do one again. It’s just not always the best way to work. Sometimes, it’s helpful to go out even if you don’t feel like it, but after doing it day in and day out, you can really start to really get burned out over it. I love photography more than anything, but I’d rather do it fresh instead of it feeling forced. Out of a daily photo project, you may have 100 photos or less that you’re actually happy with, and that’s just because we aren’t machines. I’ve always been driven by this desire to be a machine, but my best photos usually come after a long break of photo taking. Now, there is a benefit to practicing every day FOR SURE, but the need to get a photo every day AND post it isn’t necessarily the healthiest way to live. Also, letting images breathe is always good.
Number 7-
You don’t have to make money doing what you love. Since social media became a thing, I feel like everyone acts like they need a side-hustle of some kind. You don’t! It’s allowed for you to just do things for enjoyment rather than having to justify it to people. I grew up feeling the need to justify everything to everyone for whatever reason. But it’s great to spend money on doing something you love without it paying you back. Maybe I want to travel somewhere just to take photos that I want to take. Great. Money ruins everything. We are allowed to have fun and we don’t have to explain ourselves all the time.
Number 8-
You don’t have to take criticism from everyone you know. Maybe you shot a series of photos, but your family or friends think…it’s weird. Boy, we all love to hear that. We can’t take in criticism from everyone, but for some reason we think everyone we know is entitled to give us an opinion on our work. They aren’t. Make what you make and only care about the opinions of those around you who will only have valuable feedback. I only have a couple people I go to who really actually understand what I’m doing and will give me good feedback. I love being told ways I need to improve, it makes me better at what I do, but not everyone has the right to offer that. Opening my self up to opinions of people who have no idea what they are talking about is just masochism. That goes for family, friends, or people in comment sections. Have a good circle of people around where you all want to help each other grow and don’t take notes outside that.
Number 9-
You don’t have to be super invested in the photo world. In fact, photographers are observers of the world, so it’s maybe better for the work itself that you don’t live in the photo specific world constantly. It’s great to have a community of those you trust, but that’s a quality game, not quantity. I used to work in a print shop where I interacted with photographers all the time, and they all had the same photo-related insecurities because they hung out with other photographers who imposed a set of photography rules on them. There are no rules, but if you’re part of a community of people like photographers, rules for how you need to do things get made up all the time. When you don’t steep yourself in the photography world, you don’t absorb those rules, so you’re more free creatively in my view. Again, it’s great to have friends who have similar interests, but if that’s the bubble you live in exclusively, it’s going to limit the work you put out.
Number 10-
This one is more true than ever: You don’t need to buy expensive gear to take great photos. In fact, as time goes on, cheaper gear goes a lot farther. Somehow, my photography gear has gotten smaller and cheaper as time goes on because I now have a deeper understanding of what I actually need and what is total overkill. My best photos come from cameras that aren’t a distraction because they are more simple and have limited features. Less is more.
We could get more specific in this list for sure like: You don’t have to shoot RAW, you don’t have to shoot with your lens wide open, when you shoot film you don’t only have to shoot 90s cars and gas stations. But I feel like there are larger pressures in the modern day photography world that take up a lot of space in our brains that really affect the work more than anything. The other stuff is just menial details that don’t really matter in the long run.
I see people arguing about whether it’s crazy to shoot JPEGs or Nikon or whatever, and that stuff can be fun nerd stuff for a moment, but I’m more interested in larger concepts around this art form that I love so much. Photography opened up my entire way of thinking about creativity and changed how I see the world, and I’m immensely grateful for it. I just try to keep it all in perspective.
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In this week’s recommendations I want to recommend a book titled Traffic by Ben Smith. It’s kind of depressing, but it’s a great history of the age of new media we lived in from 2006 to now. Ben Smith used to work for Buzzfeed and this is basically their story of their rise and fall. Buzzfeed and Gawker and publications like it were all built on this addiction to traffic. Basically, the goal was to tailor content that piqued all of our most lizard brain curiosities. Gawker grew by posting sex tapes, Buzzfeed grew with quizzes like “Which Disney Character Are You?” And more. At the end of the day, it’s all kind of junk and wasn’t built to last.
Buzzfeed specifically, relied so heavily on Facebook driving traffic to their site that once Facebook changed the algorithm it threatened to devastate their entire business.
The blogging era was where I come from on the internet. The blog style of the early 2000s is what has informed my writing and everything I do on the internet. I remember when alot of the events in Traffic happened because I was pretty deep into all that stuff at a pretty young age. I remember this excitement about everything: a phone you didn’t need a stylus to use, that was also a browser and and iPod, a platform where you could post something and tons of people all over the world can see it, and the idea that news can just travel faster and be made quicker than ever before. But it’s 2023 now and all that stuff has reached maturity, and maybe…a lot of what we were excited about ended up being…not so great for society.
The problem with a quest for a following or numbers is that it drives a sort of nihilism, which causes them to create content, not because they believe in it, but because they believe it will drive traffic. And that gets pretty gross.
And that’s it, thanks for listening and/or watching! See you next week.
007 The Coming Golden Age of Photography and Creativity
WILL OF THE FUTURE IS NOW AVAILABLE AS A VIDEO AS WELL! Go subscribe to the Youtube Channel in order to get the video version every week.
I believe we are about to enter the Golden Age of Photography and Creativity.
Disappointment with the status quo is in the air. The status quo of creative being that there’s just not that much amazing stuff being made now. Movies are focused on cinematic universes and franchising rather than telling a great story. Television is really the epicenter of the best entertainment right now, but many do feel algorithmic and designed to keep you watching without really giving you anything in return. Social media has become extremely bland due to the growth hacking epidemic, so now many people’s social media all looks the same whether it’s photography or anything else. Not only that, but the content that seems to grow the most is content ABOUT making content. And I get it, there’s a pressure to follow the algorithms to a T or else all this be for nothing.
Many of us have lost sight of what or why we are even making things on the internet. The idea that we won’t make things unless we get good numbers makes sense for a business trying to move products, but not necessarily for creatives or artists who should be in this for one thing: Making the best thing they can make.
For the past 10-12 years, I’m going to be honest: I’ve felt like kind of a loser. On March 11, 2011 I started my first 365 project. It was so fun. The photos are terrible, but taking a picture every day and making sure to post it on time was almost more of a thrill than the photo itself. I loved it. Each day was a new experiment. Only people at my college really payed attention and a small group of people followed along and wanted to be in it. It was just super cool. I didn’t care about hashtags or know anything about algorithms or anything like that. I just focused on making something and posting it. That’s it.
I’ve never really been able to shake that impulse. The impulse to make and not worry too much where it goes or where it ends up. Over time though, I’ll be honest, that impulse has kind of made me feel like a little bit of a loser. I knew photographers and other creative people who were surpassing me in followers and growing all around me, and yet I was just focused on trying to get better and honing in on what I should be making. I get asked all the time “Why don’t you have more followers?” Or people giving me tips on how to grow in this or that way.
In my heart of hearts, however, there’s really only one way to grow: Make stuff that’s real. Make things that are a reflection of how much you care about something. You’ll fire stuff off and send stuff out into the world with no response a lot of the time, but eventually, if you’re saying something at the time people are listening, you may eventually reach that intersection of people’s attention. (But it’s not a guarantee)
One may not grow much or fast, but making the best thing we can possibly make and focusing our efforts on that will help us sleep more soundly at night. We don’t have long on this earth, so do we want to spend our time focusing on numbers of followers? 4 followers, 400 followers, or 4000 followers, the game should be the same. There’s no joy in only pursuing “what works”.
———
I think people misunderstand what AI is doing to creativity. I’ve heard many comments about how AI is coming for creatives, and the fact is…it’s not. It’s coming for menial tasks that creatives do.
On the local podcast I work on called Electric City Buzz, we just interviewed one of the top local realtors in the area. She talked about how she sees her job, and I think she’s looking at it the right way: Basically, it’s her job to curate and give her clients actual useful information for who they actually are. That means, she has to listen to their needs and signals in conversations about who they actually are. Then, she takes all that information she gathers and only shows them the properties that would be relevant to their situation. She doesn’t just take them to random houses on the market, she pays attention to their wants and needs (that go deeper than price). Zillow and services like it are replacing the need for realtors (kind of like AI is supposedly doing for creatives, basically democratizing the tools), and a good realtor now has to go a step above what Zillow can offer in order to be successful. A lot of realtors are still operating under the belief that their selling point is their gate-keeping the house-buying process, despite the gate being busted open.
Photographers and videographers are struggling with the same thing: Many think “the camera” and their skill with it is what separates them from everyone else. The fact is, the camera has been co-opted by everyone now, so the camera itself doesn’t matter. This has been happening for years now, but AI is accelerating it.
What matters is ideas. What matters is creative process. What matters are the stories we are able to communicate with the tools.
Knowing how to use the tools or staying up to date with them is always beneficial, sure. The perfect marriage for the future is to have great ideas AND know how to put the pieces together. That means maybe even taking advantage of AI tools to learn how to be a photographer, a filmmaker, a writer, podcaster, all of it! Because a mic is no different from a camera now. They are just tools with which we express ideas.
——
Like I said, the awareness of the mediocrity of the moment is in the air. I’ve felt it, maybe you’ve felt it, but when COVID hit, it feels like we all hit a slump. I think we’re getting fed up with it a bit. Those who are creative are trying to solve the problem at the moment, so when everyone starts feeling the same thing, that’s when you know something is about to shift.
Take comedies for example: Movies like Knocked Up and The Hangover started this boom of raunchy comedies that really took over the movies from about 2009 to 2014 or so. Over the past few years, we’ve had almost no comedies AT ALL. Whether you can attribute that to some political correctness or something else, doesn’t matter. Over the past couple years, I’ve started to hear movie goers, critics, and comedians observe this fact. Suddenly, this year, I’ve now heard announcements and trailers for a new string of comedies and raunchy comedies again. Bert Kreicher’s The Machine, the Jennifer Lawrence movie No Hard Feelings, and Joy Ride, just to name a couple. Because there was a void, people noticed it, and now it’s getting addressed.
Everything moves in seasons. There’s just so much dissatisfaction in the air right now in the creative world, then someone or many someones will come along, add something new, change the way we think about everything, and then we will live through a Golden Age without realizing it only to notice it when it ends. Casey Niestat started a Golden Age in vlogging, Marvel Studios started a Golden Age in story-telling in movies, Tony Robbins started a Golden Age in self-help and motivational speaking, Apple started a Golden Age in…a lot of stuff. Technology. Exciting revolutions take place, then they become the norm and then we begin to look for new influential freshness.
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AI is bringing the discussion of “Everyone is a Photographer” or “Everyone is a filmmaker” or “Everyone is a podcaster” to its logical conclusion. I think the age of that particular gripe is ending, and I’m ready for it. Going from black and white to color, film to digital, DSLR to iPhone, all of the advancement we’ve seen that makes photography easier to the masses all leads to this.
Adobe Firefly has been announced (I’m waiting for my invite), and it’s really changing the game.
I’ve always been dissatisfied with my video editing skills and now AI is able to bridge that gap for me and make it easier. Which means, the real time needs to be spent developing the ideas I’m looking to communicate. Basically, to me, it’s all about the fun part now.
I believe, now, more than ever, there’s a huge value to experimenting and taking creative risks. Use AI, make weird stuff, play around. Curiosity is the fuel. Those who are curious and focused on trying to make their work better are the ones that win in the end. It feels like a Sisiphian task most days, and I think real creative people will never really have their curiosity satisfied. But I think the pieces are moving into place in order to really reward people who think that way.
004 Substance over Style
This past week I finished filming my first full video in a very long time.
Honestly, I’ve had a lot of practice making videos over the years, but it’s still tough for me because I have ZERO faith in myself to put the pieces together well for a prolonged period of time. A short reel or TikTok is easy because no one is paying attention to that long, but for a more longform video, I have to trust that the writing and structure is a solid enough base for the footage to work.
But a big part of what I hate about filming videos these days is that Adobe Premiere sucks hard. My laptop will barely run it anymore. So, I’m just going to use this video to learn an entirely new video editing software, and everyone is telling me to go with Da Vinci Resolve. We’ll see how that goes. It’s daunting to learn something new when I at least have serviceable knowledge of a different software, but shaking up our knowledge of the tools seems to be one of the absolute biggest needs today.
Here’s something I’ve observed: Those successful in marketing and social media have almost no knowledge of the Adobe suite. Many photographers have no idea how to use Photoshop. Many people bypass the need of a graphic designer with Canva. CapCut is an app that people are using to edit all their short form video. I’m over here with my decades long use of all these legacy tools which often are over-complicating EVERYTHING I do. (Not that I’m all that skilled with any of them)
It’s obviously beneficial to have specific knowledge and command of deep tools. But it also can be a hinderance. Luminar AI and Luminar Neo are plugins I have in Photoshop that weirdly help me avoid having to spend a lot of time in Photoshop. I can clean up a headshot and remove power lines instantly rather than spending a ton of time healing stuff out.
Just like buying a ton of camera gear all the time, in most use cases, these deep tools are going to have diminishing returns. That’s because the future isn’t about the tools. It’s about the CONTENT.
And not the “content” but the content of the content. You know what I’m saying?
I think we look at deep knowledge of Photoshop and other tools like some sort of protective shield, we’re probably going to lose in the long run. I think someone who makes stuff with a phone and a couple apps but has really great ideas will end up winning every time.
It’s all about substance. And substance isn’t the same as style.
When I dreamed up my first video, I had a “look” in mind. It would be flashy, and kind of “over-edited”, honestly, as is the style of the times. But leaning on style over substance implies that I don’t have much faith in the actual meat of the video, so it will be doomed to suck.
And, I’m not really that flashy of a guy. The more I sat down to hone the video to what it needed to be, the more I realized the “effects” don’t really matter at all.
I think because of our brief time spent watching videos and photos in our feeds we are forgetting what substance even is, and replacing substance with flash. Flash has kind of become substance to a lot of people now. Photography on TikTok for instance, is about “photo tricks” where the meaning of the photo is the trick itself.
Maybe that’s why I’m so obsessed with podcasts as a medium: it’s depth and substance’s LAST STAND. It’s the last place where going deep is encouraged. Where else could I write essays that anyone would pay attention to? Medium? Linkedin? Those places aren’t my scene, man. I’m a long winded guy, so I don’t really like being put in a tight minute and a half box all the time.
Joe Rogan makes 3 hour+ podcasts, and he’s the biggest podcaster in the world. He built an empire off of taking clips from those mega-long podcasts and posting them. Sometimes they are 5 minutes, and sometimes they are 15-20, and all those clips are about something. I know people who only watch his clips and never the actual episodes. There’s almost a formula to how his podcasts work: they are fluff then substance then fluff, fluff, some more fluff, then substance again. And it kind of goes on like that for hours, almost like a “normal conversation”
But I think people believe: Oh if I have a really long conversation with someone, I’ll have clips and all that just like Rogan. And no, turns out he’s a conversation artist. He keeps it moving, but is always talking about some sort of topic. Most people don’t have the conversation skill he has, out of the box. His really old first episodes, by the way, are TERRIBLE. But at the time, no one was really doing the podcast thing like that, so he managed to build an audience. Over time, he’s gotten thousands of episodes of practice so now, he’s gotten his whole “thing” down pat. He’s really great at being Joe Rogan.
If you start thinking about conversations, you’ll realize that most conversations we have are about nothing. A good conversation is a give and take where two people are working together, but sometimes one or both parties isn’t on the same page on that. Imagine being at a networking event and trying to talk to a scientist. You know how hard it is to get a super smart person to have a good conversation? They live in their own heads often, and yet Rogan can pull a conversation out of a Mushroom Behavioral Psychologist that is worth listening to.
As far as style: his style is almost that he has NONE. His set up is super simple and almost ugly to watch. TikTok is full of podcast clips from way better looking podcast set ups, and yet, the substance doesn’t exist like it does with Rogan.
So that’s awesome! We can make a crappy looking product and it could grow despite looking crappy, right? No! The substance and visual crappiness cannot be equal. The substance has to far outweigh the visual crap to work at all. We are taught to hold style and substance in equal regard, which I think, is TOTALLY WRONG.
The minimum requirement for what will be good almost never comes from the “look” of the thing. It’s ALWAYS the substance of a thing.
Style should only exist to help boost the substance. In our “case study” of Joe Rogan, his barebones visual style simply exists to get clips of his marathon podcast out there. Podcasts are next to impossible to promote because there’s a barrier to find them, so video is a really great way to promote the content of each episode.
This past week I posted a Reel/TikTok/Short of my simple podcast set up. It’s the set up I’m using right this second for this very podcast. It’s an Audio-Technica Mic, a Zoom H6 recorder, and a table top stand. Why is it so simple? Well, for one, I can set it up and tear it down easily. But mostly, it’s not distracting to me or my guests. It allows a conversation or thought to flow without the intrusion of making sure all this dumb technology isn’t crapping the bed. I’m a photographer: when a camera is on, I’m thinking about what’s going on with the camera. It’s just my nature. That’s why my podcast set up is basically a recorder and a mic. Press one button, then talk. Almost nothing can go wrong, and the ideas are unimpeded by visual flare and nonsense. Hence why I’m struggling to make this a video podcast- I’m realizing that it could totally ruin it if I do it with 3 cameras and a studio. It has to be organic.
But again, people have to actually know it exists, so there’s a balance. But again, we put style ahead of everything because it makes promotion easier in the short term.
If I were to make a formula, I’d say Style cannot be equal to Substance. Substance cannot be less than Style. Substance has to 10x Style in order to make something work.
Why do we want to make podcasts or videos or photos or sharable content in this current and future climate? Is it because we are told it’s what we should be doing? Is it because everyone else is doing it? Is it because we perceive that whoever is successful because they have a video in a cool podcast studio or a perfect life on instagram?
Or is it because we have something to say? And a medium of choice with which to say it?
Just ask Werner Herzog: ‘If you do not have an absolutely clear vision of something, where you can follow the light to the end of the tunnel, then it doesn’t matter whether you’re bold or cowardly, or whether you’re stupid or intelligent. Doesn’t get you anywhere.’
Substance only comes from a clear vision. An intent. A goal. Joe Rogan has questions and he wants them answered. Satisfying his curiosities is his ultimate goal, I believe. Otherwise, how could he pull off having such a wide selection of guests in this world that requires everyone to stay in their particular niche lane?
People like substance, whether they realize it or not. There’s just not very much of it out there right now. People will listen to a 10 minute podcast or a 3 hour podcast, it doesn’t matter. It’s about the quality of content. Late Night with Jimmy Fallon has low ratings now because there’s no substance to it. Nothing to really connect to other than a few chuckles and an advertisement for a celebrity’s next movie or whatever. A photographer who sells prints will probably sell the same print or prints over and over again, the ones with the most story attached to it. The ones that people feel connected to the most, despite there maybe being 20 others available to buy on your website.
I don’t think this is a bad thing though. It actually makes life easier. Posting just to post, or making just to make, is officially, a huge waste of time. Don’t do it! But if you have a good idea and you want to try it out, try it out!
I’ve brought him up before, but I’ll bring up my buddy Greg Steele. He’s a family lawyer here in town (we actually went to college together), but he was struggling with social media so we decided to collaborate to try and up his game a bit. It’s hard to make the social media of a family lawyer fun to anyone, because, the stuff he has to deal with by nature, is sad and depressing. So we decided to start by making it a resource. We just make videos with Greg clarifying legal terms like “Guardian Ad Litem” or answering questions like “How long do I have to wait to get divorced in SC?” After making a bunch of those, we decided to throw some fun ones in the middle that are called “Weird Laws with Greg” where he just talks about weird laws he found like playing pinball being illegal until you’re 18. (Yes, that’s a real law in SC)
I really love these videos, because they are extremely unique to Greg. Only Greg can do them this way. They are generating some great word of mouth because of who Greg is, but they are also filling in blanks and providing knowledge to people. They are simple, shot on a phone with a wireless mic, and that’s it. He’s not distracted by a ton of gear in his face, and he just does his thing.
Making stuff is hard. Some people can do it more easily than others, but creating media in this world feels like a next to impossible challenge sometimes. At the end of the day, we just have to make what is true to us, not what is true to everyone else. I think the rules of the algorithm are a great starting point for at least giving us some creative constraints and rules, but it can’t be all about that. We have to make stuff that actually connects with people. The thing about us that connects to people is often the thing that we brush off about ourselves that we think is un-interesting. The opportunity social media gives us, however, is that we can experiment out in the open and find what people connect to the most. Maybe I make a podcast about website “about pages” and it ends up being my least listened to podcast ever. I really like that episode, but most people just didn’t connect to it as much. Maybe it was some other reason, who knows? The solution is that I can take what I learned from that and just post something better the next day, and the next day, and the next day until I find a stride and hone in on something that people find valuable.
There’s just so much out there. We all have limited time on this earth to consume everything. The new episode of Succession competes for that time. The podcasts I subscribe to compete for that time. Making my own work competes for that time. What we make has to no only be worth everyone else’s time, but our own time as well. We don’t have the time for just creating “noise” just for the sake of it, BUT we also have to be okay with something maybe not working out like we hoped. Doesn’t necessarily mean it was bad, it just didn’t connect for whatever reason.
Having a vision for what we are looking for is KEY. If we are throwing stuff out there with vague goals and no vision, then yeah, we will be super disappointed because we have no way to measure any sort of results. We have to be moving somewhere, in some direction. And hopefully, that’s forward.
001 Humans vs. Machines
Recently, on Colin and Samir’s podcast, they talked about how Youtube in 2017 was better than now. Youtube has matured, it’s a major business now. It’s a search engine. When things get big, they lose their edge. That’s just the natural state of things.
Posts that do really well across social media are posts that talk about how to succeed on that social media platform itself. If I started making content about how to make successful content, I’m sure it could potentially do pretty well if I build it within the framework of what the algorithm is looking for. Here’s what the algorithm (we say the algorithm despite there being a lot of different algorithms) is looking for: consistency, for one. Many of these platforms make all their money on ads, so the more people come back to look at content, they continue to hold valuable ad real estate. We, the people keep their business afloat. They have data from their users behaviors, so they want those who make content to adhere to the data of their users. That’s why the algorithm changes. We look at these platforms as some sort of capricious god, but really they are beholden to their own audience.
It’s the same reason you watch Fox News and you see commercials for buying gold or catheters. Fox News’ audience is a certain age, so they do everything they can to cater to that particular demographic.
But at the same time, creators are a great source of evangelism for these platforms, so they want to make sure to keep them at least minimally happy as well. Apparently, Kim Kardashian came after Instagram when they downgraded photos in the algorithm in service of TikTok-like reels. Those complaints seemed to work, as photo-carousel posts are supposedly more effective now. But that’ll probably change eventually too, because by nature, all of this is alive and moving based on the circumstances of the moment.
But in 2016 and 2017, there was some content on how to “optimize” our content making, but really, even Youtube and other platforms seemed to still be flying by the seat of their pants too. These mediums all seemed somewhat new and magical, like there was still all this untapped potential. Now, we look at “content creators” as brands and industries unto themselves.
And back in 2016, many of us were idealists about the future of content creation and how it would replace the establishment, but now, in 2023, it is the establishment. But some of us remember and long for the days where it was still the wild west.
We have so much information now. How to eat, how to be productive, how to stay active, how to protect our mental health, how to succeed in business, how to effectively sell things, how to dress, and so on and so forth. We have all the tools we could possibly ever want, and yet, are we happier? Are we more creative? Have we self-actualized? Or, does having a treasure trove of information on how to perform and do everything perfectly just attempted to turn us flawed human beings, as emotional and unpredictable as we are, into machines?
I fall into this trap all the time, and I seem to never learn my lesson. 365 projects, podcast episodes twice a week, and posting every day. Nothing is wrong with all that, and sometimes I’ve even managed to do it well, but consistency can have costs. Maybe I avoid creative risks because that might take too long to make, maybe I don’t want to miss a day out of fear of some kind. My goal has always kind of been to optimize creativity so that I can be producing ALL THE TIME.
There are benefits to that, and I’m not opposed to consistency. But, I started questioning myself: Is my goal to just put something out so I can check the box? Or is my goal to make something good above all else?
Sometimes, consistency and something good can work hand in hand, but that takes a toll over the long haul. Casey Niestat made a vlog a day for like, 800 days. He’s been on record about how that almost destroyed his life and family. Dang, I did 300 vlogs for 300 days and I totally went insane. And mine were terrible!
The algorithm rewards working under those extreme conditions. But maybe, I’m not looking to live under extreme conditions like that anymore- if we don’t want to be machines, what is left?
Patrick Tomasso’s philosophy is make what you want to make, when you want to make it. I’m increasingly of the mind that this is right. We need to balance overthinking something so much that we don’t just put it out with not just putting stuff out just for the sake of filling the internet pipes.
What is the end game?
A lot of my favorite creators do things the way they do things, meaning, they have a style. They’ve been imprinted on from various life experiences, successes, and failures, and what they make is a reflection of that. I can’t make a Mr Beast video. I don’t have the guts to run up to people in the street and ask to tour their apartment. But, my life is it’s own soup that informs what I do. And it can take time to find it. That’s the only thing I’m interested in this social media game.
As machines, we have no interests. We aren’t able to love. We only serve the users.
As humans though, we have our own interests. Our love of those things is a more powerful and exciting force than getting promoted in the algorithm.
The pressure to produce degrades often degrades what we make, very few can achieve the level of quality AND quantity, if any. The Marvel movies have really taken a dive due to this very same thing, they’ve had to work on so many movies at a time that Ant Man and the Wasp compromised on VFX because Wakanda Forever needed more VFX artists to get finished on time.
We want to be like machines, and yet, we just aren’t able to maintain a machine like output of creativity. Think about the burnout often amongst Youtubers: they are big for a while and upload multiple times a week, and then they just kind of disappear after a while. The ones who stick around end up having an inconsistent upload schedule.
I’ve always been a big producer, I’ve fully completed 8 or so 365 Projects, and can do something with regularity for a long time. But there always comes that moment when I start asking “Why am I putting myself through this again?” Once I start asking that too much is when I end up taking an overlong break afterwards. But since I’m in this for the long haul, I don’t want to get so burned out that I need a year off.
Photography is Dead, the previous version of this podcast, came out twice a week. I had a great system for making sure that happened: I’d write an episode every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday morning, so then I’d build up a bunch of episodes. Some made it to recording and some didn’t, but then after a couple weeks I’d record 6 to 9 episodes. I’d always stay ahead so that I never had to scramble to put an episode together. That worked for 48 episodes. In fact, it worked too well.
Producing a show like that made it feel like brushing my teeth, and it was starting to get a little too scientific. I was also starting to want to spend more time on each one to really polish it up. But, I didn’t want to just suddenly change the format of the show, so I’ve turned it into a new show with different expectations. Also, the ethos around Photography is Dead where I look at the photography world in the present day, was getting stale to me as I was starting to think about what’s coming next.
My philosophy around creating things is changing for me. I’ve spent so many years posting and creating daily that now, I’m hungry to spend some real time on something.
I do some social media management and creative consulting for clients that need content or content ideas, and what I’ve found is that many business owners I work with don’t post anything to social media, because they want it to be perfect. And social media, really benefits from being more relaxed and not perfect. We gravitate toward more human content as consumers. We don’t want it to feel too polished like an advertisement. I’ve always had the opposite problem: I’ve never been afraid to post no matter how half-baked. Its social media, not an art gallery. Everything we post ends up being kind of disposable. And in a few days, it’ll be buried.
But now that I’m able to consistently produce, because I’ve built my life on creativity, I want to turn the tables a bit on my self and spend more time on a project.
When I decided to make a run at Youtube and video-making again I went to a few friends who are more experienced with it. A lot of the recommendations were the same: you need to post a couple times a week and it has to fit in this or that box. In the past, I would try to adhere to the rules of the algorithm, but quality will always end up falling by the wayside. So, since making Youtube videos has never been a successful endeavor for me, I’m going to do things the opposite of how I normally do them.
First, I want to make all the content I make fit together better. The podcast has to be a good companion to the videos and the videos and podcasts can trickle down to all the other social media platforms. Photography is Dead was built as an audio-only project, so it wasn’t really possible to translate that format and frequency into video. Basically, I’m re-orienting everything around what I do around adding a video component.
Second, I want to take more time on each upload. I’m only doing one podcast a week now as opposed to two. In the main videos that I’m making for Youtube, however, I want to work really hard on doing one at a time. My normal problem is that I start thinking about multiple episodes or projects at once and work on them simultaneously, never giving enough time to one. So, this time, I’m going to fight this ADD impulse or whatever it is and only work on video at a time for as long as it takes to be good.
Third, I only want to make what I’m excited about. If you’re a Photography is Dead listener, you’re familiar with my Kurt Russell Theory. It’s essentially we love watching Kurt Russell in everything he’s in because he always looks like he’s having a blast. If we aren’t having fun, whatever we make isn’t going to be good.
Sitting around talking about what “I’m gonna do” is kinda lame, but really I just wanted to say that I have a plan. Making a YouTube channel that I’m happy with has always been an aspiration of mine, and I’ve never quite gotten there because I’ve never put enough focus on it. I’m working on a series on videos, and I’ve almost fully written the first one. I’m super excited about this upcoming series. It’s daunting, and not going to be easy, but I’m very excited about it. I think you’ll at least find the topic of the first one pretty interesting. And with each video, there will be a companion podcast episode.
At the core of all this though, there’s really a love for one thing: Photography. That’s it man. That’s really what I do this all for. That’s my first love. Everything I talk about and create touches photography in some way. It’s something, that no matter how much I do it, I never get burned out. I’ve had seasons where I slowed down, but in 15 years, I haven’t stopped taking photos.
As I spent 48 episodes talking about, photography is in a weird place right now, so I want to explore the future of what that looks like. What’s its value going to be in the future? Obviously, images are more important than ever, but as a result, they’ve become cheaper, whether one can create an image themselves or just download a free stock image on Pexels or Unsplash. Then of course, photography is getting easier to produce via AI. You can still kind of mostly tell the difference between an AI photo and a real one, but in months or weeks, it may be impossible at the rate that AI advancement is moving.
My theory though, is that those truly dedicated to the craft of photography will continue to survive as long as we focus on context. AI art may be cool and technically impressive, but it is art without context. As humans, we need context and story in the art we consume. In fact, one could argue that art is simply a vehicle by which we can experience another human’s context or life experience. Those who mostly focus on just making technically perfect images without a ton of context might be on the chopping block, but I believe if we really focus on expressing everything that has made us we still have a chance in this uncertain future.
Or
Skynet goes live and we’re all doomed. But if that happens, we don’t have to really worry about the future of creativity much anyway.
Digi Cams
Time doesn’t work the same way in the photography world. We are going forward and backwards at the same time, at any given moment. There’s a section of photographers always looking toward the future with the latest gear, and then there’s a section of photographers living in the past appreciating the gear of the past. Now, many photographers have one foot in both.
Think about analog photographers that you see on Youtube, that are now defining a whole new generation of photographer: In order to maintain a Youtube Channel they have to be fluent in modern filmmaking techniques. Many of them have personas of analog-only, and yet they can color-grade their footage with their Sony A7 whatever while they are always simultaneously carrying around with their Mamiya RZ67.
Many film photographers now are exploring a new subsection of gear: “digi cams”. That’s right, digi cams are basically the little point and shoot digital cameras from the early 2000s. If film photography is the vinyl of the photography world, digi cams are CDs.
So what is the draw? Basically, I think that cameras are basically perfect now, so many photographers are looking for some personality in their images. And really, good for them. But, I think many photographers don’t understand it- why would you go backwards?
Older photographers don’t get it because they lived through the struggles of using film professionally. When they adopted their giant Nikon DSLRs, it solved their problems and made their lives easier. Photographers born in the 90s or early 2000s see photography totally differently. They have only seen digital, and as a result, they see endless possibilities.
Limits are good for creativity. The best, most powerful camera ever doesn’t necessarily make an interesting image, it records data really well. It can be a tool for creativity, obviously, but I think many photographers still think the camera they own is what makes them an interesting or good photographer.
When I first heard about the “digi cam” thing, I definitely started to have the pangs of old age. I 100% started to understand the old Nikon Dad thing of “why would anyone go back to film?” My first thought was just, why?
I guess I started with what’s now called a “digi cam”. In fact, it’s sitting on my camera shelf. My first camera was an Olympus FE-360. After shooting with it for months, I was antsy to upgrade to a fancy Nikon D3000, and obviously my camera purchases just went up from there. But now I’m in my 30s, and apparently my Olympus is cool again. Which kind of makes me feel cool. I guess this is what it feels like to be an OG.
But in all seriousness, if a photographer was born after 2000, I get why they are using all kinds of tools rather than just one type of camera. All photography is digital and made for the internet, so the game is now about just making cool images. Most photographers aren’t printing their work, so who cares about resolution anyway?
I’ve struggled to “shrink down” my camera usage a ton because I’m always taking pictures with printing in mind. I try to make sure I have nice big files ready at any given moment, just in case. But even I’ve changed a bit: I went from the high res sensor of a Nikon D850 to a Sony A7IV (basically from 45 megapixels to 33 megapixels), because it just doesn’t take as much file to make a really good large print. My DJI Mavic Pro 2 is only like 20 megapixels with a 1 inch sensor, and I have images from that camera hanging in spaces at around 60 inches by 40 inches, and they look great. Honestly, with a higher resolution sensor I was always fighting a ton of noise, and now I don’t have that problem as much. Are more megapixels better? I guess it depends. For most people, including me (someone that prints frequently) not really. If you want to print a mondo print of a Canadian penny Peter Lusztyk-style, then yeah, maybe you need 150 megapixels. I don’t know. Most people don’t though.
I’m probably not going to be dusting off my Olympus FE-360 any time soon because of a totally different reason though: It’s not fun to use. Back when I was about to pull the trigger on buying my Fujifilm X-E4, I almost bought one of those Ricoh GR III point and shoot cameras. But after watching videos of people using them, it just seemed kind of lame. I wanted a few more dials and tactile…ness. I’m one of those people that like a more retro feel, because the feel of a camera itself can be an inspiring force.
I’m riding the line of being somewhat agist in this episode, so I’ll say this: Whatever floats your boat. If you’re retired and in your 70s, maybe the latest Nikon mirrorless and 800mm lens is what inspires you to make stuff. If you’re 22, and you’re getting pumped to create some images with an old Sony Cybershot, that’s cool too.
Everyone is different.
I go back to my work camera/play camera thing. Basically, the biggest photographers I know do this. They have a camera they carry around all the time, and then they have a camera for work stuff. I think we are at a point now where the work camera is actually pretty uninteresting, what’s interesting is seeing what photographers are often carrying around with them all the time. What inspires them enough to take photos for fun when it’s also their day job?
The camera is one of those things that can’t really be separated from photography. In the same way as…street racing? Or some other kind of racing. The car matters to the driver. In the same way, the camera matters to the photographer. Gear matters and is important to the creative process of each individual.
But…its mattering less and less to the world. Now, more often than not, an expensive camera is a totem to clients that shows them we are worth the money. We may actually pull out our iPhone in the end, but as long as we are carrying around a $3000+ camera, we’ll be taken seriously. All media created now is for social media basically. Everything is about the small screen. The algorithm seems to even punish us for putting out something too polished, because it feels like an advertisement and is therefore less authentic.
Everything is a “look” now. A “film look”. A “low-fi look”. A “super-hi res look”. It’s all about what the goal of what you’re making is- it’s all about the job immediately in front of you.
I’ve changed a lot since starting this podcast last October. Basically, I’ve been focused a lot on printing for the past however long, nearly a decade now. But the fact is, printing isn’t what’s on photographers minds today. Episodes where I talk about printing have the lowest listens, no one watches my tiktoks and reels where I talk about printing. I know more about printing than most photographers because I do it more than most photographers, and yet, information about printing isn’t flooding the marketplace for a reason: No one is doing it. Not because they can’t, but because the mass of photographers aren’t interested in it. Plenty of money is being made from client work in this era. Printing is a “if I have time” thing. It’s a hobby, or a thing that photographers are always thinking about, but never get to it.
I grew up thinking I wanted to make my own thing and have freedom, and many young photographers today start by doing their own thing so they can at the end of the day, make stuff for big brands and corporations. In a conversation it’s cool to say you worked for a big brand, but it never seemed all that fun to me. I always saw work for a big brand to be a stepping stone to doing something on our own. I assisted on a few big commercial shoots in my 20s and decided it was too slow for me, I didn’t like all the standing around, so I swore it off. I decided I’d rather just take my chances figuring out being a successful photographer in my own way. Many photographers I respect got sick of that life at some point anyway which made them go out on their own, so why not just skip to the good part?
This life is hard. I’m only 31 and the photography world has already made me feel old. The camera I used during the Great Recession is cool again? Wait, did I just call the 2008 housing crash The Great Recession? I watched the Office when it was airing live on tv. I remember when Friends ended. I sat in a restaurant the other day and saw tables of college students around me using Snapchat. Do I need to be using Snapchat again? Wait, the goal of young people is to make videos that trend so they can sell ads for Squarespace or Shopify? That’s the dream? When did the dream stop being about trying to pioneer or just make something really cool in order to get The Man’s boot off their neck? So we want The Man’s boot on our neck? So wait, the goal is to now reverse engineer an algorithm so that we know what to make so we can get noticed by enough people so a giant corporation will pay us a ton of money?
Blahhh. It’s easy to go down the grumpy old man rabbit hole. Maybe the name of this podcast should have been Creativity is Dead. Because it feels like we have been willing to trade actual creativity for sweet sweet cashola.
But that’s where digi cams come in. I think, in a weird way, digi cams will save us, or at the very least, cause the pendulum to swing back around again. Film is mainstream again now. I went to a family wedding and my sister pulled out a disposable camera. So yeah, the fringes are going to digi cams because all their uncool family members are getting into the film trend. (I’m just kidding Caroline, you’re cool. You’d be cooler if you actually listened to my podcast though)
For a podcast called Photography is Dead, this whole project has been pretty optimistic. Photography right now is probably in a golden age of some kind. At least, I think we are living in the good times now and we’ll only realize that years from now. We can use any photographic tool we want, we all have a way to share our work, and we have more options when it comes to income streams now than ever. In order to make my “corporation-less” photography career work, I’ve been working on multiple passive income streams just with photography alone. In fact, just recently we launched Anderson Views, a stock photography website just for my growing town basically just full of local images for small businesses to use for marketing or whatever else. This year I’ve already hung a decent amount of my Small Town Photo Project office art as well. Basically, both these businesses are built on images I’ve already taken.
Then, I accidentally found a new income stream of making social media content for growing small businesses. I was doing it to help a friend, and then by the end of the week I had a small group of clients. That’s been interesting for sure, and mostly, iPhone-only.
I’m not sure my photography career could have existed a decade ago. There’s just more of a market for images now. Everything use to be so rigid, and now everyone looks at images in the way people kind of look at movies vs. tv shows- it’s really just a format on how to accomplish a goal or tell a story. Is a movie really all that different from a show? One is 2 hours and one is 10 hours, but really it’s up to the story on which one works best. Same for images. Images aren’t just “photography” now. They are whatever we need them to be based on whatever we need. The more open and fluid we are with the the varying types of tools and use cases, whether it’s digi cams or 150 megapixel super cameras, the better we will be able to navigate this very strange photography world.
Dumb Ideas
I work exclusively in dumb ideas. The most unhappy I have been in my half decade of working for myself was when I was just trying to build a photography business that was tried and true: wedding photography. There’s a pathway to be successful there, there are no surprises. If you’re good at customer service, half-decent with a camera, and patient, one can build a very successful wedding photography business. Hence why everyone who picks up a camera seems to make an attempt at that route.
I really like taking photos of people, so the work of the actual wedding day itself was actually pretty fun for me. All the stuff around a wedding photography business is what I didn’t like, and I just didn’t love weddings enough to be able to compete with the photographers that really really love it. But hey, if one of my chill friends has a chill wedding and they let me go buck wild on the photos, then heck yeah I’d do it. I just love photography, that’s why I got into this.
Anyway, wedding photography isn’t a dumb idea. Neither is real estate photography. If people don’t look at me weird with that “How does that work?” Look when I tell them what I’m working on, I kind of don’t want any part of it at this point.
I don’t want to make dumb stuff for the sake of just being dumb, but I think there’s a desperation deep down to make this whole thing work. I’m in too deep at this point, and my whole adult life has been dedicated to this thing that I have to make it worth it. For the longest time, I had this idea to find growing small towns across the United States, and over time, photograph them all and then sell prints and other types of print related products to them all. I was scared of this idea for a long time because it’s so big, but you know, COVID changed people.
I got into my 04 Toyota Tacoma and just started mapping out towns that I found on top ten small towns lists and through research and made a list. I went to Florida, tons of spots in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas in that “COVID time”. I would come back home and meet with other businesses and tell people about what I was doing, and most people thought it was cool, but totally ridiculous. “How do you get paid?” “How is this a business?” All that stuff.
And the truth is, at the time, I just needed to go to these places and start creating images there. I figured the business end would become apparent, but I was also trying to steep myself in the “small town” world as someone who went from growing up traveling all over the world to living in a small town in South Carolina. It allowed me to disappear for a while and figure myself out. Not only that, but I just didn’t want to become one of those photographers who has a practical photography business, yet has all these personal project ideas that pile up that “they’ll get to eventually”. Eventually never comes unless we just get to it now. I’d rather do all the crazy ideas now, while I’m younger anyway. So, I just planned to break even for a while in order to do this whole thing.
I pursued this Small Town list for 2 years, basically non-stop. When I came home I’d find ways to sell prints and make money just so I could afford the gas for the next one. (Also, shout out to my wife by the way who has supported me through all of this for some reason) In October 2021, I decided I was going to make a two week long run at Texas. I wanted to take photos in Fredericksburg, outside of Austin, and I mapped out a route where on the way I could hit Laurel, MS, Natchitoches, LA, Fairhope, AL, and revisit Wetumpka, AL on the way back (which were OGs of the original small town list).
A couple speeding tickets, some unfortunate gas station meals, and a tropical storm later, I did it.
Even made a vlog about it:
Anyway, sorry. Uh…so I did the Texas trip, and that was when the full dumbness of this Small Town Photo Project idea revealed itself to me. I was exhausted, spent a ton of money, and I decided that it was time to face the music. It was time to use what I had so far and actually make it a sustainable business. In between these trips I had done pop-up shops, sold prints to commercial spaces, and whatever else I could do, but there was no real organization because I was just working towards the next trip.
I spent 2022 growing the commercial print side of my business, taking photos, but being a little more disciplined about building the infrastructure around this project. And now it’s 2023, and I’m continuing putting together that machine in a more polished way, so I can get back to the Small Town list, just a little less poor and with a guaranteed place to put these images when I come home. When I started this whole thing, I had 10 images of Thomasville, GA, and now, I have hundreds (I’ll though I’m sure I’m near breaking 1000 by now) of images of numerous growing small towns in the US.
Super dumb. I look back at the past few years and I have no idea how I survived doing that. A dumb idea requires that we not analyze the dumbness too much. We just have to start, and then when we snap out of it, we then will look back in horror and wonder “What the absolute hell was I thinking? I have a child.” But, you know, now there’s a path.
I was exposed to the stupidity of this project in 2022, and for a while there, contemplated its end. But since then, I’ve met people with the skills and knowledge to help me make it more sustainable. And now, my plan is to get back to the original list after tightening up “the machine” behind it a bit. That way I’m not bankrupting myself in order to pursue this. Bankrupting yourself works fine in your 20s, but once you cross into your 30s it’s a little harder to justify.
Photography is Dead is also a pretty dumb idea. I’ve been writing blogs since 2009 on the various iterations of willmalone.com and my old blogspot, and this podcast is simply those but with me recording audio of them. The problem is that I have to wake up at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning to write these things to make sure I have enough for a twice a week release.
There aren’t enough dumb ideas in the photography world right now. We complain about the internet not being a friendly place for still images anymore, but I’m becoming increasingly convinced that maybe that the internet’s influence on photography has a fatal flaw: It makes everyone pressured to do what works rather than what doesn’t. Those vanity metrics are addicting, even for someone like me who doesn’t have much of a following. I know that certain types of photos will get more likes than others, so when it comes down to it, I find myself posting images I know will get clicks. It’s a totally natural response that we don’t really realize is influencing us. Of course we want to post something that will catch more eyeballs, it’s logic!
Not only that, but we see a bunch of images from people that get a ton of likes, so we want to just copy or emulate what they are doing in some way. Look at wedding photography as an example: Every wedding photo I see is orange. Everyone has orange skin and there’s no green in the grass. They all look the exact same. I remember when the big Eclipse happened in 2017, I worked at the print shop then, and every photographer for the next two years got their eclipse photos printed. It was the same eclipse! Everyone was just printing the exact same photo over and over! I feel the same way about photos of the moon, and honestly, astrophotography in general. It looks cool in a social media feed, and one feels a sense of technical accomplishment in making them, but it’s like taking a photo of Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building. It’s just noise at this point.
My life now is a result of pursuing dumb ideas from age 17 to age 30. I’m compelled to do so. That’s left me without much money, but I worry that as I get older my practicality will get the better of me and my ideas are becoming less dumb as time goes on. In my early 20s, it was dumb idea after dumb idea, and I see the rate of those ideas slowing, and sensible, reasonable ideas taking their place. There’s a balance that I obviously need to strike, but if I lean too much towards sensible, this whole thing will crumble.
We need to make dumb things. The pressure to look smart and good at what we do leads us to make boring things. This life is the only one we’ve got, so if we spend it shooting orange wedding photos, can we honestly say that’s a life well spent? I’m just kidding. But man, I’m really sick of all these orange wedding photos.
Photography Dark Ages
Are we in the photography dark ages?
I am a firm believer in the opportunity that almost always exists no matter the circumstance. But that doesn’t mean that hard times also don’t exist.
I’m not sure I’ve seen photography in such an “in-between” space before. We are in a place where photography and image creation has been fully embraced by culture- culture recognizes the importance of those with a camera, there are more photography opportunities than ever, and yet, there’s this feeling that being a photographer isn’t enough. We need to be videographers, entertainers, entrepreneurs, taste-makers, and more. Being a photographer alone used to be a somewhat prestigious path, but since the camera became more accessible, we have to be a jack of all trades more than ever in order to stand out.
Photographers like Saul Leiter used to do commercial photography work in order to pay for the lifestyle of making work that actually matters to him. We know Saul Leiter for his work outside of the fashion photography that paid his bills, because that’s when the meaningful work was created.
That’s a path not often taken nowadays. We’ve embraced this idea that our “work for hire” is us and we are our “work for hire”.
Wedding photographers are the best example of this, which is why I didn’t make it very far in this world: Wedding photographers, in order to be successful, have to live and breath weddings in everything they do. It takes so much bandwidth, that there’s very little hope that you’ll have much left over. Sam Hurd is one of the few examples of a wedding photographer who seems to have infinite bandwidth, or even creative interests outside of wedding photography at all, but I would say Sam Hurds don’t grow on trees.
Back in November of 2022, me and a couple friends went to the movie theater and basically did the old fashioned “I don’t really know what this movie is about, but let’s go see it thing” and we ended up seeing one of my favorite movies of last year The Menu. Had no idea what to expect, and boy, that movie is thrilling, disturbing, hilarious, wacky, and kind of a bummer. I feel like this movie is becoming a phenomenon now that it’s on streaming (in fact I just rewatched it with my wife who hadn’t seen it yet).
I don’t want to give away much, but it’s basically a satire of what the food world has become, namely the experimental, high end, gastronomy world. It’s about celebrity chefs and all the types of people around celebrity chefs that ruin “the art” of making these overpriced, thoughtful dishes. Each character stands for a different aspect of the joylessness of making things in the modern day: you’ve got the enthusiast foodie who dissects and overanalyzes, the critic, the money guys, etc. All of these people exist in every art form now, because every part of the process has become a job of its own due of social media. Critics aren’t exclusive to publications only focusing on high level art, everyone is quite literally a critic in one way or another. Foodies can be influencers with tons of followers, and can act as enthusiast and critic interchangeably.
Every facet of the world now has their own customers of their personal The Menu, whether it’s the hunting community, photography community, food, movies, comedy, etc. Every art form now has what were once a type of middle-men, as an audience in and of themselves.
As a guest on the comedy podcast Two Bears, One Cave, Quentin Tarantino (definitely not for kids) mentions that the state of movies makes the 80s look great. He mentions that cinema is going through a repressive time. He illustrates the decades of film as a pendulum swinging back and forth, and that he’s waiting for it to swing back again. Not only are Marvel Movies the only thing that can generate any excitement, but it’s really tough for any original film to make a dent right now. Superhero movies are the industry at the moment, which is a real bummer for movies that aren’t about a group of super-powered heroes fighting a CGI army of some kind. (I like Marvel movies, by the way, although I’m out-growing them a bit)
I don’t know what the Marvel movie equivalent in the photography world is, maybe it’s orange wedding photography, maybe it’s that instagram style-type of image of a bombastic landscape with a lone woman standing in the bottom third of the frame looking at the vastness despite there definitely being 100 tourists right behind the camera. I don’t know. It does feel like that somehow, many artistic mediums kind of landed in the same place. We are just chugging along and not really moving forward in any significant way. Or, maybe we are moving forward, in a really kind of depressing way.
I don’t think we can make Saul Leiters anymore unless he’s willing to hire a video editor to help him make videos of him waving his camera real quick to feed into a slideshow of images to the beat of a recent pop song. Or, maybe his images become famous and then 1000 YouTubers make videos dissecting it and making their own copies of his work and then his work gets diluted and over-explained by all his fans. Wow, just saying this kind of bummed me out.
I kind of flip flop between being bummed out and excited. I feel like I’ve always lived in this duality of identity, on one hand, I love photography and I’m an enthusiast. I also think it’s important to take what knowledge I have and share it with others, sometimes that’s a podcast, a reel/tiktok, or some other way. I totally understand being the “foodie” that ruins and overly talks about something that should have some mystery, and I think I’ve kind of given into the inevitable a bit. But on the other side, if I look at everything from an artist’s perspective, it’s looking pretty bleak.
But when you think about the history of artists, and I mean artists who’s sole purpose is to make art, not be an influencer or a guy behind a mic who speaks in essays, it’s always been pretty bleak. There’s a lot of trust put in the hope that an artist will get discovered by some benefactor or the right people, and then they'll finally attain the life of making art without being under the gun of financial duress. That trust is a risky move, and it’s why many artists get discovered late in life or postmortem. Saul Leiter wasn’t really discovered for his pioneering of color photography until his early 80s.
So, photography as art, I would say is probably in the dark ages. As a medium of communication, I would say it’s in the mainstream. Everyone has a proximity to photography, and it’s very possible to make decent money if you make the Marvel movie version of photography. So I guess I can also say that photography is alive and well and doing better than ever, it just totally depends on your point of view.
Time Management
“If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute.” I live by this mantra. Or at least, I used to. I used to define myself as a procrastinator, but turns out, once I starting building my life around doing what I actually wanted to do, procrastination isn’t much of a factor anymore. I used to have no respect for my time, future or present, because all that mattered was how I feel in the moment.
But then, in my 20s, I started developing real goals and things I wanted to accomplish. And I realized…there’s just not enough time in the day.
The first month of 2023 has been a battle. I have been crushed under the amount of fires to put out and things to do, and yet, I managed to get them all done and then some. If I flashback to a Will of 5 or 6 years ago, all of these tasks would have destroyed me.
The reason I like 365 projects or repeatable photo projects that require discipline is that I recognize my need for structure. If left to my own devices, I’ll spend a day doing nothing as I’m excited that the world is my oyster. Suddenly it’ll be 6pm, and I will have maybe watched a movie or two. Then I realized I spent the whole day thinking about and getting pumped about all the things I could do that day.
If I don’t stay on myself, forget running my own business, I won’t function well in life in general.
I realized that in order to run any sort of business around your artistic medium in the year of our Lord 2023, time is the most important metric to measure everything. Forget money, obviously money is important to a business, but a bank account with zero dollars can be refilled again. The amount of time we spend is irreplaceable. We don’t get that back. And sure, as creative people or artists (I’m a creative person but not an artist), we need time to do nothing. I now have to schedule that time, however.
If we are expected to be these content monkeys and keep people connected to us on social media, but also, you know, get our actual jobs done, we have to optimize our time. Social media is a cheaper way to “advertise” than in the past, but now, getting information about our business out there has become a massive time suck. It can take up all our time if we let it.
So, when I started my photography business, which was originally aimed at getting wedding gigs, I learned the power of the to-do list. I used to be really bad about knowing what to do next, and the to-do list really kept my motivation fueled up. It was a hack to gamify my business in order to get it off the ground. Every day was it’s own page in my Cambridge 8.24x11 80 sheet notebook, and boy, would I fill up these pages with tasks in order to chase the high of checking them off. (It’s been about 5 years of using these notebooks for to-do lists now, so I have an absolutely absurd stack of them that might be interesting as an artifact one day. )
The To-Do List, however, is a pit. It can get pretty dangerous if we get addicted to the dopamine hit of Xing boxes in order to relieve stress. My problem back then, was that I wasn’t using my time well, which went to me filling my time pretty fast with all my tasks. A few years passed, and I realized…I’m really busy, but my paycheck hasn’t increased proportionately. Hmm.
And that’s because the To-Do List gets us addicted to busy-ness. The most American of addictions.
If we feel busy, we feel like we are accomplishing something. And while I was accomplishing a lot of things, it was largely unfocused, but it didn’t matter, because I got that hit off punching each task in the face.
I don’t want to be busy. I certainly don’t want to be too busy. But, my original twisted thought about a business was that I needed to look like I was at least doing something…lest the foreman yell at me? Wait, I’m in charge.
Fast forward a bit. I still need a to-do list to help me remember important things, however I’m able to fit TWO DAYS of tasks on to one page now. And there’s a lot of blank space in between. There was a point where I was putting “Make Coffee” or “Eat Lunch” at specific times on my list of To-Dos. I need structure, but if it gets too rigid, rigid things easily break.
To-Do list addicts exists, but we don’t talk about it. Our addiction to busy-ness is widespread, because “being busy” is a great way to avoid things and people and all the stuff we want to avoid because “busy-ness” is a classic and universal excuse. Busy-ness, however, is just running place.
I’m a guy who has found ways to monetize my love of the camera as a business, and while I have a long way to go, I think I’ve finally cracked the best way to optimize my time without getting burned out on social media or networking or whatever I have always ended up getting burnt out by. Here’s what I’m doing in 2023:
Beginning of the week, I schedule all my social media posts for the week, as well as this podcast. I get up pretty early, so this gets done before anyone else in my house wakes up. Then suddenly, other than some fun posts in the moment throughout the week, my social media is staying active. Early in the morning the rest of the days, I write these podcast episodes. Monday and Tuesday are dedicated to eliminating as much of the mundane tasks of the week as possible, like bookkeeping or data entry or whatever else.
Wednesday and Thursday, I try to book up with meetings, networking, coffees, art installations, lunch and whatever else that involves human interaction. If I have two meetings on a Wednesday, unless I’m totally buried with other stuff, I’m done for the day after the last meeting.
On Fridays, I’m braindead. Even for most of my college career I managed to somehow avoid having class or many classes on Fridays. I see it no different here. Fridays are a creative day. Brainstorming and making content and all that. The fun stuff. So, basically I make all the stuff I want to post so it’s ready to schedule by Monday.
Obviously this doesn’t work perfectly all the time, but it’s a great road map to start. I find that I have more air time in between jobs and not just filling my day with busywork to feel like I’m doing something when I’m really not. But I’m the boss so I don’t have to adhere to some arbitrary 9 to 5 schedule, despite feeling that pressure when I started out.
If you take anything away from this episode, be warned about the toxicity of a To-Do list. If you need structure to survive, a to-do list can be a useful weapon or your greatest curse.
Photography Business
Ah yes, the personal brand. We all want one, but only a select few can pull them off. The question is: Why do we want one?
The failures of personal brands are pretty simple in my mind: When it becomes too much about a person’s own fulfillment rather than bringing value to others, is when it doesn’t really work. This is 100% the problem with many photographers: many people who I’ve talked to or seen want to become a photographer are doing it for their own personal lifestyle. They see a life they want to have, and that’s why they want to be a freelance photographer or whatever, rather than what they should do which is to become a photographer because you have value to offer an audience or customer base.
If you want to be a photographer for a business, it’s no different from any other business: Do it in order to solve a problem. But, because of the culture around personal brands and photographers, that is often not the motivation to start a photography business. I’ll admit, it wasn’t mine. I wanted the lifestyle of creating because I liked how it felt, but that’s really hard to sell to people. Because it’s not for anyone but me.
Do we complain about social media engagement dropping because we are trying to solve a problem and we can’t help our audience as well, or are we complaining because we just aren’t getting that feeling of personal success and attention like we used to? Is it about us, or is it about others?
The algorithm loves educational content. Anytime I post a reel or TikTok with me talking to the camera about some tip or trick, it always does way better than posting a picture of my own art. Call it depressing, but validation of a beautiful landscape shot is for me. A useful tip being shared is for others. It’s seems pretty simple to me. I believe it’s not hard to grow a following if we are truly dedicated to providing a service or value to others. The reason we see so much complaining is just because there are a metric crap ton of people not providing anything, but want attention for it.
Photography businesses that aren’t doing well are often failing for this reason, no doubt in my mind. They aren’t serving anyone anything. Whether their audience just doesn’t exist, or they aren’t providing value. A selfish business can’t last. And, quite honestly, it shouldn’t last.
And maybe that’s harsh. But I’ve been doing this for nearly 14 years now, and I can trace back a lot of my failures to this basic problem. I succeed when I am giving people something they want, and I fail when I’m not giving them anything or I’m trying to give something they don’t really want.
Photographers are photographers. Photographers aren’t often business people. Photographers get into photography because they like photography. There’s nothing wrong with that, but our like of photography isn’t sellable on it’s own. Our passion isn’t enough to make a business profitable. In fact, and this may be a little depressing, but our passion for photography (or whatever art form) can often be an impediment to a profitable or successful business. I’m not saying it always is, but it often very much is. Artists and photographers have a couple options here: team up with someone who is really good and passionate about business, or become really passionate about business yourself.
Here’s an example of how photographers often fail: Buying photography equipment. In the modern day, it’s crazy how much you can get away with with almost no gear at all. Of course, some genres of photography require a lot of gear, but I, in all my years of this, have never required more than 2 or 3 lenses and a flash or two just in case of emergency. That’s it. You can shoot weddings, real estate, lifestyle, product, with only what’s in my Incase Sling Bag. (Which only fits two lenses other than what’s on my camera, a flash, and then some other tiny knick knacks.)
From a business perspective, a photographer should spend as little as possible on the tools themselves. Get great tools to make the job easier, but photographers often go overboard on that. From a photographer perspective, you should be buying new gear all the time. But let’s be real, unless you’re really hard on your equipment, you don’t even need to buy a new camera body any more frequently than every 5 years.
Gear is exciting. I get that. But it’s often a stumbling block to photographers because there are so many things worth investing in in business. Like outsourcing or marketing or building community with other business owners. Save your money on gear and spend it on actually growing the business, because that will help you serve those you are trying to serve more effectively.
Hobbyists make the work for themselves, Pros make it for others.
What if social media went away?
Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 Billion. The once publicly traded company is now privately held. That’s pretty wild. Maybe buying a social network is the modern equivalent of a rich guy buying a newspaper. Well, maybe there is no real equivalent to it. There’s a lot of negative takes on this whole thing, and I swing back and forth. I keep ending at the point where I remember that the guy built rockets that can land, so he can clearly see things that others can’t. Maybe it’s hubris on his part, or maybe he’ll turn Twitter into something better than it’s ever been. Either way it’ll be super interesting to watch.
The problem to me, is that lately Twitter has just been a bunch of talk about…the state of Twitter. And sure, Twitter is the place where you talk about the stuff going on in the world, and currently, Twitter is one of those things. The tone of it is kind of bizarre: one night every started tweeting their good-byes to the platform, and were mourning the loss of their favorite platform. But Twitter wasn’t dying. Days later, it was the same as it always was. And sure, Elon is transforming it and there’s a lot of internal pain associated with that, but the masses jumping to the worst case scenario is weird.
Elon is personally on the hook for $44 Billion. He has to make it work. Twitter may change, but it’s not dying. Chill out.
All year long, there’s been a similar wailing and mourning of Instagram. The algorithm has gotten too hard to crack for some people, and so all year I’ve heard about the so-called death of Instagram.
And we talk about these platforms as if they are life or death. As if, if one of these platforms changed or died, we would die as a society.
I’m not going to deny that these platforms don’t have enormous impact. Of course they do, and I love using them to communicate ideas and share my work.
But, what if they did just go away?
I’d argue that social media is responsible for most people getting into photography now. If you take picture, you’re probably going to post it somewhere, and that may be the end of the line for that photo. If you go on a trip to take photos, you’re going to want to share details about your trip. If you start a photography podcast, you’re going to want to tell people about it. Social media and most artistic mediums are intertwined with social media in a really deep way now, and if we got into photography because of social media, it’s tough to de-couple the medium from the machine. In a weird way, the machine has become part of the medium.
What would I do if social media just went away? What would be my plan for getting my work out there?
Certainly, I’d have a lot of time freed up, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t need to make behind the scenes reels or TikToks anymore.
It would be harder to reach a mass audience, so I’d lean into more of what I’ve been focusing on: local.
If social media is gone, the rest of the world kind of doesn’t matter anymore, so it would be hard to overlook your own backyard. Maybe we enter local gallery shows, or do what I’ve been doing lately, which is “in-person networking”. Art shows and trade shows would really start booming again. There would be a lot less time spent in an office in front of a computer other than editing work, because I’d need to be out there a lot more.
But really, for The Small Town Photo Project and what I’ve been doing lately, local has been my focus, which has made me reflect on the time and effort we put it focusing on everything “out there” rather than what’s right in front of us.
I was recently interviewed on a local podcast called Electric City Buzz, and one of the hosts asked me about what I think about the need for art in a town or city. Basically, my belief is that you can’t have growth, without art. Your mind can’t latch on to a place that has no vibrancy or anything visual to remember about it. That’s why in the HGTV reality show Home Town, the first thing they do when they revitalize a place in Laurel, MS or Wetumpka, AL is create a mural. Art is culture and culture is art. Chattanooga, TN has tons and tons of photographers capturing images of the bridges, and if you’ve been to Chattanooga or even heard of it, you can probably picture it in your mind.
What I’ve found when trying to get The Small Town Photo Project out there is that people in small towns either need to know who you are or know someone that knows who you are in order to trust or feel safe taking part in what you’re doing. Whether you like that or not, that just is how it is. So social media only works after you make that initial in person or word of mouth impression.
But honestly, seeing a cool double-exposure or sunrise shot in a small town has been a big deal to a lot of people. Photography is supposedly over-saturated, and yet, when someone flies a drone in or around Thomasville, GA I start getting texts from people asking if I’m in town. A lot of people in this country and around of world don’t live in the social media world, and since all of our work has been formatted to share on Instagram and Twitter for the last decade, we are leaving a ton of opportunity on the table. Not all work is great for local. Some people need to leave a place or focus on a different audience, I get it, but if social media just disappeared one day, what would be your first move?
Almost more interesting is what would happen to hobbyists? There would be a lot fewer of them I expect, but there would be a hyper-focus on small there as well. Maybe a hobbyist just makes coffee table books for their own house to show to guests, maybe they enter gallery shows on the weekends. There would be a welcome simplification, and the work would become more tangible again.
And that’s something kind of interesting to me: photography would most likely have to be printed more. Photography on a screen would inherently become less satisfying because it would have nowhere to go but a folder and that’s it. If there’s nowhere digital to share it, then the only other option is to print it and bring it into the real world in some way. Expense and the fact that we have an outlet for sharing our work has been an excuse to not print our work quite often. Over the years, printing has kind of been forgotten in a weird way. It’s a total mystery to most photographers now, when decades ago, it was just another step in the process. If social media were gone, it would have to be integrated back into our photography knowledge again.
This is an interesting exercise to consider, and honestly, if you have a small social media following, you may be realizing you live this way already. Maybe you share stuff on social media and it doesn’t move the needle for you much, so social media is an after thought. Social media is a hugely important tool that I think is enormously beneficial, so don’t think I’m down on it at all. I just think that if we think and worry about the “machines” too much, we lose sight of everything we sought to use social media for in the first place.
If you find yourself tweeting about the state of Twitter, or posting on Instagram about how Instagram is dying, then maybe it’s time to sit down and reevaluate the way you’re using your time. Maybe you need to log off and walk around your town and experience real life for a bit, and then come back and use these mediums for expressing actual thoughts and ideas.
Follow My Journey
In 2016, I had a daily vlog for 300 days. If you are a regular listener, you know the story already. (Check out the episode titled “2016: The Year Everything Changed”) What was the vlog about you ask? Well, I was just documenting daily life. As someone in my early 20s, the problem was that in 2016, my life wasn’t all that interesting.
I was working at the print shop in Chattanooga, and had a full-time job. So the videos would sometimes be about my job, me and my wife going to eat dinner, and every once in a while I’d go out of my way or travel somewhere. But I had nothing on offer. I had no hook of any kind. If someone asked me “Why should I watch this?” I probably wouldn’t have an answer for them.
But, I felt like I was on some sort of magical and epic journey, and wanted everyone to follow it.
And, honestly, my 2016 vlog shouldn’t be watched. It’s a cool internal document for myself, although I don’t really want to go back and watch them either. I took them off of Youtube a few years ago, and on my hardrive they will live for the rest of my days.
There’s a lot of stuff I’ve made that isn’t worth watching or listening to or checking out. I’m making much less of that kind of stuff these days because I’m older and have the ability to audit myself better than I could back in 2016.
But, I don’t want to be too harsh to myself. I was trying to learn the mechanics of everything I’m doing now. Ultimately, I’ve been pretty much doing the same stuff then as I do now, just better and with much more of a direction. You have to suck before you get good at something, and sometimes you don’t realize how much you’re sucking, but you just have to get through that period. The lack of knowledge of your level of suckage is an ignorance that is necessary in the beginning, otherwise we would all give up on everything. We don’t know what we don’t know.
The big thing I was missing for a successful vlog at the time was that I wasn’t offering anyone anything. I thought my life was more interesting than it was, I thought that was the valuable part. Looking back now, I was missing the point of the whole enterprise. Why on earth would anyone follow my journey if I had no investment in giving them anything in return?
And maybe even if I had some sort of value to offer, maybe I was doomed, because most post-grad early 20s people just aren’t that interesting yet (there are of course, exceptions).
I talk about adding value ad nauseam on this podcast, so I think you might assume where I’m going, so I’m going to zig instead of zag and keep you on your toes a bit: I wasn’t just missing value, I was missing community as well.
I wasn’t totally on an island back then. I had some people. My friends at the print shop, and some friends I retained from college, and maybe a few others. But I wasn’t involved with anything, and I wasn’t giving back to a community in any way shape or form: I would wake up, go to work, maybe go for a run, eat dinner, edit the vlog, watch a movie, and then go to bed. That was basically my life for a few years. I wasn’t part of a church or anything either. I didn’t have any sort of real foundation to my life other than my desire to become successful at this photography thing, I guess, for my own ego.
That reached its inevitable conclusion of not being all that satisfying. Which I why I left that life behind. I just couldn’t live like that anymore, so we packed up and literally moved away from our lives in Chattanooga, a place I had been for 8 years. Trying to make things for one’s own glory and ego is a dead end, and incredibly unsatisfying. Fortunately, for me, I never found any sort of success when I was driven by ego, because if I did, I’d be a total monster now. But even if someone has a massive ego, and they have something on offer, maybe they can get away with it. I had a massive ego and nothing to offer, so that ran its course pretty quick. And I didn’t know any of this at the time, I just knew something had to change. Which is why a couple years after 2016, I left that life behind.
Like I said, I was still working toward the same things I’m working toward now, mechanically speaking. I knew that I wanted to spend my life making stuff, I just missed the point back then. It was starting to come into vogue to “document the journey” and that was basically all I was trying to do. And maybe the value of all that has come later, now that I can learn from it. I don’t know.
We often hear from some sort of influencer that we should document what we’re doing or make TikToks or whatever and without thinking about how to do that well and our own way we just instinctually think we need to starting doing it because everyone else is. But all that means a hill of beans if number 1: You aren’t providing value. And number 2: if you have no community or people around you that you are invested in.
It’s super attractive to be able to say you built everything on your own. Honestly, that’s been a big feature of my work, and it shouldn’t have been. Because eventually, you hit a wall, and you’re going to need help. Or hobble along without it and eventually die. The desire to say you built something yourself is just ego. Living in a small town has really showed me that. With ego, everything we do ends up being transactional relationally: the I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine. But if we can ditch the egos and just get invested in others, we just become cheerleaders for each other. It’s not about our own success, it becomes about “What can I build that best helps the people around me?” It goes from “how can I get more eyeballs on what I’m doing?” to, “how can I make something that actually provides those around me with something good?” It becomes about service to others, rather than service to ourselves.
These are recent lessons I’ve learned, by the way. I’ve had a chip on my shoulder for, forever. It’s getting less significant. Maybe even going away. And suddenly, I feel like things are starting to work and click into place better.
I didn’t really intend for this podcast to get autobiographical in any way. I wanted it to speak to different topics in the photography world, but I’m not really in the drivers seat of this thing. It’s going where it’s going. But, I think ego, and the “desperation to get seen” are one of the biggest problems in the photography world today. It’s hard to have a conversation on Twitter without someone removing the thin vail of genuine interaction to try and show you and sell you on their own work. It’s tough to even mention you’re into photography at all without someone pulling out their phone, pinning your eyelids open, and forcing you to look at their own photography. It usually comes after saying in a Willem Dafoe-esque way “I’m a bit of a photographer myself.”
It doesn’t bother me when other photographers show me their work. I’m all for it. But when it feels like the interaction we just had was genuine, and then it’s revealed that it’s not, bums me out. It’s why people struggle with salesmen. Everyone knows what a salesman wants, so it’s hard to trust them, because you don’t know what’s real and what’s not. The best salesmen aren’t salesmen at all. They just build relationships and friendships and try to find where they can fulfill a need. They don’t think in terms of what they can get out of it, they think in terms of what they can provide.
To be successful, there almost has to be a letting go of our own goals. Our own goals are limited, and we often get so focused on them that we are actually limiting our own potential of what’s possible in our lives. Our goal should be the goal of helping those around us and helping everyone we love be successful. That’s true success. That’s a journey people really want to follow.
Photo Hiatus
A while back, I made an episode about making a great bio or “about page” that captures who you are are what you do. Basically, what is the most interesting part about you?
Photographers really struggle with this. A lot of photographers don’t, deep down, want to be that interesting, they want to be like every other photographer.
I know, I know, you’re like, Will, that’s nuts. But it’s not. It’s a human impulse. We don’t want to stand out, we want to fit in. We feel like something is off when we don’t fit in, and when we aren’t doing things the same way as the people around us, we often feel wrong and like a failure.
Photographers who steep themselves in the photography world and community do this exact same thing. It’s not about focusing on what is interesting, it’s about making sure you’re in lock step with the other photographers in the community. And that’s why photography has gotten boring on social media, that’s why engagement has dropped, and now, it’s why I go on to Twitter and Instagram and it’s just nonstop complaining about how photographer’s work isn’t getting seen anymore.
I’m on the other end. I don’t stay connected to the photography community enough. I’m trying to be better, but I’m finding that it’s super easy to get sucked into it all. Photographers who spend a lot of time with other photographers don’t make work for an audience, they make work for other photographers. It’s kind of this loop that never has any real pay off, it’s just approval seeking from your peers. But if your peers are in the same boat as you- then you’re not really going to go anywhere.
I’m not saying don’t hang out with or be in community with other photographers, but my Twitter algorithm for the past few months has been only photographers, and it’s a very skewed view of the reality of the photography world.
Years and years ago, I used to work for a commercial product photographer while I was in college. I was taking a photo documentary class at the time, and I decided to use photography to document this professional, high level, commercial photographer. It was super intimidating. And the project, ended up looking terrible. Not because the subject matter was bad, but because I was trying to impress this commercial photographer more than I was trying to actually tell a decent story about him. I let the pressure get to me, and these photos remind me of how I just totally dropped the ball on anything interesting because I was just focused on this commercial photographer’s opinion.
That’s why I love Van Niestat’s videos, he’s a YouTuber (not a photographer), but he doesn’t really watch Youtube. His style is unlike anyone else’s because he stayed on the outside of everything. You are what you eat. You become what you consume. If I consume a ton of analog photographers, I start taking more photos of abandoned buildings and gas stations. If I consume a lot of Youtube travel photographers, I gravitate more toward sunsets and bombastic landscape shots. I think my photography work in 2022 has been good, but honestly, I can tell that I’ve maybe consumed a little too much this year. A lot of my work isn’t me. And a good chunk of it is totally forgettable.
I’ve been spending the final weeks of 2022 planning out next year (in as much as that’s possible). I just need a game plan for how I’m going to tackle everything. And it’s time to face the music: I think I need to go on a hiatus of photo-taking. I need some distance between me and the work. Honestly, I need distance from photography in general.
I’ve been posting more behind the scenes stuff lately on my Instagram, and I’ve started to realize the honest truth: maybe the most interesting thing I do is not actually the photography part. For those that are new to the podcast, I’m basically a commercial art consultant. I have a library of images that I use to print large custom prints for businesses. And that’s an unusual job.
The problem with photographer as a moniker is that culture understands it as being a wedding photographer, portrait photographer, or real estate photographer or something akin to that. The world sees a photographer as a mechanic. Will Malone Photography might as well be just Blah Blah Photography, because the Photography part is the only thing that ends up meaning anything to people. There’s a ton of other Blah Blah Photography companies if you search “photographers near me” into Google.
I once watched a TED Talk with a fine art photographer who basically said he dropped Photography as a word entirely. It took me a bit to fully understand that, but I get it now. Photography puts me into a box that takes a lot of extra story-telling and explanation to get out of, and that’s just a lot of extra work when having a conversation at a networking event. If you skip to commercial art consultant, the message gets across a lot quicker.
“Competition is for losers” according to the controversial Peter Thiel. If you’re tired of being compared to the long line of bad photographers out there, or simply photographers that don’t fit your niche, make up your own title. Call yourself something different that helps you stand out. Identify the interesting part of what you do, and lean on that. Trust the interesting and different part, don’t look at it like a weakness. Doing things different is seen as a weakness when you hang out with a bunch of other photographers. It’s just too group-thinky out there.
I don’t mean for this to get too negative. I love the images I’m seeing in my social media feeds day to day. There’s a ton of photographers doing a lot of great work out there. But in analyzing my year, I think consuming that stuff has maybe negatively affected my work to a point. The fact is, when you are self-employed with a camera, the images end up being the easy part. The business part is what takes the most time and effort.
I’ve talked before about my dreams and goals for my photography work: Basically, I want the freedom to make what I want to make and get paid for it.
And I know, I can hear your chuckles from here. Who doesn’t want that? I think it’s extremely possible, I see the proof of it every day. In 2022, I sold more prints of my work than I ever have. In fact, most of my income this year has come from selling large prints of my work. So I’m going to take a break from the camera a bit, to really get better at the business part in 2023. If I can put the same energy I put into my creative work into tweaking and improving my business, then I think when I get back to making new work, I’ll have a better system with which to attain my dream.
But really, the more I get down this road, I just want to be better at getting great images on the walls of the growing businesses I serve. So I’ll be happy if I can just get better at that.
The fact is, my photography output has been outrageous over the years, so I’m just going to borrow some of that time to get better at the other aspects of what I do. And then maybe, once I get back to capturing a new set of images I’ll come back with fresh eyes and feel a little safer to just calm down and be myself.
The Problem with TikTok
I feel like I mention TikTok a lot on this podcast, and that’s probably because TikTok has revolutionized not just social media, but maybe even media consumption in general. In one of my favorite shows ever made, Halt and Catch Fire, a show about the tech revolution in the 80s and early 90s, Joe MacMillan, one of the ambitious idealists of the show, theorizes that if computers process information fast enough, there’s a certain threshold where users will never stop using it. Totally spot on. Instagram and Facebook gave us this years and years ago, but somehow TikTok found an entirely different threshold.
The user interface of TikTok is a work of genius. It’s so good and so addicting that you can scroll and be fed interesting content ad infinitum.
Throughout this podcast and other things I do, I often try and take the positive route on things that people often talk about as blanketly bad. TikTok is one of those things that many people have problems with and are concerned about, and while I often say that I like TikTok, I do, like many people have concerns.
I don’t talk about politics across my social media outlets or podcasts or anything. Ever. I won’t do it. People screaming their opinions into the void of Twitter and Facebook and wherever else is part of the problem with our discourse today. In 2016, I posted about politics a lot, and after a few heated arguments in comments sections, I realized I was totally wasting my short time on this earth with that nonsense. So I made a blood oath with myself to not get political online. Let me tell you, my life is better for it.
So that’s all to say, let’s put aside the political or national security angle of the TikTok debate for this episode.
TikTok and Reels and Instagram and Facebook and Twitter to me, are all valuable tools I can use to get my images and ideas out into the world. I believe I have some perspectives about things, and I can express that through writing or audio or photos or video, and to me that’s exciting. I see them no different than I see a camera.
Maybe early on in my photography career I was a real trend follower. I remember seeing photos on Flickr of people dropping fruit in water and freezing the motion so they could get some cool “splash photos”. I saw that, thought it was cool, and did my own. That’s just how I, and I think a lot of people learn: they see what’s cool, try it, and then that hopefully spurs some creativity of their own eventually. You have to just try a lot of things to find out what kind of photography you like, and that means, yes, maybe in the beginning you follow some trends.
But one cannot live on trends alone, however. Well, we used to not be able to. The problem with TikTok is that, well….you’re rewarded for following trends, which creates an incentive to never really break out into your own vision. Now you’ve got these creators on TikTok who just chase trends day in and day out to stay relevant. Much on TikTok is fleeting noise that has no substance- it’s mostly momentary chuckles. Creators don’t really need to make something new, they just repeat what works for everyone else.
There are exceptions of course, I’ve seen a lot of original and cool stuff on TikTok. The problem is that once something original and cool is done, hoards of creators come in and copy it wholesale. Photography TikTok for instance, is probably the best example of this: I got into TikTok because I saw a ton of cool photography tricks like pouring water on the ground to simulate a puddle and shooting low to get a reflection in the puddle of your subject. Now, I see that video over and over again by different creators, and they all get tons of views and follows every time.
The other trend on photography TikTok that I see a ton is dudes that approach random women (and sometimes they seem pretty underage) and ask them if they could do a portrait session with them on the spot. It was started by photographer Alex Stemplewski originally, but it ended up catching fire and now you see a lot of kind of irresponsible versions of it by people who think it’s cool and want to do the same thing. Personally, the photographing strangers thing isn’t my thing, and this angle of it definitely leans into beautiful women to get views. In some cases, I’ll be honest, it seems kinda creepy.
Then there’s also this whole lane of wedding photographers ranting about clients or the industry. Since there’s a lot of really tired and overwhelmed wedding photographers out there, those do really well, but they are all the exact same.
The coolest type of photography I often see on TikTok is from product photographers like Evan Tanaka, who show you their wild set ups for a photo and then you’re on the edge of your seat to see a super satisfying result.
I’ve actually struggled with writing this episode because normally I like to make sure I know the names of people that make cool stuff, so I can reference them, but that’s part of the problem with TikTok. Every social media platform suffers under trend following, but it’s usually pretty easy to trace the originator. With TikTok, the originators are often buried under all the copycats. It’s like if the guy dressed up as Batman in hockey pads at the beginning of The Dark Knight was mistaken for Batman and then just took the real Batman’s place like nothing happened. You can follow people on TikTok, but the “people” on TikTok are kind of irrelevant based on how the app is set up. It’s all about feeding the machine. It’s kind of irrelevant if it’s a copy or the original, it just needs to be interesting for 2 seconds so we can chuckle to ourselves or gasp at the result.
There’s a weird shamelessness to TikTok that I think a lot of people, especially people 30 and above are really turned off by. I’m all for a vibrant creator economy, where someone can make cool videos or photos and then make a living on it, but it seems like it’s moving closer and closer to prostitution rather than a utopia of self-funded artists. Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s amazing and interesting work being made and creators that are doing really innovative things, but the aspirations and incentives for the next generation of creators are really getting kinda grubby as time goes on.
It’s hard for me not see my own daughter and wonder what all this will be like when she’s older. She’ll watch her dad be a photographer and creator, and maybe she has no interest in doing anything resembling what I do. But if she does, what will the creator economy look like for her? Will people be rewarded for their creativity or will the incentives continue to race to the bottom? Unfortunately, probably the latter if I’m being honest.
So, what are we supposed to do about all this? Well, that’s been a lot of what I talk about on this podcast- if you want to chase millions of views then trends and shock-factor are for you. But that’s a pretty scary road to start your way down. I believe in patience, and slow incremental growth over time. Figure out who you are, and just steadily push forward no matter what. You may never get to millions, but you may find a nice, quality audience of tens of thousands.
But I’m addicted to TikTok too, and still see a lot of potential for creative people- I’ve said it on this podcast a bunch, but I really think that creating valuable work wins at the end of the day. I sell prints as a business, so that’s great outlet to get my work out into the world. TikTok and Reels can be tools to help me share my experiences and what I’ve learned the farther I get down this road. This episode is focused on what I think a big problem with TikTok is, but don’t get me confused: I still think it’s valuable. It’s all about trying to use it in a measured and careful way. Take Ryan Holiday, he’s using his TikToks and Reels and all that to talk about the ancient stoic Marcus Aurelius. Thomas Sowell, a conservative philosopher doesn’t make videos, but he condenses his ideas for multiple platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as well.
So. The problem with TikTok as I see it, is quite honestly the problem with instagram and every other site like it: we focus too much on the medium. We are focused too heavily on exploiting how it works in order to get seen. We base our usage around that “desperation” that I talked about in episode one- if we do a little bit of this and little bit of that, the algorithm will like it. But, say what you’re doing to game the system works. What then? You have to start all over and game the algorithm with something else. On and on and on.
The solution, for a fruitful social media experience on both sides (creator and consumer alike) is to focus on using the medium to express your ideas and work. We need to stop putting so much weight on the machines themselves. TikTok could be banned by the US government any day now (hopefully not before I release this episode though), and if you’re focused on the machine, you’re gonna have to totally start over. If you’re focused on ideas, however, you can take your perspective and just start expressing it somewhere else.
Nikon Dad
I’m a Nikon dad.
Yes, I’m actually a dad and I own a Nikon Camera (actually a few), but the dad part really has nothing to do with the term “Nikon dad”
It’s more of a lifestyle, a type of person, a state of mind.
It’s not really my fault either: much like Mowgli in the Jungle Book being raised by wolves, I was raised by other Nikon dads.
So what is a Nikon dad?
A Nikon dad is a photography enthusiast, someone who really cares about the details. Someone who believes there’s a right way to be a photographer. Someone who owns khaki pants and a selection of golf shirts. Someone who lauds Nikon as the only proper camera, and looks down upon all the other brands as inferior.
Nikon dads are associated heavily with “pixel peepers” defined on Wiktionary as “a person who carefully scrutinizes a magnified digital photograph in order to evaluate resolution and image quality”
I’m currently in recovery. (To be fair, I don’t own any golf shirts anymore. I left that lifestyle behind when I was old enough to start paying my own rent)
My first DSLR camera was a Nikon D3000, and since then I’ve owned a Nikon D200, a D7000, a D800, and just recently retired from a Nikon D850. While they are the Dell PCs of the camera world, the D800 series especially has been perfect for my main line of work. When shooting images to make large prints I didn’t have to worry about anything. These cameras are so powerful and fulfill every need. I still believe the Nikon D850 is competitive to any mirrorless camera on the market today.
I actually switched to Sony earlier this year, although I’m starting to realize it’s the camera brand of the next generation of Nikon dads. (Especially since I’m pretty sure Nikon uses Sony sensors in their cameras now) But because I’ve been using such a high resolution camera I even downgraded a bit from 45 megapixels on my D850 to 33 on my new Sony A7IV.
In 2009, owning a Nikon was cool. Everyone owned one. They were the most affordable way to get a “professional” camera at the time. Now, Nikon really has a bad reputation, but not because of the camera itself which is just as good if not better than other cameras on the market, but largely because of the people that tend to like them.
I think the type of person that is passionate about Nikon is the type of person that became a photographer back when photography was still pretty unaccessible. Nikon was always the best choice for years and years. It was the camera back in the film days. One of the coolest things about Nikon cameras is that you can use their vintage film lenses on their newer DSLRs and vice versa. Nikon has a legacy unlike any other brand.
But you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
Pixel peepers, as they are known, are the most obnoxious people on the photography internet for a reason: They miss the point of photography. Humans are drawn to images based on emotion and story, not whether the reds and blues in an image are totally correct. In fact, most people couldn’t care less about a photo being “correct”.
“Movie premiere, Hollywood” 1955 is a photo by Robert Frank is a photo of a woman in a crowd, but the subject is out of focus and the crowd behind her is in focus. How you feel about this photo I think determines where you land on the Nikon dad meter. I used to hate it, because it’s technically not great.
But that’s not the point.
I’ve grown and matured, and I’ve found myself chasing scenes much like this one. I’d rather take a photo like this than a technically perfect image of recorded data. I’d rather convey some type of emotion or feeling than show you a picture of a sunset on a perfect landscape.
Here’s the funny part: for the past few months, I’ve only found myself carrying around my Fujifilm X-E4.
What??? It’s not even full-frame. It’s a tiny, basically point and shoot camera, and that’s all I want. The Fujifilm personality is probably the opposite of a Nikon dad in almost every way: creative, fun, and doesn’t own khaki pants OR a golf shirt.
We recently had a hurricane graze our area and it brought some incredible sunsets.
I didn’t take a photo of a single one.
That’s how I know I’m getting better.
But in all seriousness, I don’t want to play stereotypes here. There are plenty of Nikon people who have emotions and an artistic eye. But, if you’re a camera person or photographer, you probably know exactly what I mean when I say “Nikon dad”.
I’m pretty squarely a hybrid photographer now more than ever. I shoot digital, now on a Sony and a Fujifilm (ok ok and my Nikon D850 still sometimes) AND I shoot film. On my desk right now I have my Sony A7IV, a Nikon N65 35mm film camera, a Nikkormat FT2, and a Nikon L35AF and a selection of old and new lenses.
The perfection of even my Sony camera has made me kind of lose interest in a super powerful digital camera. If I’m assigned to shoot an image or I just need “the shot” I grab my Sony because I know I’m covered. But if I want to create memorable images that are really fun to shoot, I want some sort of limitations to work around.
Cameras now have everything. These gear videos on Youtube comparing sharpness of old and new models are so silly now because they almost have no difference. We are in the boring, iterative part of camera technology. No new ground is bring broken. Everything is amazing.
Which means, if anything is important in 2022, it’s the images.
I think Twitter has a really amazing photography community, better than Instagram at this point, and I’m seeing incredible, visionary images taken on iPhones!
It’s not the camera you have, it’s what you do with it that defines you.
What I’m ultimately saying is that I believe we have evolved past technical perfection. I believe images whose goal is “correctness” has become noise that blends in with everything else. What stands out now, is character, vision, and story.
And honestly, I hope to be able to be a photographer like that one day.
Social Media
A photography podcast making an episode about the state of Instagram right now probably would get plenty of listens, but is new ground being broken? Is it interesting to talk about?
And, honestly, I think we think about Instagram and social media way too much.
BUT
I also think most people who are upset that their engagement cratering on Instagram either have no strategy, or aren’t really doing the right strategy.
I’m included in this group. I’ve had a strategy, and I think parts of it worked, but I truthfully have not been providing enough value to people. Straight up.
I don’t think Instagram is completely innocent: They don’t know what they want to be anymore. I think Meta realized there’s not as much money in the “social network” game, but rather, it’s all about getting attention for ads. Instagram/Facebook/Meta executives all probably had that “holy ****” moment when laying in bed realizing (like the rest of us) that TikTok’s algorithm is so good at presenting interesting content that they could lose 3 HOURS just scrolling. Of course they want a piece of that.
People don’t really like admitting it, but TikTok has changed and revolutionized the social media landscape. Because it’s not social media. It’s TV channel surfing at scale. You watch a few seconds long show that is presented to your specific eyeballs (and they know what you specifically find interesting) and then you swipe to the next channel.
The US has been on the verge of banning TikTok now over two presidential administrations due to Chinese connections and nation security concerns. But TikTok is so good at what it does and so viral, no one really cares. Joe Rogan read their terms of service on his podcast and exposed all of the ways they were collecting data from your phone and nearby computers. But…did that stop most people from using it?
TikTok couldn’t have existed without Instagram before it. Instagram changed everything. But even 2 years ago, TikTok’s interface and fluid usability made Instagram feel kind of ancient. What Instagram is trying to be now is like your grandfather getting on a skateboard. It’s not going to go well, and it’s a little sad.
Meta has the data. They know what people want. They know if they have more video in a feed that it will retain audiences more than a bunch of square still images will. Social media is in dog years though, so instead of thoughtfully growing and changing they have to speed up their changes to their platform lest they lose everyone faster.
I think all of this has revealed how many people rely too much on a singular platform. You can’t scroll twitter (or instagram for that matter) without a photographer complaining about their lack of engagement. But as Colin and Samir often say on their podcast: These platforms are “rented land”. We don’t own them, so we are subject to changes they make over time.
I think the solution to social media growth despite all these changes now is fairly obvious, however: Provide value like you never have before.
Pretty pictures aren’t enough. There’s so much great photography out there that either your images have to be wildly different or you need to be providing something else as well. I’ve been under the belief that I was providing value when posting a landscape sunset photo, and maybe I was, but not to most people who’s algorithm creates a feed for them full of landscape sunset photos.
When I started to put my prints up on the Instagram shopping feature is when I noticed a problem with what I was doing: Right under my “print for sale” was a bunch of suggestions: If you like Will Malone’s photos, check out these other Instagram print shops. They were all other sunflower sunrise photos or other eerily similar images to the types of photos I was posting.
That kind of bummed me out.
But then I started a Twitter account again after bailing from it for a while. I realized there’s a really great photography community on there, so I’ve been dipping a toe in over the past few months. I found some photographers whose photos were somewhat unremarkable, but they had huge followings- it broke my photographer brain.
But then I realized…They were eagerly building community. They probably even had day jobs and were just in photography for fun. (Imagine that) They loved seeing others photography and offered themselves as a vector for others to share their work. They were giving other photographers a platform within a platform. Value.
Because photography and the photography industry is all I’ve thought about over the past 13 years, I’m too close to the fire. Some things that are totally obvious to most people, blow my mind. I’ve always heard this phrase “provide value” over and over throughout the years from various entrepreneurs, but I guess, I never truly understood it. I thought my photos were enough.
Most people (me included) share selfishly. We are posting so that we may grow. That desperation for attention that I talked about in the first episode is why we think this way, but it’s old school thinking. Back in the day, you opened a shop and put an ad out in the paper. When you open a hardware store in Deadwood, people need a hardware store. Timothy Olyphant didn’t set up a boutique hardware store next to a Harbor Freight, he was the only game in town.
Back in the day, there just wasn’t the shear numbers of competition there is today. We know we have to set ourselves apart, but I think most of us think: We have to shoot better photos, (and maybe even talk smack about other photographers to downgrade them a bit). Shooting “better” photos (whatever that means) has diminishing returns- there are many photographers who have surpassed me in business who aren’t as good at using a camera as I am.
What we need to do, to set ourselves apart really is to create more value, as much as we can muster. We need to think less about what social media growth can do for us, but rather, what our social media growth can do for others.
The people that think like that are growing on Instagram and Twitter and Tiktok. Like, astronomically.
You’re probably wondering, “How do I provide value?” I think everyone has their own brand of it, but everyone has something to offer. Whether it’s humor, or tips and tricks, or a community, value can be more than just giving things away to people.
If you want a super extreme example of creating value: Go check out Mr. Beast. He’s the biggest YouTuber in the world. He gives away INSANE sums of money, but when he releases a video, he makes sure not to waste your time. He knows how to retain attention, he knows how to keep people from getting bored and clicking away. He’s literally giving stuff away sure, but he’s also giving you value in the form of a tightly edited video.
If you’d like to go back to a time where you can get famous by posting a landscape of a National Park with some music lyrics as a caption while trying not to cut yourself with the cracked glass on the back of your iPhone 4 You’ll need a quantum tunnel and a time/space GPS so you can go back and become viral on Instagram in 2011. That’s just not how things work anymore. This isn’t Deadwood.