Tomorrow -well actually later today- is a big day for me.
I had my very first, in fifteen years of shooting professionally, re-shoot. Man, it pissed me off no end I can tell you. Fifteen years of unsullied work, high quality image making is killing me. I have recently gone from shooting digital back to shooting film because I started to mistrust the digital concept as a whole. Now after the re-shoot, I am on the verge of completely detesting digital as well.
Its gone from novelty to scurge. The fact that 90% of my clients now dictate what they want the image to “be” before I have even taken my camera out of the bag, I find to be extremely bad circumstance for the work I am about to take on. Pressure from the outset equals distrust, mistakes and most of all unprofessionality. Having told one client that I shoot only film they were immediately in a more relaxed stance, “I shoot the film, give it to the lab, they process it and then we go through the contacts together, you tell me which prints you want I get them done and you pay me the money”. And thats that, end of story. Job done on to the next one. The old ways meant that the crativity was left to the photographer and the machinations left to the labs. There are some jobs Im telling the clients I shoot film, then Ill shoot it digitally, create a disk and send that to the lab and have them produce a couple of nice C-prints from my digital files, at the end of the day they get proper prints even though it took a ‘white lie’ to get to that point.
Needless to say, that right now, Im faced with a choice, of whether or not to take on a new fulltime job and drop my freelance photography work altogether (well for a while anyway), just so that I can get some kind of financial stability and get my feet on the ground.
Ive been here in the US for two years now, and in that time have gone through the gamut of financial ups and downs, the banks here are appaling, over draft charges were absolutely killing me up until about six months ago. No credit company out there wants to have anything to do with me right now, so i cant use a credit check as a security check making moving into a new place extremely difficult, I cant finance a cheap used car, and everything that I need or want means that I have to save my pennies, which undoutedly get swallowed up in the next cellphone or utilities bills.
So yes, the option of having a fulltime job takes on a new meaning, and is looking extremely attractive right at this very moment of my life.