Thus We Begin

 As a ­self-employed freelance fashion, beauty and portrait photographer, my intentions and motivations for taking on this FdA in commercial photography include being surrounded by repetition regarding the technical skills and knowledge of both basic and advanced camera craft, adding rigidity and formality to the chaotic methods and mannerisms involved in the ways I taught myself, discovering new techniques and skills that I may not have had the opportunity or finance to pursue and consequentially add these to my repertoire and “arsenal” of products and services, to further develop the business skills required to operate a successful commercial photography studio and to learn new ways to fuse creativity into various images in order to keep raising the bar and continually offer a product and service that remains different to anything offered by any other competitors in the industry.

Although I’m aware that my photography is of an acceptable standard at many levels, mostly due to cohorts and colleagues continuously arguing such despite my pleas to the contrary, I am consistently under whelmed by the images I produce just days after they are finished. Through years of reflection, the only reasonable or at least the main source of this is a lack of confidence, not only with photography but rather in all aspects of my life. This confidence issue is another of the many reasons I ultimately decided to undertake this Foundation Degree program, as I believe that such a social learning environment can only help to improve it as such.

Photographically, I would like to begin removing myself from a heavily technical based style and start down a path of more conceptually conceived work. Through this, what I would like to achieve is a body of work that actually conveys stories and other messages rather than the portraying the “pretty picture”. This of course, is not an all-encompassing goal, as some forms of work including one of my favourites, Beauty, require just that: a pretty picture. In the past I have struggled with efforts to do just this and although I have succeeded on a few occasions other successes came from concepts and ideas provided by other individuals involved in the creation process. Though I am forever grateful and awed by the ability to work with and continue to work with some of the extraordinarily talented people I have, I feel I need to strive to nurture my meagre abilities in order to bring more to the joint palette.

Another aspect that I look forward to throughout this course will be able to legitimise taking some time from the actual business of the photography business. When I started, I was all too aware of the estimates that dictate that the percentage of work that goes into a photography business is only about 15% actual photography, even less on some weeks, the hard truth on paper is a completely different animal to the hard truth in reality. Having the “excuse” to ease the work hours put into marketing, accounting, canvassing, retouching, market researching will hopefully help me to form a routine, even in the overwhelming times, that will remain with me long after the course has finished.  

Ideally, the ultimate results of all this work will culminate in my ultimate goal of taking my commercial fashion and beauty photography business through its first years of life and beyond into a thriving career in which I can work with the best team members the industry has to offer in order to create visually stimulating images.