Creating Experience... and sharing it all with you.

The only way for me to figure this out, is to figure it out.

I've made some great strides in my photography and feel like I'm approaching the point where I want to start to transition in to a full-time career as a pro. (Now, there's a lot of debate out there surrounding that word in our field. Let me define what I envision for myself as a professional. My goals are to: 1) Shoot for national level brands, agencies, and/or magazines and 2) Make a decent living that allows me to take care of my family, continue to grow as an artist, and, since I'm being transparent here, have a sweet ride.)

This brings up some questions I don't have the answers to.

How do I land jobs?
Where do I find clients?
How much do I charge?
What gear do i need?
How do I get my hands on the gear I need and can't afford?

and on, and on, and on, and on...

Lets back up, because none of this really matters unless someone wants to pay me for my work. I know that in order to land jobs, someone out there in the world has to know that I'm alive. And that I'm a photographer. And that I do good work. Scratch that. Great work.

Ok. Sweet.

Tons of people know I'm alive. A couple hundred people know that I'm a photographer. Where's my work? Oh. On facebook. And there's a bunch of crappy work on a website I set up way before I ever needed one.
In fact, I shouldn't call the images in those galleries "work" because that implies that there was either a client or some sort of organized effort beyond "dude, lets shoot something today".

Bottom line, I recognize it doesn't matter how many people know I'm a photographer if they track down my work and it looks like crap. I need a portfolio that proves I can do the work I'm looking for.

Like most jobs, this one requires experience. How do you gain experience if experience is required just to get your foot in the door? You have to create it for yourself.

So, here's where I've started:

I'd love to eventually shoot for Quiksilver or Roxy. So I made up a fake advertising job to shoot. I gave myself a deadline. I will be shooting this project with as much professionalism as I can muster and treat it as I would if I were actually shooting this for them. These will be the first images that make it into what is going to be my new book. The book I will actually be proud to show and use to represent myself in the future.

I met with my right hand man Jered tonight (well, last night at this point) and we had an initial creative meeting and went over some pre-production. Actually, quite a bit. I'll be sharing all of this information, all the steps and missteps along the way, right here on this blog. I'll hand over my notes, talk about ideas, planning, logistics and everything I learn along the way. There's a ton of stuff that goes into producing a commercial shoot and I'm sure I'm missing 70% of what really goes into it since I clearly have never had a large client ask me to do it before, but I guess we'll figure that out along the way.

This should be interesting, hopefully we'll all get to learn something from this experience. All three of you that read this blog.

Ok, I was going to stop here, but that wouldn't be true to the spirit of what I'm doing here. One more thing:

Jered will be doing a lot of filming throughout this process, because we thought it would be cool to make a video. Then I realized not only would it be cool but it could serve as a way to show a potential client how I operate. The way I handle this production from start to finish is all part of my brand, and regardless of the client being real or phony, this production will be real, and the final images, they'll be real too. This video could potentially land me work in the future. There, now I've been totally honest.

We've decided to shoot in Pacific City (based on a few things I'll cover in a later post) so any posts from here on out will be titled accordingly.

I'm super excited about this, I hope someone else can get something out of it also.