The Biggest Mistake I Made as a Photographer
No matter what your craft is, over time you always find ways of improving and come up with ideas to make that craft easier. Last summer I realized something that I never really thought about before nor anticipated. I started printing out my photos and once I did that, I started to see requests from others immediately. They wanted to see prints of my older work as well. It was incredibly exciting. I went back into my old harddrives and searched for all my older work. The only problem with that was that I had my logo on all my older work.
Normally, this wouldn’t be a bad thing by any means. My photos are protected by my watermark, so what’s the problem? I quickly realized that I had not saved the original files, none of them. Ryan from 2017 edited the photo and then slapped that watermark on it (originally for my own branding and to deter people from taking my work online) and said, “Yep, now this is perfect. No need for the other files.” I would then proceed to delete everything else except that “finished” file. Years later, I now realize how that has come to bite me in the ass.
That’s the thing when it comes to your passions though, no matter what that might be, you always learn something new. Any work you do on the daily can be improved in ways to make it easier, not just in the moment, but in the future as well. When I realized I messed up, I was devastated. Some of my best work from those early years of photography, tainted by a watermark I’ll never be able to get off. Okay, I make it sound much worse than it is, but for prints, trust me, it doesn’t look professional and it distracts your eyes from the photo itself. Instead of lingering on this for too long, I wanted to come up with a method to not only keep everything that I took photos of but to stay organized as well. During that time I was also working as a photographer for a congressional campaign. For something as big as that, I made sure I kept every single photo. Regardless if it was good or bad. I held on to all of it. So starting there, I began to organize my work.
A few months passed and (due to some crazy life events) I lost track of that organization. It was when my work started to be presented in art galleries when I decided to actually sit down and take the time to organize everything. I knew that the new year was about to begin, and I created files for the year 2020. From there I broke it down to two more files one for photography, the other for videography. Everything else that follows is the same in each folder. It’s broken down by month, then finished photos, raw photos, and jpeg files. Using this technique for almost seven months now, I gotta say, it’s pretty effective. We learn and grow from our mistakes. We can adapt and find new ways to make things easier on ourselves, not just for now, but in the future as well. I set myself up for success in the future. It’s already been shown as I have gone back into my old raw files from January and February and found photos that I may not have liked then, but definitely like now.
It sounds like such a simple fix, but it didn’t hit me until December of 2019. It took a little over three years to develop my organization for my craft. It blows my mind that it took that long, but Ryan from 2017 or even 2016 probably didn’t think that I’d end up being where I’m at right now. Live and learn right? Now when I shoot and edit, I shoot and edit with the intent on printing out these photos. Nearly four years of doing this and I’m still learning something new each and every day. It’s part of the reason I love what I do.