Well, this is certainly not a podcast episode I thought I'd have to make, but it's one that ought to be made. In this time of incredible uncertainty and confusion surrounding Coronavirus and COVID-19 I just wanted to provide a little bit of respite for all of you photographers, all of you videographers and just a few things to keep in mind and ways to come out the other side of this better than when you started, which I know sounds pretty much impossible right about now.
This episode is going to get into seven ways that you as a photographer or a visual creator can really make the most of this time of social distancing as we try to fight the spread of the COVID 19 pandemic. And on top of that, I want to provide some ways to help out some of our freelance brothers and sisters in the visual community. So today's episode is going to touch on a little bit of all of that.
So where do we even begin to start? Depending on where you're listening to this episode right now, perhaps you've already been urged to practice the art of social distancing. So as a photographer, how do you handle social distancing? That is, that is so often our job to not be socially distant, to get up close and personal, to occupy the spaces of the people that we're photographing to get their stories. But of course, as the CDC has recommended, that is really the only way to prevent the spread of this disease. So for us as visual creators, what can we do during this time to make sure that we're not losing out on our passion of photography, videography, you name it. And honestly, this episode is as much for me as it is for everybody else. When I really understood the seriousness of all of this and and knew that I was going to have to be practicing the art of social distancing just as much as everybody else, whether you're in a more high risk area or not. When I realized that me as a photographer and creator was going to be socially distancing, whether you're a lawyer, accountant, you name it, I had to really think hard about what I was going to do. So recording this episode, putting out this post, it's as much for me as it is for all of you. These are just a few ways that I'm thinking about the next days, weeks, hopefully not months of how to not just survive during the age of COVID 19 as a photographer, but how to make sure that we're all the better for it on the other side.
Here's ways to get through this:
First and foremost. Maintain your physical and mental health. This is going to be a truly draining time in our lives as creators who thrive on novel situations, who thrive on getting out into the world and experiencing it with groups of people and sharing those moments. So firstly, I think the greatest thing to focus on is mindfulness. During all of this being aware of your thoughts and feelings and emotions, it's so easy to follow through on every single news article that comes through numbers, tracking maps on Johns Hopkins website. But what does all of that do? That puts you into a state, not quite a panic, but of perhaps over vigilance if you're practicing all of the things that the CDC currently recommends, you're doing it right.
There's an incredible amount of news capacity to track every little thing that goes on. So focus first on starting internally and becoming the master of your own thoughts and emotions. There's an incredible amount of scientific evidence out there to suggest that higher stress level decreases your overall immunity to disease. So perhaps one of the ways to help prevent this is to keep a positive outlook on the situation as a whole. We are going to get through this as individuals, as a community, as a nation, and as a species.
One way that I would suggest focusing on your mental health throughout this is to take up some sort of practice of mindfulness. For me, that's mindfulness meditation. That's something that's always worked really well for me individually. Again, your mileage may vary, but I've been really happy using the Headspace app for a more guided meditation that tends to keep me a little better. Focus tends to give me some prompts, some thoughts to focus into, as well as being able to tailor it to what kind of focus I want to have for that day, whether it's creativity, managing stress, et cetera.
So on top of managing your mental wellbeing, it's important to manage your physical wellbeing during this whole process as well. Social distancing doesn't necessarily mean becoming a complete and utter shut-in because of how intricately linked your mind and your body are. It's incredibly important to keep a good level of exercise and moving your body throughout this whole process. At this point, I'm seeing a lot of jokes and memes online of people saying, humorously, do your duty and watch a Netflix show to help prevent the spread of Corona virus. And while I get the gallows humor of the situation, making yourself a shut in who's not focused on your physical wellbeing is going to have a really deleterious effect in the long run. So what can you do to help keep your physical wellbeing intact during however long that you are practicing social distancing? Well, just because you're social distancing doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't get out and get some fresh air. Literally just go for walks, go find a park, go drive to a park where you're not clustered around other people and just go for a walk, get some fresh air, move around, get your body going, get your blood flowing. The amount of good that this can do for you both in terms of your overall attitude and for your body is just immeasurable.
Also, if you're someone who typically does go to the gym and does a lot of workouts and that sort of thing, yeah, this is going to be a challenge. You're going to have to adapt your routine. For me, I'm not going to the gym anymore because of just all of the unknowns at this time, so it's time to adapt your routine to what you've got. Let's say you usually do a lot of free weights. Well maybe this is the time to go pick up some free weights or order them online, have them delivered to you and do those same routines at home. Maybe you hop on an exercise bike a lot. Well, maybe this is the time to go pick up an indoor trainer to ride inside when the weather's not so great, although depending on what part of the country you're in right now, you may not have quite as awful of a weather situation going on as I do in Minnesota as the snow continues to fall.
And for those of you that are now doing the work from home thing, it's really important to just get up and move around a lot. Sure, you might have set up your laptop and cozied in on the couch for these first couple days, but it's important to set a dedicated area for work and make time throughout the day to step away from that. Now personally, I do use a standing desk, so I know if I've been in one place for too long, I'll start getting tired and it's time to get up and walk around. And if you're sitting, just try setting a timer for every 20 minutes, every 30 minutes or so, and use that as a reminder to get up and move around throughout the day.
All right, so we've started from the ground up with your physical and mental wellbeing, so what next? Well, you may have seen on Instagram recently, I just posted a photo. It's at @BBrewerPhoto of some old work. You may think like, alright, what's old work going to do for me right now? Well, I think it's a useful exercise and one that I've been trying to practice regularly over the past six months or so of going through all these old hard drives that we have and looking through previous assignments, previous projects, or even just any old photo that you've taken a long time ago.
What's the value in that? You might say, well, it does a couple things. First, it shows the way that your eye has changed over time. It's useful to see where you've been as a photographer, to see where you're going to go in the future. You may look through some of these old assignments and go, wow, I was seeing the world in a different way back then. Maybe it's because of the gear you were using, maybe because of who you were at the time or the situations that you were getting yourself into or shoots you are covering. Think of it almost like a visual diary.
On top of that, It's a really useful exercise to see how the trends in photography have changed over time. Now we'd all like to think that we're beautifully independent creative spirits and we aren't impacted by the work around us, but realistically in the age of social media, that's just not true. Whether subconsciously or consciously were impacted by all the work that we see in the world that we come across in our feeds. And even as you go back and looking at previous work, you were probably being subconsciously impacted by who was winning awards back then. What kind of work was getting promoted in that sense?
And finally, one of the most rewarding parts about going through your old work is, you know, you might just find a diamond in the rough back there. I took a look through a project from, gosh, 10 years ago while I was studying abroad in Denmark and it was a student project. It wasn't anything I was overwhelmingly proud of. In fact, I had actually pulled some of that work off of my website. But upon closer inspection on a couple shots in there, I realized there was some potential. So I took those raw images, I reprocess them the way I'm currently seeing things, crop things to my specifications and you know, lo and behold, I had a nice image that was able to go into my people gallery on my website right now.
So there's point number two of going through some of your old work and seeing if you can find a little diamond in the rough or at the very least do a little bit of a visual diary search. Number three is actually really closely linked to number two and that's going through your archives and seeing what's out there in terms of stock photos. Now obviously the stock photo industry has changed a lot. There's definitely not as much money in it as there used to be. And while I never did get on that train way back when. I do appreciate the value in it.
Depending on what kind of photography or video that you shoot, there could be a literal treasure trove of great photos, videos, moments in your archives, sitting there idle on your hard drives that are doing nothing for you. So during your process of going through your old work, try to go through it with an eye for stock. Maybe you were out in an assignment and you finished and you're heading home and captured an abstract photo of a bridge. Let's say. You may have just forgotten about that, but only until you go through your old work, are you going to go back through and go, huh, maybe there's some value in that. Maybe there is some commercial appeal for that particular texture and that image in the past.
One of the big barriers to putting your photos up on stock sites was simply the headache of having to go through all of the metadata for every individual stock. Well thanks to some really clever technology that's going up there right now that actually has pretty much been erased in the last few months. I've started using a service called WireStock. You can find them online at www.wirestock.io and part of the reason that I've really enjoyed this so much is because it does a lot of that metadata backend work for you for six to eight different stock sites at the same time for photos.
So let's say upload a photo of a drone image that I had posted recently that I think has some stock appeal. I simply have to select whether it's a commercial or editorial image, depending on what kind of release information I might have, but in all of the information that I have available to me, including what category it should be filed under as well as a caption for each image and then just hit the submit button. Generally your photos are approved within a few days or so and there you go. They're out on the stock image sites all at the same time. So if you are interested in using wire stock, shoot me a message on Instagram at @BBrewerPhoto and I'd be happy to pass along a link.
Uploading photos to stock websites may not be able to replace income loss during this period, but it's not nothing but over time this can be a valuable resource to growing a recurring income as a photographer or videographer.
So as I mentioned before, one of the things I'm really kind of cringing at is the idea of people using this time in social distancing to just… well… be lazy. To me, I think that's a really missed opportunity. I think there's going to be a subset of people who have a story to tell from their time social distancing. And there's people who aren't. There's people who are going to come out of this arguably stronger than they did going into it. And one of the ways to sort of level up during this time period to use sort of a video game analogy is focused on skill acquisition.
It sounds so simple, but during our normal day to day lives, we don't often think about what kind of new skills we could learn or things we could grow in or improve upon. Now during this time of no sporting events, no conferences, no public gatherings of any real sort. Now's the time to really think about ways to grow and expand beyond your current skill set as a photographer or videographer or hell, anybody.
For me personally, one of the projects I'm going to take on during this time period is learning 3D animation. It's something that's sort of tangential to the work that I do creating video and could really add a huge element and component to some of the future projects that I'm going to be working on.
And more than that, it kind of gives you a leg up. It changes your stack of talents that you might have. You might be a portrait photographer, but let's say during this time period you practice landscape photography, you practice nature photography. That could give you a whole new perspective on how to pose people in nature and natural. Just for an example right here. Another example might be, let's say you're a more traditional photojournalist. Well maybe this is the time to step back and learn a bit more about controlled lighting scenarios, more studio lighting, more about how to light different materials, say plastic or glass or fabric or whatever. Again, I really can't reiterate how important I think this time will be to separate those that grow from it and those that stagnate during it.
All right. Item number five also really speaks to coming out on top from this time social distancing and that to me is planning and researching on personal projects. We've talked about this extensively on this show that working on personal projects and getting those in front of editors or producing them for yourself can be some of the most rewarding personally as well as economically to advance your career as a visual creator.
So while right now you may not be able to go out and work on some of these projects directly. Maybe it's time that you sit back at the whiteboard and plot out some of the projects that you've been thinking about or really dive in on some research on how to execute one of the ones that you've already thought about a lot. Who are the people you need to contact? What are their phone numbers? Where do they live? What is all of the groundwork that you can get done so that when it is time to get back to normal and it will be time to get back to normal, eventually you've done an immense amount of work to get back and pick up the camera that maybe other folks might not have and as a corollary to personal projects that you may not have started. My God, finish stuff that you have already started. I know for me this is exactly the kick in the ass I need to finish editing some video projects that have been sitting on my plate for… God. 12 months. I shot a video project last year, personal project, documentary mini doc sort of project and God life has just gotten in the way, you know? Sure, I've moved up to Minneapolis, I've done a lot of things and you know things get busy but now is the time to go back through with personal projects that you've shot already and make something out of it. Make something beautiful with your work that you've already created, put it out into the world. God knows we need a lot more beauty in our lives at this time.
All right, point number six and this is kind of a smaller one, but I think one that shouldn't be overlooked as well and that is make your workflow work. Now I'm a bit of a project management junkie, so for me this is something I've kind of always practiced a lot of, but even me, I just figured out something for my workflow to optimize the way I'm saving images and storing them onto my hard drives just in the past couple of weeks. That has saved me an incredible amount of time.
So from a project management point of view, you can kind of take a step back and see all of the different milestones in a particular project from client communication to budget, to shoot dates, all of that and kind of think about that systematically from a workflow point of view and seeing if there's a way to make that process go a little smoother. That's not just emails and sticky notes and when it comes to your image processing and your actual work that you're doing, maybe there are ways to improve your process that could save you time. Think about what are those big bottlenecks along the way that holds you back, that prevent you from getting your work done as quickly as possible.
Like I was saying, for me, one of the things that I just realized that I can optimize that was slowing me down a ton was the way that I saved images. Fun fact, if you use the actions menu in Photoshop and create an action that saves your images, say as TIFFs or JPEGs, and use that to process all of the open windows at once. It does a ton of hardware optimization on your computer as you're doing this and cuts the amount of time it takes to save your images just about in half or even less. What used to take me minutes. Take seconds now. So when you're processing hundreds of photos from a gallery or an event, whew, that could save you an incredible amount of time.
So my advice is go through your processes, think about the way you do your work and see if there are spots and bottlenecks that you can really optimize to make your work flow go even smoother for when you are back to work and shooting.
And number seven in terms of the ways to get through this time of social distancing as a photographer is community. It sounds so simple. We take it for granted. We see each other's feeds on Instagram and Facebook and we think of that as community. We think that's enough. But now is the time to really connect as photographers.
Even as I am recording this podcast on Monday night, I'm going to be joining a virtual hangout with other photographers and photo editors tonight. Just as a way to keep that connection alive. Just because you're socially isolated doesn't mean you have to be emotionally so. Connect with the other photographers in your network. Are there people whose work you've been following for a long time that you just don't know anything about them personally? Now's a great time to reach out or maybe put together a weekly meetup online through zoom meetings or Skype or something like that. It's a great way to build a community when it feels like everybody's kind of on their own little Island at this point.
All right, so we've talked through these seven ways for you to handle social distancing as a photographer or visual creator, but I want to devote the last part of this episode to how you can support visual creators and artists and photographers and videographers during this time.
Right now I am lucky enough to have a staff position to fall back on in terms of income, in terms of insurance, all of these I cannot, I cannot imagine the stress that some of you guys might be going through right now. So I want to put out a few ways here that you can support visual creators during this time and make sure that we don't lose too many of you to financial worries and stress and uncertainty along the way.
First, it sounds so simple. We all have so much wall space in our houses. Buy some prints. I know that's one thing I'm going to be doing over the next week or so is going through some of my favorite freelance photographers work, whether it's portrait work, whether it's landscape work, photojournalism or anything. I want to go through and find some images that I think would make beautiful prints. It may not seem like much, but it is a simple small way that you can support visual creators during this time and make the house that you're occupying a little more beautiful in the process.
Second, and this is more for people who are like me in that they do have a staff position and maybe freelance on the side are working towards freelance career as they do have a staff position and that's passing along assignments. That's something I'm actively going to be doing during the next weeks and months is if I do get an assignment, chances are I'm probably going to pass that on to somebody that I know needs it more than I do right now.
Third is shout-outs. It's so simple and this goes for everybody, whether you're a photographer or not during this time, even the act of promoting other people's work and shouting them out and giving some love to people's photography and photos and galleries and whatnot, past work, anything. It goes a long way. That's part of the beautiful power of these social networks that we use. These Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all of that is that you are able to reach people that you otherwise would never have access to or never even know about. So do the simple thing. Just find some photographers that you've been following. Find some creators that you really love and share their work. Go through all of their photos, go through their their portfolio and share something you love. Put a comment on it. Anything really does help in terms of keeping people's work front and center as they go through this challenging time and come through the other side.
Fourth on the list of how to help photographers and visual creators during this time is being a good peer and a good community member. For me that means helping out people who maybe are early on in their career and going through their portfolio or helping review their work or a project that they've got. I know for me, one of the biggest things that helped me as a new creator was having friends and coworkers and people that I've only barely met who were willing to go through my portfolio and tell me what I was missing, what ways I could optimize it, ways I could improve the work that was there, what I needed to cut, Whoa God, what I needed to cut. Indeed.
So that's something I want to work on during this time is performing visual portfolio reviews for people. So if that's something you might be interested in, drop me a DM on Instagram. I'm at @BBrewerPhoto or send me an email to podcast@photoforward.media. I would be more than happy to help review your website, help review your, just lend some thoughts to, to projects you've got going on. I really do want to be able to help creators during this time and make sure that their work is as strong as it can be for getting back on their feet after COVID passes.
So again, if that is something you would be interested in, send me a message. I will be honestly more than happy to set up any and all Zoom meetings that I can, even if this is passing this along to your students or if you've got any younger photographers that you know in your network, please feel free to drop my information to them. I really want to help out in any way I can.
And finally, this may sound a little bit selfish, but I promise you that it's not, and that's interviewing photographers for your podcast. Seriously. That's one thing that I want to do a ton of over the next coming days and weeks and again, hopefully not months, is interview a ton of photographers. There are so many incredible visual creators out there that have incredible stories, perspectives, philosophies that I think need to be shared even greater than they already are. Maybe they have stories that they don't even realize are incredible.
So that's one of the things that I'm going to be doing a ton of, is reaching out to photographers, reaching out to freelancers especially or independent content creators of all kinds of sorts and seeing if they'd be willing to jump on a podcast with me. I'm going to do as much as I can during this time period to help promote their work, get it out there to the world and and share their stories.
Again, this doesn't seem like a huge thing, but I know how many people this podcast reaches and by virtue of the network effect and getting that out to even more people, I think that can only help our brothers and sisters here in the photo and video industry during this. Quite frankly, scary time.
Well, at long last, we have reached the end of this episode talking about ways to get through social distancing and the Coronavirus outbreak as a photographer or visual creator and ways to help photographers and visual creators during this really tumultuous time. I know that this list is not exhaustive and none of this is medical advice as as you probably already have gathered from this, I can't provide any of that. I can't tell you when this is going to be over. I just know that it's going to be over and that we as individuals and as a community need to grow from it in any way possible that we can.
So if you have any questions about the items that we talked about today or you thought of some ways that you want to be able to help creators during this crazy time, please do drop me a note. I will try to get those posted and update this with resources as I'm able to. Again, if there's any way that I can help any of you, please, please, please do not hesitate to reach out together as a community. We're strong. We can get through this.
So to repeat, if you do want to have me help you with a portfolio review or a website review or anything like that, do you reach out to me? Best way to reach out is on instagram @BBrewerPhoto or drop me an email to podcast@photoforward.media. So in lieu of the traditional appeal for ratings, reviews, and all of that nonsense, just want to leave you with the final message that I leave you on every podcast episode. Keep seeing, keep shooting and keep putting your best photo forward. Cheers, everyone.
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