A Photographer’s Diary – Week 1

Posted by Matt Lange on Aug 3, 2009 in Photographer's Diary | 0 comments

For the first installment of the new, weekly entry, I guess I should do some sort of introduction of myself and situation to bring you all up to speed.

My name is Matt Lange, which you know.  I’m a commercial photographer in Baton Rouge, LA.  A little over two weeks ago, I walked away from Corporate America to pursue this dream I have of being a successful commercial photographer.  How has it been so far?  Nerve wrecking honestly.  When I put in my two week notice, I just knew I had it all lined up. I had money in the bank.  I had a couple photo shoots lined up that were just going to suck new amazing clients to me like I was the black hole eating the universe.  Well, that didn’t really happen. Don’t get me wrong, I had some awesome shoots so far, with a few more coming up soon.  But the reality is, when you take that jump, you better hope that chute opens before you hit the ground.

Since leaving Corporate America, I stepped back into the world of part time work.  Since I haven’t landed my deal with Nike yet, I have to have something to do to supplement some income and give me some breathing room to do some more shoots.  This is such a strange, yet familiar world.  I work as a QA Test for EA Sports.  It’s actually really cool.  I’m not allowed to really talk about it so I’ll just leave it at that.  Oh, and I’ll say, I meet some really ‘different’ people.  Moving on…

So what’s the goal of all this you ask?  Oh, you didn’t ask?  Well I’ll share.  Someone in the back asked.  I heard it.  I want to be a big time sports photographer.  I want to shoot all things sports.  Ads, Television Spots, Games, whatever.  If it involves sports,  I want it.  I love shooting everything, but I want to do that for money.  I have to eat right?  The whole purpose is to do what I really love.  I’ve had a pretty bad run at full time jobs.  I met some good people, don’t get me wrong, but I wasn’t happy.  The only job I really liked other than pictures was working in College Football.  But being married doesn’t really allow for that.  So this is the next best thing.

Since this is a ‘diary’ I guess I’m supposed to fill everyone in on what I’ve been up to.  Well, when I left that job, I had 3 things lined up:  Louisiana Tech Football Promo photos, Praline photos (which are on my site) and music video editing for Motion Family.   Well, the first thing I did was photograph the pralines.  Man, food photography is tough.  I’m not really at liberty to discuss too much about this right now, but I think they came out well.  When we do round 2, it’s going to be epic.  That very same weekend, my wife and I made the 4 hours trek to Ruston, LA to photograph the Louisiana Tech football job.  I really should say, that shoot turned out great!  I love those pictures.  But if you have noticed, they aren’t on my site.  Well, here is where the stressful part of being a photographer comes into play.  NCAA states that I cannot use a current player’s likeness to promote my business.  ’But Matt, I thought you did them for Tech and not yourself’.  Yes, true.  But it’s still a rule and I have to follow it.  Sucks, but hey.  They’ll be up soon enough and I will be a very happy camper.

I’ve also been spending a lot of time in the last two weeks trying to figure out how to get clients.  Oh man, every photographers question when they first start out, “how do I get clients?”.  Well it’s been about 3 years since I got back into this, and I still don’t know.  But I’ll tell you what I have been doing.  Emailing, like crazy, to everyone.  I basically have set my sites on the ultimate goal, sports, and have tried to figure every way out to get my foot in the door.  A big problem I keep having though, is that I keep trying to go straight to the top, and forget about the local scene.  I have a season sideline pass with Southcreek Global, to cover LSU from the sideline, so the back of my brain keeps telling me it’s good enough.  Well, it’s not.  I’ll figure it out one day.   But I’m trying to get in where I fit in, around here I guess.  Just trying to get some commercial clients to get that portfolio built up.  I have been lining up shoots on my own dime to get it rolling.  I have found that in doing so, I get a very ‘free’ feeling.  I like to think that this is how it is when you do commercial work.  I sit there and plan/research exactly how the shoot will go, and then it does.  It’s an amazing thing really.  When I get the Nike gig, it’ll be just like that.  We all know it probably won’t be, but hey, I can dream.

I don’t know if this was a great opening ‘diary’, but I think it caught everyone up.  Next week’s will be a lot better.  Seeing as how I just thought of doing this yesterday, I really just freestyled this one.  I covered the basics though:  quit job, part time job, NCAA ruling surprise, pralines, music videos and money parachute has yet to be deployed.

I’ll post again, let’s say, Tuesday.  Every Tuesday I’ll do this.  It’ll replace the Tuesday creativity posts, seeing as how I can’t get to a computer during the day anyway.  Thanks for reading if you made it this far.  I’ll condense them from now on.