Mike Johnston of The Online Photographer just posted a characteristically insightful piece on becoming a "successful" photographer. (I put that in quotes because he’s talking about more than one kind of success.)
The real gold is in the last section, How to know. The significant idea is this: "If you use the 1-2-3 method of editing, you might consider starting a new category: significant failures."
Read the rest, it’s short and worth it!
Putting together a portfolio of any kind of art is painful. Way more painful than it seems it should be. Photographer John Loomis has some interesting thoughts on the process on his blog:
Even while I fully understand the need to put together an updated portfolio, and it is very important to put new, interesting work out there as often as possible, the process can be so unforgiving that even starting down the path can grind your professional life to a dead stop. More than a few times in the middle of designing a portfolio I’ve basically thrown up my hands and shouted, "holy shit, what am I doing?!" What you are really doing is creating a mirror of your passion and vision of the world you live in, and sometimes that reflection is extremely difficult to see anyway but darkly.
Sounds about right. This process has made me want to burn all my film and think that my pinhole cameras might be put to better use as gravy separators and my lenses used to start fires more times than I can count. There is a reason I haven’t managed to put anything in my gallery section in over a year of the site being up (though that’s about to change), and that is that editing portfolios sucks with a capital SUCKS.
Continue reading at Drinking With a Dead Man
Via Katie Cooke