The Letter I Wish Somebody Had Handed Me in 2014

Hey kid.

I know you're not sleeping well, freaking out at 3am, trying to figure out how to make this whole leaving TV and going out on your own thing work. And the last thing you need is me chirping in your ear about what you should be doing, but too bad, you need to hear what I'm about to tell you.

Let's start with what you're doing right now that you need to cut out from this day forward.

Every session you walk into, you barely take the time to get to know your clients. Most of the back-and-forth happens over email. There's no gameplan put in place. You sort of agreed on what they think they need, didn't push any further, and called it a day.

When you get to the location, you have anxiety overload, and default to what you always do.

You get small and bury yourself in the camera.

You're going to screw around with the lighting longer than it needs to be screwed around with.

You're going to take an ungodly number of test shots and check the back of the camera way too many times because you don't trust yourself.

You're going to talk to the gear instead of the person in front of you (actually, you can still sprinkle that in because the clients laugh at that part, so keep doing that).

And the person in front of you is standing there, tapping their foot in anticipation, wondering when you're actually going to take the reins and lead the dance.

Granted, the session will produce some beautiful photos. They will. You don't suck at this part. The light will work, the compositions will work, the technical execution will be all there.

That's the good news. The bad news?

You're only giving them a portion of what they really need.

You won't be able to name the other parts. The worst part is that most of your clients won't be able to name them, either.

Regardless, they'll thank you, they'll pay you, they'll post a couple of the shots and ignore the other 327 photos you delivered to them.

The thing that's off? It's you.

You're hiding in the equipment because you don't really understand what the actual goal of these sessions is yet, and you don't want them to find out.

Here's the thing nobody's told you yet.

The reason you don't know what you're doing isn't because your skills are bad. Your skills are fine. You can light a face. You can read a room. You can frame. You know how to do the thing reasonably well. You'll get even better at this over time, and get to a point where you have an unquenchable thirst for better.

But the reason you don't know what you're doing is that there is no strategy in the conversation before the camera comes out of the bag.

You and the client agreed on a session. You didn't agree on a purpose. You don't know what the photos are for. You don't know how they're going to get used. You don't know what they're supposed to do.

So you're spraying and praying, hoping that you can get by through creating pretty photos.

That's the gap. That's why every session feels like it ends a little awkwardly. That's why you're staring at the back of the camera.

The vanity of the images can't, and never will, pick up the slack for the missing value throughout those deliverables.

Strategy is the whole game. Everything else is downhill from there.

Now let me tell you something else you don't know yet.

You think you're producing photo galleries. Sessions. One-offs. A client books a shoot, you deliver a folder, they pick a few favorites, you both move on, and maybe they call you in a year or two when they need an update.

That's not good enough.

You're producing a library of visual assets. You're educating clients about an ever-evolving system of assets.

Something that builds onto itself over time and gets deployed across a dozen different touchpoints. Not just for the next 6 months. But for the life of their business.

When you deliver photos without teaching the client how those photos fit together, where they go, what each one is for, how they slot into the rest of the work they'll do over the next five years, you're handing them a pile of good looking shots and hoping they figure it out.

What ends up happening?

They'll ignore the good ones and overuse the wrong ones. Or, they won't use them at all. They'll come back asking for new headshots and portraits when what they actually needed was a different kind of asset entirely. And you have no idea.

And that's on you.

Your job, the one you don't know is your job yet, is to give them the awareness of how the photos work as a system. Not for this website update. Not for this LinkedIn refresh. For the rest of their professional lives.

The work has a name. You won't have it for years. The name is Visual Authority Architecture, and you're going to build the whole thing from scratch by discovering, over and over, that the photos are never the point. The point is what the photos make possible.

Now let me tell you about your clients.

Most of them would rather be somewhere else than in front of your camera. Don't take it personally.

You'll convince yourself in the early years that your clients are different because they hired you, so they must be into it. They're not. They're tolerating it.

And you can relate to this feeling, can't you?

Remember high school graduation? College? Grad school? Standing next to mom and dad looking about as miserable as you could possibly look?

You know how when you look back at those photos now and you wish you could go back in time and change your face because you don't want those moments in photographs to reflect how self-absorbed you were at the time?

You can't go back. You can't reshoot. Those moments got captured the way they were, which is a damn shame because those represent most of the photos you took with Mom and Dad as an adult.

It's your job to make sure your clients don't look back with regret when they look at their photos.

It's your job to get them out of their own heads. Drop their guard. One small moment. 1/100th of a second at a time is all you need to accomplish this.

That's the secret. The shutter is fast. The camera is patient. You need them to forget the camera is there for a fraction of a second, and then your job is to be ready when it happens.

Which means your job is not hiding behind the camera anymore. Your job is talking to them. Making them comfortable. Reading what they're feeling. Being a human being in a real moment.

And then, snag that blink of an eye where they stop forcing it and allow themselves to be themselves.

You're going to suck at this part for a while because you're still not confident in yourself. It's not what you learned through all those YouTube tutorials or the headshot group you joined.

You're going to be uncomfortable with it. That's fine. You'll live.

Here's the part that's going to surprise you.

The clients you end up working with aren't just clients. They're people doing important work.

They're helping somebody get past what's holding them back. These people help others through tight spots. And the work you do is going to determine whether the right people find them.

That's the overarching goal you don't see yet.

Win for your client. Win for their clients. Win for you.

You used to think of photography as a service. It's bigger than that.

It's a calling.

And the calling has a job description:

Respect the people. Respect the process. Don't half-ass it.

Every time you mail in a session, you're not just short-changing the client. You're short-changing the people they were going to serve with the visibility you didn't help them earn.

Don't do it.

In case you forget how lucky you are to be doing this, let me remind you what you used to do for a living.

You used to shoot hours of b-roll of crying babies.

You used to chase cheating spouses down the street after the lie detector results came back on a daytime talk show.

You used to spend twelve-hour days capturing footage from people whose lives were getting cracked open on national television for entertainment.

That was the job. It paid the bills, it taught you how to see, and you were good at it.

But this work, the work you're walking into now, is different in a way you don't have words for yet. You're going to wake up in seven or eight years and realize you've been getting hugged and thanked by people whose careers got a little easier because you knew what you were doing.

Spoiler alert. The juice is worth the squeeze.

Oh, and one more thing.

You're about to figure out how to monetize your art without compromising your integrity. That's rarer than you think. Most creative people spend their careers picking one or the other. You're going to find a way to have both.

The temptation is going to come. Higher-paying work that isn't aligned. Faster work that asks you to skip the strategy conversation. Clients who want pretty over useful. Easy money for sessions that won't do any real work for anybody.

You're going to want to take some of those shortcuts.

Don't.

The whole thing only works because you didn't.

Don't screw it up.

I'm writing this for myself. But if you're reading over my shoulder, you're probably in your own 2014 right now.

Different details. Same gap. You can feel something is off in how your visual presence is doing its job. You don't have the language for it yet. You're staring at the back of your own camera, in your own way, hiding in your own equipment.

You're not stuck. You're just early.

The thing you can't name is real. And it's nameable. And once you name it, everything moves.

The work I do now is the work I wish someone had been doing for me twelve years ago. Naming the gap. Building the system. Making sure the visual presence does the job it was supposed to do all along.

So I'll ask you the question I wish someone had asked me in 2014:

What is your visual presence actually for, and who is it actually serving?