The the most important thing when you're starting out and you're a young
photographer is to take time to work on your own personal projects and come up
with really interesting, quirky stories that no one else is doing, rather
than going and covering a big news event like this, this is something I did very
late in my career, let's say after 10 years or so. But in the
beginning the best thing I could to do was just find the weirdest
story that no one else had done and that would immediately set me apart from
everyone else, so I think that's the single best bit of advice I could
give to a young photographer coming up, to come up with original ideas.
When I was starting out, I wasn't the most technically gifted person by any means
in my class, I was probably at the lower end of the scale, but I was told that
that's something you can learn. Your natural ability and your
interpersonal skills and your work ethic are not so much
things you can kind of develop in such an easy way like the technical side of things.
Having a kind of natural
ability to put people at ease, to have a disarming manner
to open doors, to be kind of quiet in your approach and not
be too forceful, that's how I've a lot of
what I've done by being quite gentle in my approach to
photographing people because, yeah, ultimately it's a huge ask to
ask people to let you photograph them, so to be
mindful of that and humble about it.
The first part of
developing a good story is obviously
doing your research and reading and consuming as much material and
information as possible, whether it's in the form of news or documentaries or books.
I found ideas from all of those those different places, so to just
consume as much as you can and then when you've got a good idea to
give yourself time to explore it because not everything that
looks great on paper is going to work as a photo story, and it can be pretty
crushing when you've spent weeks thinking about an idea and
researching an idea and then you go and you try and photograph it and you realize
that it's not going work. Try and establish a relationship with the
editors that you want to pitch work to. When you've got
an idea so it's really important to meet these people
face-to-face and that's why it's so good to come to things like Visa and have
portfolio reviews, so you meet said editor you want to work for.
Next time you send them an email they know who it's coming from and
they're much more likely to answer it. I think targeting the
people that you do you really want to work for and focusing on
specific magazines and newspapers and institutions that you want to work for
because not everyone is suited to every publication or organization.
We all have our kind of style and specialities, so to work out where you
fit in and then really go after that.