Staying Busy in a Crisis
CW Pencils, 2019, from a social media asset project with American Express
Here’s what I’m doing to keep busy, manage my business, and stay sane while the coronavirus crisis unfolds.
Professional:
Putting together creative decks for past, current, and potential clients for summer and autumn. Once things start to pick up again, I hope that I’ll be able to make their jobs easier by presenting fully formed ideas for content with a plan in place, ready to implement. Team, locations, number of assets, brand messaging post-crisis, model options, etc.
Catching up on YouTube tutorials. At this point I feel like I’ve mastered 95% of what Capture One Pro and Adobe Lightroom have to offer, but it’s a never-ending process learning what’s possible in Photoshop. So I’ve enmeshed myself in a giant cluster of YouTube tutorials about different processing techniques. Right now I really love PiXimperfect and Phlearn. I also plan to learn more about InDesign (for a Cozy Gurl Club zine I’m making) and DaVinci Resolve (Final Cut seems a bit limited, Adobe Premiere feels unwieldy).
Gathering inspiration.
Watching and rewatching some fantastic videos. Bill Cunningham New York for street style, the Alec Soth: Photographic Storytelling course by Magnum, The Many Lives of William Klein
I have tons of folders of inspiration images sorted by mood, style, outside, inside, studio, beauty, etc. and I’ve finally organized them. There’s a few thousand! I use these images to create custom moodboards for personal projects or for clients wanting a little more guidance on creative.
Browsing through some fashion blogs I used to love to read. Wonderland, Schön!, Ladygunn, Image Amplified are some of my faves.
Working on my website. I’m in the process of culling lots of new images to update this website. I’ve also created this blog, which is the single best thing I’ve ever done for myself as a photographer. I love having an outlet to put more images out to the world without cramming it into people’s faces on Instagram.
Working on social media. I’ve shied away from social media a lot—I deleted everything except Instagram years ago—but I’m trying to focus on presenting the very best version of myself and my images from now on. I feel good about the workflow right now. I cull and edit my images for my client or the model, hand select my favorite 10-15 images for the blog, and preview 2-5 of those on Instagram. I’d like to be able to put together and post behind the scenes videos from the massive archive of video I’ve taken on my GoPro (mounted to my camera) on YouTube or TikTok, but that feels like it’d be such a huge undertaking. I’ll think on this more.
Personal:
I’ve taken to meditating again, with the Headspace app
Journaling with the Day One app, my preferred digital diary for the last few years
Every other day, I lift weights with my little brother in the garage. Bench press, military press, curls, planks, barbell hip thrusts, deadlifts, leg extensions, squats.
Most days, I go for a bike ride for an hour, while listening to true crime podcasts on Overcast. I track my BPM, cardio, calories, etc. with a FitBit Charge.
Catching up on reading! I updated my Want to Read list on Goodreads and in the past couple of weeks I’ve read To The Lighthouse by Viriginia Woolf, On Photography by Susan Sontag, and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard.
Tackling a list of movies I’ve been wanting to watch. I signed up for Letterboxd and have 300 or so movies I want to see. In the past few weeks I’ve seen L’Avventura, Waves, [REC], Contagion, and Ready or Not.
Getting 8-10 hours of sleep a day. With no current client obligations, I’ve been getting some of the best sleep of my life.
This is by no means a complete list of everything I’m trying to do at the moment — I could write a whole other blog post just for what I’m doing on the financial side of things — but I’d love to know what everyone else is doing right now to keep their business afloat and stay sane right now! Feel free to DM me or comment below. :)