On the Merit of Free Labour
"I photographed some chickens and all I got were these lousy additional jobs"
Note
This post was originally made on Push // Pull, a blog run by Photographer Matt Becker.
Okay. Let me explain what I mean by that somewhat provocative title.
A couple of months ago, a friend asked me to take some pictures of his chickens for social media. Chickens of a particular breed. Frizzles!
As a breed, Frizzles are relatively under-represented (other breeds can have frizzle-feather variants, but this is its own thing), with only a reasonably small-sized society behind them. My friend - a Frizzle keeper and breeder for some years, and owner of Lampeter's own Siop Botanica - was looking to promote both the breed and the society; to bring more attention to and hopefully generate interest in both.
So. Pictures. Me.
Am I a professional photographer? No. Am I likely to become one? It's hard to say. Can I use this as an opportunity to practice the craft and hang out with my friend? I certainly can.
Since it was "work", and for a friend, I didn't charge anything despite his asking me to - at my level, I'm just not comfortable taking money for what I produce. Thus: the Free Labour.
From mid-afternoon to sundown on a relatively chilly October day, a number (a high number) of photos were taken. I'd go on to edit them over the next couple of days, after I got back from work. My general process would be:
- Cull. Get rid of as many photos as possible, keeping only the best or most interesting / useful and rating them for easier sorting / grouping later
- Apply my base colours / brightnesses / details Lightroom preset
- Adjust exposure (with the sun going down and my less-than-stellar abillity to get exposure correct in-camera, this was a time-consuming step)
- If necessary, put a combined mask over subject and foreground, invert so it covers the background (Lightroom's AI-driven background-detect doesn't really work well enough for this in my experience) and reduce the background's exposure slightly to give the subject more presence. Try not to overdo it.
- Export! JPEG @ max quality 150DPI (end goal is social media, so don't need more)
- Compress (using Caesium Image Compressor; one of my favourite pieces of software and one to which I've donated multiple times over) - sending over 1GB of files is time consuming and laborious; sending <200mb of files is considerably less so
Once I finished processing everything I sent a ZIP of the compressed files over, and that was that!
What was that about the merits in this?
Ah. Yes. That wasn't that.
Following that fun-if-slightly-chilly October afternoon, I didn't expect:
- ending up having some of the photos published in a premier poultry publication (Fancy Fowl Magazine), with the editor saying they really liked what I'd done
- the possibility of freelance work under my studied profession (web development) to rework the society's website
These two things are obviously not immediately income-generating. But. Not everything needs to be, and - so long as you're able to survive otherwise - not everything should be.
The latter, if it comes to fruition, is a nice extra sum of money (that will likely be "reinvested" in camera equipment, let's be honest). The former is a nice boost for my confidence. Will I still think the majority of my photos are bad? Yes! Most definitely. But having something like this in the back of my mind allows me to tell that nay-saying, belittling voice to shut up, if just for a little while.
The magazine appearance is a feather in the cap, so to speak, and the potential freelance work is something that can be discussed further, with the other members of the society now knowing a little more about me than "he's a guy that lives in Wales that does websites I guess". Again, potential future developments.
The Caveat
The key aspect of this, however, is that I explicitly held no expectations past "I'm going to hang out with my friend, take some photos, do some basic editing and send them over. They might end up on social media".
Had I expected the work to lead to anything else, I would either have been disappointed if it didn't ("but why didn't it; I must be a terrible photographer"), or felt justified in my beliefs had it done so ("but of course I'm getting more work from this; I'm a brilliant photographer"). Neither option is particularly healthy.
What is healthy, I would argue, is being open to things that might not give immediate monetary returns, but can give a little colour to your life.
Post-post Update
🐣
Since starting writing this post, I've been commissioned to redesign the rosettes awarded to well-performing Frizzles in competitions.
(Post-post-post Update)
The rosette design has since been included in another issue of Fancy Fowl, along with two of the images above.
