Hitting the wall

Wedding photography is not for the faint of heart.

The hours are long, the stress is high, the pay ain’t close to what it looks like it will be, and it will be commonplace that you will deal with a razor-thin margin for success on a day with a level of tension that most people will only experience a few times a year. Every. Single. Weekend.

You will be bludgeoned by every insecurity possible. You will be battered with an unrelenting torrent of competition in a field that has nothing more than a $1,500 barrier to entry for a cheap DSLR, a zoom, and a flash, and the better you get, the more you will put your heart on the line to have it unwitting stomped on, because you will take it personally whenever someone books someone else who shoots in that way – you know the one – the one that you loathe and rally against.

If that isn’t bad enough, pricing pressure will not relent. No matter how much you charge and how good you are, your prices will sound high to the uninitiated, and it’s going to be up to you to convince them otherwise.

And for all that it does cost, it’s easy to find yourself fighting for the scraps, clawing for each bite you can find, so paralyzed with fear that you’ll sacrifice time with family, friends, and doing the type of photography that made you enter the profession in the first place.

You will work through nights, obsess through days, and check your phone relentlessly, so you can reply to any and every request in an instant. When times are tough, even in the middle of a movie, a dinner, or a date, you will still want to see if any new inquiries are waiting, and every time you post something, you will be dying to know how many people are seeing it, how viral it is, and you will wonder why the attention wanes so soon.

Along the way, you will also be subjected to an unending stream of status updates and notifications that you will monitor from command central, a.k.a. Facebook, as you reply anytime that little button lights up in red, telling you there’s a comment waiting or a like on the tally.

Business ebbs and flows, but you’ll spend months on end each year with a barrage of questions when the trickle slows about whether the well has run dry or if it’s just business as usual. During these times, you will learn to theorize and explain every possibility to the finest degree, as you chase one solution after the next, looking for the magic bullet.

Meanwhile, you will find no correlation between your most successful shoots and your worst. Clients will complain about the fact that you missed this and didn’t get that on the very set of images you were the most proud of, yet they will love the pictures that you’re least attached to.

At times, you will question the value of your vision, causing insecurity to mount and scar tissue to build as you work harder and harder to avoid every possible error, to please every possible person, and to do more than is humanly possible, blunting your most valuable gift in the process – your ability to see in the present.

If these scars run too deep, you can even become fully detached from the moment, unable to observe, dwelling in a world of shorthand and short cuts built of safe shooting and stagnant observation that you can templatize and generically apply to each and every moment you capture. As you do so, you will start to tell yourself you’re doing it for the client, because you’re sure not doing it for yourself any longer. It is as if the weight of a million little mistakes are bearing down in force on your spirit, squeezing so much doubt into your body, that instead of seeing the beauty around you, you will only see the noise and lose the signal altogether.

But all of this is really just a long, long way of saying this is a hard job.

And this is a not a bad thing.

Reality is exactly what it is. Nothing more. Nothing less. But do not give up, do not stop. Learn to bend, but do not yield. Because these challenges are not only surmountable, but if you let yourself, you can smash them down, and dance all over them. It’s not about an easy day, an easy month, or a fantastic year. It is about life.

If you’ve hit the wall and felt these frustrations, take heart in knowing that it means you are alive. You still have the fight in you. You have not given up. Because the question is not whether you will give in or whether you will make it work. The question is whether you will give in before you make it work. Do not give in. A dream is defined by the very force of its challenge.

There is the wish we all want about how we’d like it all to be, and there is the dream we all have about what we need to do. These are not the same. And if it’s a wish, and you’re not ready to go the distance, and you think it should come quick and easy and effortlessly, there’s no shame in pulling out of the game and finding your dream. But if it is a dream – something you need in some place deep down that only you understand, then it is too much to sacrifice for something so simple as reality.

To grow into something is not to accept the inherent misery of a situation. To grow into something is to stand in the face of it all with nothing more than you, open and bare, free and willing. It’s not to accept failure, but to know that mistakes are just life’s way of asking for a different answer.

It is the act of learning to exist in the present. Not to walk into the fear and emptiness of each day unprepared and unready and to assume we will crawl through the hole unscathed, but the ability to walk through the fire, protected by instincts we have honed through dedication to our craft, so we can place a fundamental faith in who we are and what we believe and know that our bodies will respond as we need, when we ask. It is to be ready such that we know that we can take control when we relinquish control.

It is not the world raging against us, then. In every action and every moment, the world is offering something to us. It is asking us to turn into it, engage it, and be part of it. It is a full, giving, spectacular place, packed with sound and light and feeling asking for the most of us and promising more in return. There is more variety and inspiration and beauty in a single day than we can store or memorize in the entirety of our minds, and it is always there for us to have, to hold, to find and uncover, every day, all of the time.

It is a hard job. But for all the weight we carry on our shoulders and all the burdens that rest on our back, we have a job that is built on the idea of dwelling in the world’s potential. Every. Single. Weekend.