A free chapter · How it started

Nine months

From the kitchen table to the last day.

I had a corporate job, and I was the one carrying everything — the health insurance, the life insurance, the paycheck that showed up whether or not it had been a good week. I also had three children under about eighteen months old, which meant two babysitter runs a day, every day.

And I had gone gray inside. I don't mean from the hard part of it, because the hard part I could handle — I'd already been through a ruptured disc and surgery at sixteen weeks pregnant with twins. It was work. The spark had gone out and I couldn't find any joy in what I was doing, and I don't know how to explain it any better than that.

I sat down with my significant other at the kitchen table and said I couldn't do it anymore. I was dead on the inside. I wanted to do something different and I wanted more time with my kids.

Nine months later I walked out.

It wasn't a leap. I don't think it should be one for you either.

I didn't wait nine months to start doing something about it. From the day I recognized what was happening I knew I needed a plan, and I knew photography was going to be part of it. I also knew photography wasn't going to replace my income, not for a long while. If I was lucky it would be a fifth of what I made in my corporate job.

So I looked at everything, not just the camera. I reached back into old relationships, and it turned out my former company needed supply chain help right then. That became the other half of the plan.

Two different things, at the same time

This book is about the photography half. The other half is what kept the lights on. If you're at the point where you want to jump and bail and toss it all aside, be realistic about what will and won't pay the bills. But you can also be creative about it. You're allowed to do two completely different things at once, feeding two different parts of yourself, and neither one has to apologize for the other. For me that was fulfilling. I didn't just up and quit. I had a plan.

The sticky notes

Somebody once called it the Trickster — the voice that says you can't do this because you won't have that. I had a lot of that. No health insurance, because my significant other didn't have any either. No life insurance. No steady money.

So I wrote down every reason I had for not doing it. Every worry, every gap, every thing I'd need and didn't have yet. One problem per sticky note, and all the sticky notes went into a notebook.

Then in my downtime I'd take one out and solve for it. Just that one. See it all the way through, and put it back answered.

Before I knew it most of the notes were answered, and I knew it was time.

I still have the notebook somewhere.

Alongside all that

Studying and practicing. I bought books, particularly about light, and read them while the kids napped or played on the floor with my camera already in my hand.

And I shot constantly. Moms and new babies — family friends, because everybody knows everybody here. My cousin who babysat for me, and her sister and her horses. My kids as models over and over. I'd call them and say I've learned something new, can you come over and help me practice.

What twenty-something doesn't want free pictures of themselves?

The day it clicked

The first time I put the camera in manual, I was reading a book and trying to work out how ISO, shutter speed and aperture fit together. I understood the words fine. My hands were the problem. My brain and my hands weren't connected yet, so every adjustment was a calculation, and by the time I'd finished calculating the moment had gone.

That went on for months.

Then I was up in a field on the mountain behind my house, shooting my cousin with her horse — Dickens, who has since passed, and she is very glad now that she has those pictures. I was doing my best in manual, same as always. And somewhere in the middle of it something connected between my thumb, my forefinger and my brain. I stopped working out what to change. I just knew what I wanted and which way to roll the dial to get it.

I pulled the camera away from my face and hollered at my cousin across the field — I've got it. I understand it. This is amazing.

It went from mechanical to instinct, and everything after that was different.

The day it clicked

What I practiced on

I was also working out what pricing would look like, and posting everything — including the free work. Not to my personal page. That was private, so nothing on it was ever going to reach anybody who didn't already know me. I set up a separate public business page, attached to my personal one, under the business name. People could share it, and strangers could find it on their own if they went looking for a photographer around here.

That page is how the first strangers found me. The first paid job was three hundred and fifty dollars — a family completely outside my circle. No connection to me at all. The first time I met them was the day I showed up to shoot them, and that was the day I earned my first money at this.

I looked back at those pictures the other day. I cannot believe they paid me for that. But they did.

Three toddlers is not a disadvantage when you are teaching yourself to photograph people.

They won't hold a pose, they won't take direction, and they don't care even a little bit that you're trying to learn something. So the only frames you come away with are the ones where you were fast, and where you'd already worked out your light before anything happened.

I learned to shoot moving people on my own children, for free, in my own yard, for a few months before anybody paid me to photograph anything.

Almost everything in this book about handling a live session came from those months in my own yard. I never took a workshop on any of it.

I asked to go part time first

I had three children in eighteen months. I didn't have them until I was thirty-five and thirty-six, so by then I was fifteen years into a career — ten with one company straight out of college, then five with this one. The job paid well, but the stress was constant.

So this was not a small decision and I did not treat it like one. I lost sleep over it. Even after my mind was made up it still had weight on it, and I kept asking whether I was doing the right thing. What got me over the fear of the unknowns wasn't confidence. It was curiosity — I wanted to know badly enough whether I could actually make it work with a camera, and that wanting was bigger than the fear.

But I asked to go part time first. I told my boss where I was — that this stage with the kids was relentless, that I was stressed and low, that I needed less. He took it up the chain and the answer came back that they don't do part time.

That made me more certain than I already was.

When I handed in my resignation, they came back and asked about part time.

I already asked. You said no.

I'm glad I didn't take it. If they didn't value me when I sat there and told them plainly what I needed, they weren't going to respect an arrangement they only offered because I'd called their bluff. I went and built my own part-time work instead — supply chain consulting, running alongside the photography.

And the whole time, doubt

I was riddled with it. Is this the right thing to do. Am I being irresponsible with my family. Am I telling myself this is more possible than it actually is.

I knew, technically, that I was not as good as some of the photographers around me. There were plenty of moments of why am I even doing this — who is going to want this?

It was hard and it was frightening and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

I also don't regret a moment of it. I'd do the whole thing again.

The drive home

My last day was in June. I remember it being warm.

I drove away from that building and I felt free. I'm sure I had a schedule waiting for me at home — I always have a schedule — but it was mine. Nobody was expecting anything from me that I hadn't decided to give them.

Music on. Grinning. Gripping the steering wheel. And scared, at the same time, the whole way down that road.

What I remember most is that I didn't feel owned anymore. For the first time I felt like I owned myself. I owned my own future, and I wasn't relying on anybody else to hand it to me.

I'm going to make this work. Come hell or high water.