My photography journey # 8
Discovering film photography, Sigma Art 35 mm, a new blog, which didn't last long, and commercial photography. (2016-2018).
If you are new to this series and would like to read the previous posts, I have made a menu item at the top of my site. All you have to do is click on My photography journey, and all previous posts will magically appear.
At the end of 2017 I got my first film camera.
I had been interested in getting one for quite some time, but I hadn’t yet done any research or seriously looked for one, especially since I knew nothing about film cameras and didn’t know what to look for. Then suddenly a beautiful camera came to me.
A friend of mine, whose children went to the same school as my daughter, asked me one day, if I would be interested in buying her dad’s old film camera, which she had, but never used. I think she felt a bit sad, that it was just sitting there on the shelf, and she thought it deserved to be put into good use.
I told her, that I would love to see the camera, and so we met, it was love at first sight, and I bought it immediately.
The camera was a Canon AE-1 program with a 50 mm f/1.4 lens + an additional bigger lens, which I no longer have, because it was too heavy and uncomfortable to use, so I ended up selling it.
I shot two rolls of film over the first months of 2018. A Kodak Portra 400 and a Kodak tri-x 400.
I sent the rolls to Spain to have them developed at Carmencita film lab, which had been recommended to me, and I had no idea what to expect. Would I receive 36 black frames? Stuff out of focus? Did the camera even work?
When I saw the result, I was so surprised and very relieved. The rolls contained real photos! Most of them were in focus, and there were even some really good ones among them.
To see these photos appear on my screen (and later on in print) was so magical. It seemed almost unreal, and I couldn’t believe my luck. I was now shooting analog!
The camera and the 50 mm lens are still with me, and even today, after having purchased other film cameras, it remains my biggest camera love.
In 2017 I made another purchase. I replaced my Canon EF 24-70 mm f/4L IS USM lens with the Sigma Art 35 mm f/1.4.
I had already stopped using the 24-70 mm (Actually I had probably already sold it by then), and I needed something to replace it for my family photography. I had read a lot of nice things about the Sigma Art series, and in the end I simply ordered the lens online.
The Sigma Art 35 mm is the best lens, I have ever owned, and today it is the only lens, I have kept for my Canon 5d mark III, and which I still use. The colors are amazing, it’s sharp, but also soft, and 35 mm is a focal length, which I really enjoy working with.
The only negative thing about this beauty is the weight, which together with the 5D body really becomes too much for everyday use. (You can read more about that in this post).
Between 2016-2017 I made some changes to my blogging.
I don’t remember exactly, when it happened, but I gradually started publishing less and less new content on A dusty olive green. I had slowly become a bit tired of some aspects of blogging.
You should know that with the exception of a very few collaborations (which can be counted on one hand), I have never made money on my blog. Of course I would sometimes get new photography clients and other jobs because of it, but overall blogging was something I did for fun and out of pure passion for writing and photography.
As I got better as a photographer, what started to bother me a little bit, was the fact, that I was practically doing free publicity for shops, cafes and restaurants, and on top of this it happened quite often, that these places asked me afterwards, if they could use my photos on their website, and because I was the one, who had taken the first steps to write about and photograph the places, it was hard for me to say no or ask for payment for image rights, so usually I would just say yes, but it bothered me, especially when it was big places, who surely had the budget to pay.
I think this little inner conflict was one of the main reasons, why I decided to change things and start a new blog.
A dusty olive green was still online, but in 2016 I purchased a new domain and created a new blog, which I called I harmoni (Danish for “In harmony”).
The purpose of this new blog was first of all to create a concept, which would be more meaningful to me (and to my readers), and on top of this I was hoping, that this time I would also be able to make a bit of money on my blog.
I was still going to write about places in Florence and Copenhagen, but this time I decided to focus on all things organic, vegetarian, artisan, sustainable etc. Those are values that have always been important to me, and by focusing only on shops, cafes and other places which shared these values, I would already feel a higher purpose with my work - even if I wouldn’t be able to earn money on the blog.
I also decided to have a clear and transparent policy regarding image use, so that any shop or cafe, which I was going to write about, would be informed beforehand, that they had the option to purchase the image rights, in case they liked the photos and wanted to use them for publicity on their website and social media.
To start with I reached out to brands to offer some unpaid sponsored blog posts. I needed to show other potential clients, what they could get from my blog, and of course I needed to grow a readership, before I could even think of asking brands to pay me.
I did a few collaborations here and there, always for free, but in a few cases I managed to sell some image rights afterwards, which was nice. My readership grew quite fast, especially thanks to Instagram, as I discovered that the social media community around all things sustainable/organic was huge.
And yet the blog didn’t survive long.
First of all I realized, that it didn’t feel right to write “on command” (This expression is of course a bit hard, as I myself took the initiative to write every single blog post, and I always had complete freedom to write, whatever I wanted to write, but it felt wrong anyway).
I quickly understood, that sponsored blog posts were not for me, and I realized, that although the values, which I had chosen to focus on in my blog posts, were values, which I shared 100%, I didn’t find them interesting enough to focus an entire blog on them.
I think the blog lasted less than a year. Then I transferred the most important content to A dusty olive green, before deleting I harmoni.
So much for that adventure.
In 2017 I was contacted by a magazine called Artful blogging, who wanted me to write an article about my blog, and what blogging meant to me.
I wrote the article and sent it to them, and they picked some of my photos directly from my Instagram to go with the words. It turned into a piece of eight pages with a very beautiful layout, and I was very happy with the final outcome.
I just read the article again for the first time since 2017, and I was amazed to discover, how everything I write, can be applied to this moment. In fact it may be even more relevant today. (If you open the single photos and use the zoom tool a bit you should be able to read it all).
After my unsuccessful attempt at creating a new blog, I was officially tired of blogging, and one day I decided it was time to also abandon A dusty olive green and delete it from the Internet. (Very ironically this happened not long after the article in Artful blogging was published).
It’s very typical for me, that when I get tired of a project, a social media or whatever it may be, I prefer to delete everything right away. I guess it’s a way of moving forward without being able to look back or change my mind, but of course it’s also an attempt to control what is circulating online. I don’t want too much old stuff, which no longer represents, who I am today, to show up on the Internet.
After my assignment for Freunde von Freunden in 2015 (See part 7 of my photography journey), I slowly started getting more commercial and editorial assignments.
Between 2016 to 2018 I did a couple of event photography assignments during the Pitti fashion week in Florence, I did some interior and portrait photography for online articles on websites such as Minimums, Ignant and Kinfolk, and I also did a big assignment together with other Florentine photographers for a blogger event organized by a German luxury brand in 2017.
My commercial assignments were limited to this period, and just as quickly as they had started coming, just as quickly did they stop, and I don’t think I did any commercial photography after 2018.
Maybe I could have taken it a bit further, if I had been more proactive trying to reach out to possible clients, and if I had been willing to work more for free.
Because back then many (especially magazine) jobs were not paid, or they were honored with a very small and symbolic fee. In the beginning I accepted this, when it was a job, which I really wanted, and which I knew would look good in my portfolio, but once I started to do more paid assignments, I stopped altogether accepting unpaid jobs as a matter of principle.
When I look back today, I think I should have done a few more of these unpaid jobs, as they could have lead to more (paid) assignments, but it was a choice, I made, and back then it felt right.
Another reason why my “career” as a commercial/editorial photographer didn’t last long was, that I simply wasn’t the best.
Even though Florence isn’t a big city and especially back then didn’t have a huge number of photographers, there were indeed others, which were very good and also better than me, when it came to this kind of commercial/editorial photography, so at a certain point I decided to abandon it altogether and focus only on what I did best: Kids and family photography.
Always enjoyable. Your dedication to deleting your work from the internet’s with so much authority is inspiring haha. I regrettably have still so much of my artwork online and really wish I didn’t haha.
Yours is an interesting journey for sure, and your way of writing about it is refreshingly transparent and honest. Your photos from the different periods in your journey reflect what interested/occupied you and show various subjects, but I think there's a 'signature' in a lot of them.