Every advanced photographer, professional and hobbyist alike, feels burned out at one point or another. But for a professional, it’s extra tough because your livelihood depends on your ability to perform, to “bring your A-game” to a wedding or portrait session. If you’re not careful, you can slip away from the passion and even the talent-infused results that are currently paying your bills. So, how do you advoid professional burn-out, as a wedding / portrait photographer? (Or any self-employed photographer really, but for the sake of this ramble, we’ll refer to weddings and portraits.

My Ramblings:

This happens to everybody, especially this time of year when the money might be coming in less but the back-end work is just increasing. That’s just the way this career goes. But as long as you can get safely through annual slog then you’ll feel great in a few months.

To be brutally honest however, if your goal is to continue truly LOVING photography as much as you once did, all-year-round, some very dramatic changes might be in order. At the very least, you need to try and minimize your weekday hourly slog. This career can downward spiral very, very fast if you get too buried. Trust me, I know. Out-sourcing your post-production is a huge thing, but not necessarily the only option. Many photographers simply adjust their workflow production time and get each wedding / session turned around in just a few hours, instead of weeks or months… I do highly recommend BOTH mastering post-production and figuring out a good out-source option. Both business models can work very well, you just need to figure out which is right for you. Sometimes it’s a little bit of both!

The bottom line is that you need to make more time for yourself. I don’t care how fun photography is as a career, if you’re working 80-100 hours a week, that’s not cool. You could work a white collar job for 40-50 hrs a week, make way more money, and be an ordinary human being on nights and weekends. Because I don’t care how “soul-sucking” a corporate / blue-collar 9-5 job is, if you make a good living and work only 40 hrs a week, it’s actually a pretty cushy life.

So, you need free time, plus a photographic hobby or you will go insane. I have lost count of how many people think that they’ve fallen in love with photography and that shooting weddings / portraits is their “calling in life” …yet for the past 1-2 years they haven’t touched a camera except to use it for paying their bills, or maybe to snap the obligatory cute kid / pet photo or two. (That wind up never getting edited and shared…)

I’d blow my brains out if that were me. In fact that was me for a year or two, and it was indeed pretty depressing. But I learned my lession: no matter how passionate you are about using your camera to make money, you still need to use your camera to feed and liberate your soul. Whether you want to goof around with camera-tossing (yes that is exactly what it sounds like) …or get serious about landscapes or architecture photography, you gotta find something.

And personally, I don’t even count portraiture as a “hobby”, since that’s part of what I do for a living. I like to do something completely opposite of what I shoot for work. I understand that some people’s “personal projects” might include themed portrait shoots, and I love doing those too, however I guess I just always categorized themed shoots with “work practice / expanding my style”, not my personal hobby…

So, that’s my advice. 1.) Find a way to ONLY work 40 hrs a week, (or so if you’re currently bogged down working 80-100, and 2.) Find something that you’re passionate about, and keep it entirely separate from whatever you do to pay your bills.

Of course it also goes without saying that you may or may not need to raise your prices, in order to afford this new-found free time. But everybody is currently charging something different and that’s tough to gauge except on an individual assessment.

Take care, and feel free to let me know if you have any other questions!
=Matt=

PS: Support my addiction to giving free advice – Donate via Paypal, or by shopping at B&H.

Ever since Nikon made the SB900 to replace the SB800, every professional or experienced photographer (note that the two aren’t always connected, but I won’t go there today LOL!) …every professional or experienced photographer seems to have forgotten about the SB800, and now the new SB700 which seems to be deemed only acceptable for amateurs. So, this is a question I see ALL the time: “Should I buy the SB900, or the SB910?” Or, every now and then, someone actually considers the SB700 as well, but the bottom line is that most everybody else who is giving recommendations out there seems to always recommend the SB910 and nothing else.

My Ramblings:

Yes, the SB900 has issues with shutting down due to the overheat protection feature, and yes if you turn off the overheat protection feature you may have zero issues….or you may explode your flash. So if someone put a gun to my head and made me decide between the 900 and the 910, I’d pick the 910. But I’d like to know, who is that “someone” who keeps putting guns to peoples’ heads and making them decide absurdly random stuff? That’s not the real world.

In the real world, if I could choose any Nikon on-camera flash on the market, for me it would be the SB700 hands-down. It is every bit as functional as the SB900 / SB910, but it’s a fraction of the cost. And for some this is even more important- it is also way, way smaller and lighter! I hated how top-heavy the SB900 was, I stopped using it the day I got an SB700 as a backup actually. The SB700 is that good.

Sure, the SB700 is slightly less powerful than the SB910, however I’ve just never had a problem with that I guess because I also rely heavily on wireless flash for my job, which is wedding photography. In my opinion, if you’re trying to bounce off ceilings that are so high that you can’t use an SB700 and you absolutely MUST have the slightly greater 1/1 flash power of an SB910, …well then you’re doing something wrong!

BTW, I have another jag about flashes- Never, ever waste money on buying a brand new one. There is almost nothing under the sun that could go wrong with a flash that doesn’t void your warranty. Really the only thing that ever goes wrong with flashes is either you drop them, or you explode them. In either case, Nikon will just laugh at you when you try and ask for free repair under warranty. This is why I have been buying used flashes since, oh, 2006? (I have purchased 6 Nikon SB flashes in that time, and innumerable generic brand flashes for testing at SLR Lounge…)

Just about the only reason I would consider buying a new flash is, if I were also going to get the third-party warranty, the “drops and spills” warranty. Because 90% of the time, the Nikon warranty is worthless.

So, if you see a Nikon pro out there with the SB910, you can just snicker at them a little bit. Not only because that pro simply doesn’t know how awesome the SB700 is, but also because the SB900 / 910 has been known to be SO top-heavy, that it can cause connection (misfire, or no-fire) errors with certain DSLR bodies! (Most notably the D700 BTW) It is a serious issue that very few people actually know about; they always just dwell on the fact that the SB900 was so horrible because of overheating, and they just assume that the SB910 is the only professional choice. Well, I am here to tell you that it is not, in fact for anyone who has to use a flash on their camera for 8-12+ hours per day on a regular basis, such as wedding photography, I highly recommend, no I ONLY recommend, the SB700.

I’ve been using Nikon SB flashes since the days of the SB80DX, and SB800 / SB600, and I gotta say the SB700 is by far my favorite out of every single one I’ve ever used. Maybe if you have a Spare SB800 laying around you can stick with that. Mine served me very well for many years. And if you can find a used one for under $250 that might be awesome. But other than that, buy a used SB700, or if you buy it new get the extra “drops and spills” warranty.

Take care, and feel free to let me know if you have any other questions!
=Matt=

PS: Support my addiction to giving free advice – Donate via Paypal, or by shopping at B&H.