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=

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