blounty55-blog

[blounty55-blog]

DREAM JOB AFTER GRADUATION

Firstly, what is a dream job, and can it ever become a reality? Every graduate probably has their own employment aspirations after graduation and will wonder what doors their honours degree in photography can open for them.

Personally, I’m not totally convinced that just having the letters BA(Hons) after your name can be a passport to achieving a salary that sustains a good standard of living, keeping a roof over your head and food on your plate.  Gone will be the days of relying on a meagre university grant for this sustenance and now we will be heading into the real world where, if you don’t work, you don’t eat!

Failing to meet deadline dates will also have a detrimental effect on the wage packet and there certainly won’t be any extenuating circumstances for not submitting work to a client on time, only loss of income or even worse, a financial re-imbursement.

Although I feel that I can get on with most people, something that I have had to do throughout my previous professional working life, I still find myself ill at ease if I am asked to take portrait photograph of a person, even if they are family or friends. The course tutors have indicated that confidence in this field would come with experience, but my own photographic practice and preferences have shied away from portraiture and concentrated predominately on landscape photography.

Some may argue that this genre could well be one of the easiest of the photographic mediums, just go out on a nice day and come home a couple of hours later with a few pretty snaps of the countryside. Whatever partialities one photographer may have on a theme, another photographer may well deride and reason that their own particular medium, such as portraiture, has a greater standing in the world of photographic art.

So, what for me, would be a dream job in photography? How can I find a job that gets me out of bed on a cold, wet winter morning and to make me think that I’m going to have fun at work today?  Would it be better to be working in a nice warm studio making nice images of people who want to be photographed?

I am under no illusion that in today’s modern society, where everyone is a photographer, snapping away with their smart phones and uploading to social media a nice picture of what they are going to eat for their supper, that life as a professional photographer will be anything but an easy one.  Personally, I think that the use of smart phones has contributed to the decline professional newspaper photographer as picture editors could well be flooded by free images made by the general public, but that is another debate.

So where do I go from here when I try to decide upon my dream job in photography?  I do have a couple of ideas, one simpler to achieve than the other.  The easy option is to simply go out and take landscape photographs of areas of local beauty and interest, make good quality prints and attempt to sell them at weekly markets and craft fairs especially those in the areas where I have photographed.  Probably not the most aspiring of business plans but it might be a way to get my name known and hopefully even get some photographic commissions and to generate a financial income.

The second and more ambitious idea is to find a way to become attached to the United Nations and to photographically document their peace keeping missions from a civilian point of view.  This type of work would probably fall into the ‘Documentary’ genre of photography and is something that I am going to have to look deeper into in the near future.  

The world of photography is a crowded market with few employment openings so, for the time being, in the words of Mack David, Hal Hoffman and Jerry Livingston, A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes, When You’re Fast Asleep…   but it’s now time to wake up and try to put these dreams into reality!

https://www.lyricsfreak.com/c/cinderella/a+dream+is+a+wish+your+heart+makes_21248863.html

LANDSCAPE.   SELLING IMAGES

https://www.istockphoto.com/gb/photos/landscapes

https://www.thephoblographer.com/2017/08/14/how-to-make-money-as-a-landscape-photographer/

https://www.format.com/magazine/resources/photography/sell-landscape-photos-online

https://www.freelanceuk.com/photographers/photography_sell.shtml

https://www.gettyimages.co.uk

UNITED NATIONS.   EMPLOYMENT

https://careers.un.org

https://careers.un.org/lbw/Home.aspx

http://www.un.org/en/index.html