after spending a good chunk of time conceptualizing and planning a photo shoot for tonight and tomorrow morning, it’s all gone out the window because the weather is not cooperating. yesterday was beautiful and sunny, and even this morning’s overcast glow was pretty great. but tonight it’s absolutely going to rain, and in the morning it’s going to be cloudy at best. we need a sunrise for the morning photo to look the way i’ve planned it, and even though we will be shooting in a dry location tonight, getting our model to the location dry and unaffected by the weather is not going to be possible given that there will be some climbing and shimmying involved.

in a way, this isn’t such a bad thing since it will let me get caught up on some editing tonight and tomorrow morning. but at the same time, i really need to be earning income from my work to cover the cost of my new camera and hopefully to earn enough to get into the zone where i can afford to buy a drone. not to mention i still need a neutral density filter and a polarizing filter for the landscape work i’m planning during our upcoming travel, as well as the extra batteries i’ll need for the gopro and the eos rp, and the hydrophobic lens cover for the gopro so i don’t have my water videos ruined by water droplets on the lens.

so basically we are talking about $250 worth of accessories still left to buy and another $700 or so for the drone kit with extra batteries, and i’m about $1200 in the hole with this eos rp purchase. there is no way i’m going to make $2,000 between now and june at this rate, unless a couple of big jobs come my way. i do have about $900 worth of work on the horizon, and a decent amount of time to do other work, but all of my outreaches on thumbtack and craigslist over the past few weeks have gone unanswered, so i can’t count on those platforms to bring in more work. on top of that, while instagram brought in one great client that resulted in a few hundred of revenue, the platform hasn’t been generating as much attention as i would like and i’m honestly getting tired of spending so much time combing through pictures that all tend to look the same. that isn’t to say that the photographers in encountering aren’t talented and producing amazing work, but the truth is, there are just so many people using the same cameras, the same lighting, the same editing programs and techniques and getting the same results. it seems like so much work on instagram these days is proof of concept and has no meaning or purpose beyond just being aesthetically pleasing.

this rainy day delay has my inner cynic coming out, i suppose. but i won’t ignore the thoughts that are occurring to me, because truth be told, i need to think about what i want to do with photography that will make my work different and unique from the work of so many others. how can i establish myself as a unique voice worthy of attention?