Day Job and Shooting Your Projects

http://www.lightstalkers.org/how_do_you_pay_the_bills

I have a full time day job managing a small not-for-profit in New York. I shoot evenings and weekends and during the 4 weeks vacation I get per year. I’m able to make at least one, sometimes two, trips abroad every year to continue my work in Indian diaspora communities around the world.

Downside: not as much time for shooting as I would like, am forced to work slowly.

Upside: my bills are paid and I have total creative freedom to shoot what I want and how I want. Am forced to work slowly.

I sometimes get the urge to join the media industry as an employee or full-time freelancer, but I always talk myself out of it. I wouldn’t have the time or the money to shoot my own pictures, and I probably wouldn’t have health insurance.

I quit (2 months ago) my day job (very comfortable engineering position in aerospace company) after 8 years there. I managed both for a few years (working and photographing) but the two world collided hard and I had to make a choice. Now I don’t have my day job but I am very, very happy in doing only what I love to do. (yes, I have family, wife and 2 kids)... They want us to believe that you have to slave for someone (corporation) in other to be happy… Well, can’t fool me anymore…

Hi Cat,

I have a great part-time job in Belgium as well. Working 3/5, clutering my hours, since I don’t need to be in the office every day, so giving me basicly 4 days off to shoot in the week. The company I’m working for is very flexible and if my official holidays are gone, I can arrange to lets say, work two weeks straight, and change my days, so I get a week or two weeks of.
Great collegues on top of that, so it works out perfect for me.
And like preston said. It gives me the freedom as well to shoot what I want to do. Choose my own projects and work on my own ideas, without having to do stories I don’t want to make money.
Hope this somehow helps.
Good luck.
Wendy

wendy,yes,it helps.thank you for sharing—good that it works out for you and for preston too.velibor seems to have worked out something that works and keeps him happy. good experiences to know.i did read that thread on how one pays the bills.yes, that was a good post.just thought to post this to focus just on day jobs and the choice that it is for some of us. thanks,all.

Kind of like Wendy, I have a 3 day a week job, and manage to shift my days around a little once my official holidays are used up to ensure long weekends. But as much as my collegues are adorable, sitting at an office job bores me out of my mind, and seems to slow down the creative process … so i’m planning on changing this routine sometime early 2008 and just go off and shoot my projects and dreams … if it doesn’t work out, i know there is an abundance of bullshit jobs to get some cashflow going again when need be.

Hi Gina,

Know exactly what you mean. I see you live in Belgium as well and I might point out to you that is this thing called ‘loopbaanonderbreking’, sort of a carreerbreak.
I’m doing that right now. Took a year off work to completly go for the photography. The great thing is that you can extend it up to five years, and you even get some kind of allowance for it. Isn’t much compared to what you usually earn. But still, it’s better then nothing. And you stay insured etc through the normal system, and if it doesn’t work out in the end you always still have your job.
I would def. try that first, and then you can still say you won’t return if the photography kicks off.
If you need any more info on this, just pm me.
Wendy

Lekker woord – “loopbaanonderbreking” – ek sal graag my loopbaan wil onderbreek vir een jaar :)

so funny that you speak nederlands, or afrikaans. To me the afrikaanse words sound way more exotic then the dutch ones; But it’s nice that we can somehow communicate with these two languages. So simular and yet so different as well. Love it!

Really? To me Afrikaans sounds much more “flat” than the Dutch … very interesting, the way our ears are tuned to the muscicality of different languages.

My day(and night)job actually gives me the possibility to earn the money to keep on “working” (as it’s not work but just my goal) to go on with the long time project/s, taking pictures whenever I can, investing free time and holidays in it, since a couple of years and for the next one at least. Glad I have a job that allows me to do so, life is made of decisions you take and sometimes of decisions life takes for you :)

Hey Kat! Kamusta? I work as an I.T consultant, and I would take on projects that are around 4 to 12 weeks. Then spend another 3 to 8 weeks on my photography. I also do something related to photography most of my free time (e.g. research, learning new skills, captioning, organizing the and selling the collection, etc…)

Aside from the income, my day job gives me time to rest after travelling for quite a bit. It’s my period for eating healthy, going to the gym, and having some semblance of a normal life.