I love seeing your personal photos.
It’s usually the last place I visit on a photographers website and I have to make it all the way through the portfolio and tears without clicking out but then… to see the photos of your wife, kids, friends, vacations, birthday parties, breakfast, house, neighborhood is so absolutely pleasing to me and confirms your love of taking pictures and your need of an assignment so you can enjoy all these things.
It makes it personal.
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I have been taking and showing a great deal of my personal work over the past three years. On my website it is branded as Sightings and the current selection of New Work is from a trip to Bangkok, Angkor Watt and Hanoi.
This style of shooting developed after seeing a presentation by Jay Maisel. I so much loved his personal photos, but I couldn’t understand why he was taking them? As in how would they ever be used? Then it dawned on me that the point was to shoot what we see because we have the vision to make art out of the world that most people pass by.
It has also helped to develop my inner sense of what makes a photo. If I only have myself to please, what would I shoot and how would I shoot it? It goes beyond being a craftsman applying the tools of my trade to the scene. This has allowed me to develop that mysterious inner sense beauty that leads me to look in the right place at the right time.
And now that I have taken all of these personal images, the question once again what to do with them? They are useful for entering and winning prizes in photo contests and they do get a good response when I show my Sightings portfolio. The challenge is how to translate the taking and showing these photos into landing assignments into do more?
Thank you for posting this. I have been undecided on whether or not to include personal work in my next site update, and this helps a lot.
how do you feel about personal blogs? do they do more harm than good with all those personal outtakes, and inane ramblings? or do you feel like you get a more complete view of someone you’d potentially hire that way?
At this point they don’t effect my decision to hire but I do find them entertaining and I do tend to remember the photographers more because I spend time reading their posts.
I can’t help but sense a little bit of irony here. By personal work, I tend to think about research in style, subject matter or personal approach to photography. But family portraits to me have more their place on a blog than on a professional website. Just an opinion here, I guess this depends on how you wanna market yourself…
that’s cool
I totally agree. I also like to post some personal images to my blog every now and then because I also enjoy seeing those on other photographers blogs.
Reading the comment of Mark Harmel remind me a Jay Maisel conferent that I attended two years ago. Jey shared hundreds a excellent photography and almost all of them were personal life photos.
I think that a photographer who always is with his camera on hands should take picture of his life. It is the only opportunity that he will have in his entire life to do it.
My personal life photography work had opened new doors of opportunities.
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