Finding My Voice... Again. An Artist In Transition Without Map or Destination. Yet.

As we spin around that medium sized ball of burning gas, some things remain constant. Change is one of those things.

Photo by the author, Superior, Arizona.

Good Sunday Morning!

This morning in the desert, it is a brisk 45 with clear skies and an almost perfect sunrise. We have submitted our house plans to the builder and are awaiting the inevitable changes, suggestions, workarounds, and the list of challenges that will come next.

I am trying some new coffee my wife bought, and I tell you that because all of the big-time YouTube photographers go on and on about coffee, and I just buy whatever has the best brand on the bag. (Note to self: except the ones that say ‘nutty’… blech.)

Yesterday, we explored a little road that took us through some spectacular desert. It is hard to find roads I haven’t taken before, so when we find one, it is a blast to explore. For those of you in the Phoenix area, it is the Florence Kelvyn Highway from Florence to the Ray Mine. If you love deserts, you’re gonna love this one.

Along the Florence Kelvyn Highway

We also visited Superior, AZ. I am amazed at what is happening there.

This little town on US 60 has been on its deathbed for decades.

No more.

The empty stores are now filled with art, antiques, restaurants, ice cream parlors, and a litany of small businesses. More stores are occupied than empty, and that is not something I have seen in 30 years.

Good feeling. I have always had a flirtatious love affair with that little mining town.

OK, a bit of something different this week.

A dilemma.

I am working on my 2024 plan/system and a few things have become clear, or maybe clearer is a better term.

Voice.

No, not my singing voice which I am told is a cross between Yoko and a wounded water buffalo near a muddy watering hole in the Serengeti.

(Which is where one of my mentees is with his wife today… Hey Mark, don’t turn your back on the lions, man.)

My writing voice.

I am worried that I am beginning to sound like one of those Medium writers who want to consistently tell you that you are doing it wrong, and you should do this because if you don’t flocks of Twitter users with Xs emblazoned on their hoodies will swamp your boat and laugh at your rotting carcass.

Yeah, I don’t want to sound like that.

Nor do I want to be an internet guru spilling little bags of sunshine glitter as I sell you another course designed to teach you enough to buy the next course… and on and on.

Then, of course, there are the money-focused posts. “How to Make $10,000 a Week With Your iPhone”, “Book Yourself Insane with This One Weird Trick”, or “Millionaires Shoot Raw, Find Out Why”.

Yeah… no.

I became a photographer for the very best of reasons.

To meet girls.

OK… I am being honest here, and it was a long time ago.

Judge me not, wastrel.

But I stayed with photography because I found it to be one of the most sublime art forms, with the added benefit of seeing the work in a relatively short time frame.

Kind of the antithesis of someone carving the faces of presidents into a cliff for their entire life and still never seeing it finished.

I was writing music at the time, and getting 27 string players together to learn, rehearse, and play the music I wrote was even more difficult than it sounds.

Get me a chisel; I got Lincoln’s chin, brother.

Somewhere along the line, photography moved from an intensive hobby to even more intensive work. A career appeared before me, one that I was ill-prepared for.

But I took that path nonetheless and never looked back.

I knew next to nothing about the business of photography, how to land clients, how to bill them, and even how to deliver the work that I had shot.

I was flying blind, folks.

But, and this is important, I am a fast learner.

And I was obsessed about figuring this stuff out.

I worked with dozens of photographers as an assistant, office manager, rep, and second shooter.

What I learned propelled me forward, and I turned around one day and realized I was shooting for magazines, ad agencies, and clients all over the country.

Then I decided to switch it up and become an agency based on my photography, with a dash of design skills.

By 2000, I owned the third-largest agency in Phoenix, billing nearly $10M.

Instead of shooting, I was hiring shooters to go and do what I loved to do while I wore a suit and pitched clients from Silicon Valley to Istanbul.

We won awards.
We helped eleven clients go public and score large.
We did ads that appeared in the WSJ, Business 2.0, Wired, The NYT Magazine, and websites for clients as diverse as WebMD and an Afghani rapper.

Fun stats:
17 employees
4800 Sq Ft, two-story mezzanine
24’ Serpentine workstations that put coders and designers together
Twenty-one awards
Featured in almost every business publication in Arizona
Private parking lot
Satellite office in the Bay Area
More frequent flyer miles than I could count.
A piano and a set of drums in my office. Yeah, full set.

9/11 and the dot-bomb event changed the world. The phone simply didn’t ring for three months. Those were hard times for us and every ad shop, but we were overly vested in dotcoms.

Read the room. Leave on top.

I went back to being a one-person shop in a little space on the edge of Tempe.

Happily, I might add. I hated hiring and being responsible for other people’s lives almost as much as I hated firing people. Both were part of the job, but it was a big reason why I slid back to being a solopreneur with no regrets.

I started teaching in my little design studio in 2009, and it expanded to a very successful workshop.

PDN Reader Survey: The Best Workshop Instructors:

Don Giannatti teaches two-day sessions once or twice a month throughout the country, and also does special weeklong workshops in places like the Bahamas and Mexico. His “Lighting Essentials” workshops are billed as affordable, no-nonsense primers on how to create great lighting setups using simple tools. “Less me, more you; less bluster, more shooting,” reads a line on his Web site. And according to former students, he delivers. They praise his “practical and hands-on” approach, and appreciate his “fun” and “casual style of teaching.” He “doesn’t stray into self promotion,” as one former student said, and another credited his focus on “profession and art, not gear.”

LINK to PDF

I saw the writing on the wall when CreativeLIVE started their free workshops, so I taught two of their workshops there and closed down my live workshop business.

CL simply killed that model. Nobody wanted to do live workshops anymore when they could sit on the couch and have a beer with Sue Bryce or some other internet phenomenon showing, and telling, and selling their chatchka.

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Everything has its time.

Project 52 started soon after, and it morphed from a hodgepodge of lessons on Flickr to a full-on weekly assignment, review, and education course that let me meet hundreds of talented photographers who would go on to open studios and have careers of their own in a business they love.

During this time I had a bit of a health scare. A soreness in my legs and back made shooting much more difficult, and I had to let the studio go. This was hard to do, but I also realized that most of my interest now lay in teaching, writing, and self-assignments. A blood clot that was nearly fatal reinforced my plans of changing focus.

But all along this journey, I have been a teacher, a mentor, and deeply interested in being a catalyst, change agent, friend, and chief encouragement butt kicker. Watching photographers prosper and do well is…, well, in some ways it is my small legacy.

Although that sounds somewhat strange to say. Me? Legacy?

So now that I am in transition again, I find myself writing much more than I ever have. Two or three articles on Substack, one or two on Medium each week. Weekly long posts on Facebook and once in a while on LinkedIn.

(What is it about LinkedIn that I find annoying? I want to like it, I do. In fact, I think it is a very powerful way for photographers to introduce their work - and themselves - to clients. But for me… I simply don’t understand how I would particularly use it. I’ll figure it out. That’s what I do.)

Whew, after all that I am back to voice.

I don’t want to sound preachy.
I don’t want to sound like an internet guru.
I don’t want to constantly be selling.

I just want to have fun, share my insights, and hopefully provide an aha moment for some of you.

Those little aha moments that happen on occasion, causing massive shifts in your attitude, behavior, and actions, are the stuff of greatness, my friends.

I had one in December regarding AI, and again this month when I found that I had perhaps not been focusing on the right thing. I am changing that with both my mind and my actions.

It is a struggle. Old habits are tenacious. Like a movie villain who you thought was dead rising in the background with a large, bloody battle axe, you gotta make damn sure you are out of range when they attack.

So all of that is to say;

When I challenge you, it is out of my love for this business and the love of the creators that I do so. I want you to succeed.

When I give advice, it is not carved into stone tablets; it is not immutable admonitions from on high; it is simply what is working for me, and I think you should try it. Like BBQ calamari in chocolate sauce, advice is not for everyone.

So as I continue down this road of publishing more, making more, and settling into this new place that 2024 has delivered us, I will make every effort to help anyone who needs it, push anyone who needs a push, and listen more.

Listening is the most important skill we should relearn this year.

Seems it is a lost art.

I want to revive it, at least for me.

If you have suggestions, comments, ideas, dad jokes, or even haiku you want to share, you know how to reach me.

See you next time!

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A few bits and pieces:

Check out this website for designer/photographer Anna Utkina.

Also the images of David Robert Farmerie.

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PS: I still have one opening for the Client Acquisition Sprint.

You can find out all about it here.