One Year as a Freelance Photographer in the Books

This week marks one full year since I worked on my first assignment as a professional freelance photographer for the AJC. In February 2017, I visited several different restaurants for a cold weather soup roundup, and I was very nervous about getting photos that would be good enough for the paper. I was even more nervous because one of the restaurants included in the assignment was Pancho’s, the divey Mexican place with the huge sign that overlooks I-85.

Selected photos from my first AJC assignment

Luckily, once I dug into the assignment, I felt well-prepared for the work. Thanks to my experience shooting photos for clients at Green Olive Media the prior couple of years, I felt at ease with the photo subjects and comfortable in restaurant settings. I even had some creative ideas, like freezing the motion of the garnish on the soup at Seed and stretching the cheese topping on the soup at King + Duke.

The real challenge of the assignment came after the actual photos were taken: properly editing and submitting them to the AJC. I had to download and learn how to use a completely unfamiliar FTP software so that I could upload images to the AJC’s system. Oh, and I had to figure out how to add some specific metadata in Photoshop, which I didn’t even own.

Technically, this week last year is when I officially became a professional freelance photographer if you define “professional” as someone who gets paid to take photos. But if that’s when the switch was flipped, the transformation didn’t feel immediate at all. It’s been a true process, full of challenges over the past 12 months. I’ve learned to use Adobe Lightroom and, to some extent, Photoshop. I’ve bought and learned to use quite a bit of new equipment – not just a new camera body and lenses, but a full Strobist-style flash photography kit and a drone. And, of course, I went full time as a freelance photographer and writer.

The past year felt like both a long journey and the blink of an eye. I’ve learned and developed so much as a professional, and yet it seems like just yesterday I was Googling “metadata photoshop?”

As it turned out, I think the photos I took at Pancho’s during that first assignment turned out to be the strongest in that set. The other restaurants featured were more sophisticated and polished, but the rustic chicken soup that seemed very out of place in the article turned out to be surprisingly beautiful.