3 things I am always asked.
3 things that happen every single time I'm loitering on the side of the road with a camera:
1. "Did you get me?" Asked roughly ten times a day. My stock answer: "Probably."
2. "Did you catch the Kwikasfuki KXR1000S that came through an hour ago?" I nod enthusiastically. I wouldn't know a Kwikasfuki KXR1000S if it ran me over. "What colour was it?" I ask, hoping it was the green one I just caught. "Blue." Bugger. "Probably," I reply, somewhat optimistically. 98% of the time, thankfully, I have.
3. Someone tells my wife I've got the easiest job in the world: sitting on a folding chair in the sun drinking tea. Tag them below, they need to hear how a day actually goes.
Because here's what it's really like:
It starts days before: arranging the day, confirming joint comms with a venue, often to drive two hours up the road and find another photographer standing on your spot because the venue "forgot" you were coming. When you're self-employed, that tests your sanity.
Then six hours on the side of the road. Shooting, chatting, having a laugh, telling people where they can buy the pictures I'm taking.
Two hours home, straight to the desk, memory card backed up, then 8 solid hours of editing:
• Telling Lightroom to hurry the hell up every three minutes.
• Accidentally applying an edit to 1,300 photos at once and having to hit reset.
• Deleting the wheelies. Binning the blokes who went past at warp speed revving the nuts off their bike, thinking it would make a legendary photo. (It doesn't. It makes you blurry, and not a single person at the café was impressed.)
Then you upload, advertise, and pray. Somewhere around refresh forty of the analytics page, you spot someone flogging "proof of life" car park photos where you were that day for £3 a pop, and briefly wonder if you should've just become a stripper instead. Then you remember you can't dance, and haven't been in Magic Mike shape since roughly 2009.
I have one of those photos, to be fair. My mum took it in front of my house when I got my first bike. It reminds me that bikes aren't meant to be photographed in car parks.
The first order pops in 60 seconds after the photos are live. Every time. And every time I punch the air, breathe a sigh of relief and open a beer, saying a prayer of thanks for the people who support me by buying a picture.
Winter job: corporate headshots, writing more novels, and sitting by the window praying for warm weather and dry roads.
And I wouldn't change a thing.