The Unexpected Profit from Personal Projects
[by Paula Lerner]
One thing I’ve learned in 25 years in business is that doing personal work that has meaning to me almost always leads to lucrative commercial assignments. Although it is unpredictable beforehand how personal project A may lead to job B, in the end doing work that I am passionate about not only feeds my soul, it helps grow my business in unexpected ways.
Back in the mid 1990s I did a project about a welfare mom in Boston at a time when welfare reform was in the news. My work garnered a number of national awards, as well as winning a regional comp called “The Big Picture Awards,” sponsored by the ASMP New England chapter. An art director at a major ad agency happened to see ASMP’s promo disk of the winners, and and called to ask me if I could apply that same gritty, black and white style to photos of printing presses for an ad campaign. Who knew that my photos of a welfare mom could lead to a lucrative ad gig for an international company?
At the time I got into multimedia I collaborated with the washingtonpost.com to produce an online feature about women entrepreneurs in Afghanistan. I did the project for love rather than for much money because I felt it was an important story, and I knew in that venue the audience would be large. After it was published, a director of New Media in my home city of Boston googled “multimedia” + “photojournalist” + “Boston”, and my name came up. She saw the work on The Post and called to ask me to submit a proposal to do a series of multimedia segments for her institution’s web site. Since then she and her colleagues have commissioned me to produce just under twenty multimedia segments, which has kept me in business during these terrible economic times. Who could foresee that my project on Afghan women would result in an ongoing, solid assignment base from a good institutional client?
Although I could never anticipate exactly how the connections might unfold, I have found throughout my career that taking a chance on doing work I cared about also supported my business. If the images are good and the work is meaningful to you, that high quality and passion will come through and clients will want to work with you. So don’t put off doing those projects you care about. Think of them as both a chance to recommit to the reason you got into photography, as well as an opportunity to grow your business.
Paula Lerner is an award-winning photographer and multimedia producer based in Boston. Her work can be seen at www.lernerphoto.com.
One Response to 'The Unexpected Profit from Personal Projects'
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Hear! Hear!
This is a finely written validation of my own experiences. The very act of going out on a limb is one that attracts interest, energy and humanity’s quantified expression of all that in our globalized, media-hungry world: Money.
Thanks for summing it up so nicely