Fraser Speirs – Making a living with the camera

April 13th, 2007 by chuq

Fraser Speirs – Making a living with the camera

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Fraser Speirs – Making a living with the camera:

After hearing various people talk today and various discussions, I made a decision: I shoot photographs for pleasure, write programs for money and don’t want to make my ‘other’ hobby into another job.

It was only ever a fantasy world, since I’m far from certain that I’m anything like good enough to sell my work, but here’s the rule: the programs pay for the camera toys and the camera toys don’t have to justify themselves. Easier and more fun that way, I think.

Fraser’s made a very important discovery. Sometimes, taking something you really enjoy doing and turning it into a job merely removes the fun from doing it. Be careful with your hobbies — because you always need something that lets you get away from work.

Way back when, when I was publishing OtherRealms and writing book reviews for Amazing Stories, even though I was a life-long, hard-core reader, I came to realize there was no bigger hell than a deadline tuesday, a stack of books, and a sad realization they were all crap. I finally stopped writing to deadline, and instead went back to writing for fun (I have this stack, maybe 4′ high, of books waiting to be reviewed — seriously — but with all the other stuff I’ve been trying to catch up on, it hasn’t happened yet.)

Worse (or maybe “changed”) — between my fiction writing and my reviewing, I started reading everything with a more critical eye — it became very hard to just sit down and read a book to relax and enjoy, because the writer in me started taring it apart and studying it. For a while, I pretty much stopped reading fiction, because all fiction became “work”. I’m not nearly that bad these days, but I still have a strong preference for non-fiction, because it doesn’t trigger the critic in me (as often….).

Fortunately, I’ve come to love reading history and military history — because much to my surprise, unlike my belief in high school and college, history is not boring; how history is taught to students is, unless you get really, really lucky.

When I was doing the sci-fi circuit, the most common question I got about the reviewing was “you got paid to read books?’

and the answer is no, I didn’t. I got paid (not a lot) to write intelligently about books I’d read. A much different reality, and not nearly as much fun…

Be wary of turning your hobby into your job; you may find out it’s no long fun, just work, and that you merely lost a hobby. Not always a good tradeoff.