‹ Home

Pouya Dianat
Free time is a terrifying thing to have, at first. When I was a staffer, I talked about everything I was going to do and kept a list. The first week I had off from work, though…I sat staring at my computer just crushed by the overwhelming weight of freedom. So I set up a comprehensive list of everything I wanted to do and organized my days to have a loose rotation. If I have a week off while the Braves are out of town I rotate my days between:

(1) PHOTO DAY – Spent working on personal projects, screwing around with studio ideas, editing photos, researching things I want to work on, planning future projects

(2) FILM DAY – Working on scripts with my roommate, who is a writer, watching shorts, reading FilmMaker, MovieMaker and Film Comment, watching movies, reading about other filmmakers, researching

(3) TRAINING DAY – Log on to Lynda.com and choose something from SEO, Flash, Final Cut, PhotoShop, or any other program and learn something new — it’s been phenomenal

And on the seventh day of the week? Errands and finances: getting bank accounts into order, budgeting for the rest of the month, paying bills, buying way too many Magic Arms at Showcase Inc., etc. The key to my new career is constant growth, continuous learning, and striking a balance between paying the bills and doing what I want to do.

Nanine Hartzenbusch
Establishing my professional identity in a new community — we moved to a different city and I created a new business. I was known and well-connected in the Baltimore Washington community because I had worked as a staff photographer for the Baltimore Sun for 11 years. In Charlotte, where we’ve been for two years, people are still getting to know me and my work. My biggest challenge is to grow my client base, while getting to know Charlotte. A friend counseled me, “This is a marathon, not a sprint,” which has helped tremendously. Being patient has been key.

Jason Arthurs
The scariest part for me was simply putting a price on my own work and my own time. At a newspaper that price is set for you, and you have one boss you are accountable to for the most part. I got past the pricing myself obstacle fairly quickly. Once someone said yes to a price that I thought was fair, I felt a lot more confident with the next client. I was very careful not to undercut the market in my area. A lot of my freelance work comes as referrals from other freelancers and I think it´s important to know what the market price is for assignments.

Eric Larson & Jen Sens
ERIC: The most difficult part of the transition has been the business aspect. Bidding jobs, contracts, licensing, bookkeeping, marketing. They don’t teach you any of that in journalism school. We don’t spend as much time as we would like shooting pictures, but that’s a reality of running your own business.

Not having benefits or a paycheck is also right up there. You can’t really live on a budget when you have no guaranteed income, and getting independent health-insurance is a kind of like being stuck in a very expensive bad dream. I took the take-this-job-and-shove-it approach to leaving the paper. This wasn’t the smartest, but I can relate to someone who comes into work one day and leaves without a job. You go into survival mode and are forced to figure things out pretty quick. Especially when you are young, aren’t vested in your 401K, don’t have any savings, and need to spend 20K on gear in order to operate.

I lived off credit cards for a few years. The nice thing about freelancing is you can clear debt pretty fast if you land one big job. All those years of shooting, interning, and assisting gave us a solid portfolio to start with and made us pretty confident in our abilities. If you show up to a big shoot, get nervous, and don’t bring it, you won’t get another call from that client. We also have a great mentor in Orlando, Ben Van Hook. He has been instrumental in helping us learn about the business and become better versed at producing large advertising shoots.

Heather Hughes Ostermaier
The hardest thing for me was leaving my friends and the excitement of the newsroom, which made it easy for me to stay on top of local events. So I started a monthly get together for all of the past and current newspaper employees (since there have been so many layoffs, a lot of us are still in the area).

The scariest thing was not having a guaranteed paycheck and the uncertainty of having a successful business five, ten, or even twenty years down the road. So I read several business and photography business books, and talked with everyone (including Rachel LaCour Niesen) who had successfully gone through the transition to learn from them. Then I kept careful records of when I booked weddings, how many meetings I had, etc. so I was able to see trends through the year and know if I was doing as well as or better than the year before.