A portfolio career in photography and landscape gardening

Phew, it's been a busy portfolio careers week - getting a project off the ground with my colleagues over at Active Citizens FE, checking and sending out SEO reports to my Zine clients and, as a volunteer, liaising with our local college over a year of fundraising they've got planned for Guide Dogs.
Busy weeks mean less time for blogging so I'm particularly grateful to be hosting a guest blog this week from my surrogate big bro and valued client, David Horder, who combines photography and landscape gardening in his portfolio career...

My Career Portfolio 
I’ve never thought of myself as a portfolio careerist, more of a chap that finds many things interesting and fun to do, so am I a portfolio careerist or a Jack-of-all-trades? In this day and age many people have more than one job, my attitude is, if I enjoy it and I can earn money from it, then why not do it?

Currently I work as a Hertfordshire-based photographer, mainly covering events such as weddings as well as on-location portraiture and family photos.

My other company is called Lensflair Digital, here the photography is aimed at corporate event coverage and on-location catalogue work for graphic designers, estate agents and a variety of clients that require product shots. The second part of the business is video production, making short promotional features for businesses, mainly for distribution via the web.

The final side of the business is 3d animation, not something that I’m expert in, but something that I truly enjoy and spend a great deal of time learning and adds a high quality gloss to all of my productions.

So straight off the bat that’s three professions that are generally specialised, but arguably photography, video production and animation are similar and linked in genre, so it makes perfect sense that I would work within these vocation, so why do I also work as a Landscape Gardener?

Benefits
So how is gardening and photography linked and what are the advantages doing both? The simple fact it, I enjoy doing both. My childhood was spent living in Dorset and it was there that I gained my love of nature and being outside. Photography does give you chance to be outside I grant you, but it also requires equal time processing the shots in the office afterwards. In the good old days of using film, this would be spent in a dark room, now it’s in front of a computer, the realisation is that both processes required being inside.

The problem is the same with animation and video production. A great deal of time is spent in post-production, which is generally inside darkened, windowless edit suites. Such working conditions for me drive me to despair, so working outside as much as I could was always the way forward for me. So that’s the background into my reasoning, but to go back to my earlier question, what are the benefits?

As a photographer I meet a lot of clients at their home or place of work. Given that I am drawn towards nature, I often find myself making remarks about how nice their garden is and given we are a nation of gardeners, everyone loves to talk about their plot of special land.

A good friend of mine runs his own landscaping company and I would often refer him to my clients that needed landscaping work. He soon found that due to the increase in work, he needed extra hands to help out. Given that most of my photography work is during weekends, I rather liked the idea of getting stuck in myself and doing some honest labour.

As editing photos and video often requires me to sit on my backside for days on end, I found the landscaping a good excuse to be outside and to do some physical work, but it wasn’t long before I realised photography and gardening are linked in many ways, which is why I’m drawn to both.

First off both are creative vocations, where you end up with a final product that will be loved by the client for a long time afterwards. Both require a keen eye for detail, where you have to take a step back, look at what you have creatived and say to yourself, have I missed anything, does that look good and would I be happy with that?

For example, with photos, it’s far too easy to snap away and not be mindful of your surroundings. So you have a group of people posing for a group shot, or even a single person portrait, which is your foreground interest, it’s easy to miss what’s going on behind them.

So this is when I have to take that step back and look twice, once at the subject in the foreground and again at the background, before taking the shot. The people may look great, but the background may look better if I moved them to the right, or turned them 90 degrees. This maybe the difference to having a scruffy road offering a busy looking background, compared to say a nice grouping of green trees, which is a more pleasing backdrop, which has better colours and is less busy. A muted background leads to the foreground interest becoming more prominent in the shot. This also avoids any post-production clean-ups to make the shot look more appealing.

The same approach I lend to gardening, it only takes a moment to take that step back and look at what you’ve done to avoid simple mistakes. One good example was on a garden I was working on recently. This was a major tidy up, so the hedges were cut back, the large lawn was mowed, leaves swept up and the beds were weeded, it was a good afternoon’s work. By the end of it I stood on the patio to admire the much improved garden area and noticed the large stone statue in the centre of the lawn I hadn’t strimmed around it’s base! A simple detail, but one I had forgotten about. Thirty seconds later it was tidied up, but the fact remained, if it wasn’t for having a sharp eye, the customer wouldn’t have been impressed about the improvements made, but instead dismayed about the small bit that I had missed. Not good.

So talking to photography clients about their gardens leads to gardening work, the same works in reverse. Through the landscaping work, I often bring my camera along to take before and after photos for the company portfolio. I am often asked about my expensive looking camera by gardening clients, who have then booked me for photos, once they have found out that I do that as well.

The advantage here is that they already know me through the work already undertaken. Also I’ve gained their trust as I’ve proven I can do what I claim I can do. People generally like to use people that we know like and trust. By proving myself one way, often leads to work from the same client in one of my other occupations.

It’s not often that you can ask the same person to photograph your wedding and afterwards lay a new patio in the garden. How many people that have a single occupation have such a varied working lifestyle?

There is nothing better than to be the ‘go to guy’ for such a wide range of services and not to be tied down to one thing. Your competitors really are at a disadvantage.

Lessons Learned
The biggest lesson I have learnt is not to worry about what people think. Given that I am fairly new to running a business my thoughts regarding the landscaping were that if I was seen to be doing something that wasn’t my main vocation, it would lessen the expertise of my photography work.

Put another way, I was worried that if I was out landscaping, people would think I was only doing that because I wasn’t any good at taking photos and this preconception could damage the other businesses. I had to change my own mindset and embrace the idea that in this day and age, many people have more than one job. If anything it proved to clients that I had an open mind to work and had the talent to undertake different types of work and to do them well.

I feel that the job market has forced this impression that we should pick one career and work hard to be the best at it. This thought doesn’t ring true with most people as we are still linked with wartime efforts when we did what it took to get the job done.

Everyone was happy with the factories being run by women, manufacturing ammunition for the soldiers, during a period when a women’s place was firmly in the home. Most clients I have worked with are very comfortable with the fact that I can do more than one thing, if anything it’s a weight off their mind as they then don’t have to look anywhere else, as they have a contact that they can trust.

So the lesson learnt was, most people aren’t snobs and you are not looked at in a lesser light for trying new things. If anything people are impressed that you can diversify and are prepared to take on a challenge in order to make ends meet. Pretty much we are a nation of entrepreneurs at heart and everyone loves a tryer.

Advice
My advice is to have a go, what do you have to lose? If you enjoy it, people will pick up on this and put their trust in you out of respect for your enthusiasm.

It has helped me that the services I offer are linked by a love of being outdoors and I feel this is important too. If you want more business, then try to network your portfolio in some way, so that your clients can continue to give you work and not go elsewhere.

Above everything make it known that you love what you do and show that you are not worried about what people think. I’d rather go with someone that loves what they do with a passion but isn’t the ‘top man’ in their field, over the ‘top man’ in the field but has been doing the same thing for thirty years and has become jaded and bored.

People with interest and enthusiasm generally come up with fresher ideas and more interesting and different ways of tackling projects. Have you ever asked someone, do you know of the best plumber in the county, or would you ask, do you know a good plumber? Clients don’t want the best job done, they want a good job done and if that work can be done with bags of enthusiasm, passion and fun, then you can’t fail.

Oh the plumbing reference is down to that was my first job out of school on the advice that I needed a trade. I don’t do it any longer because I didn’t enjoy it, I knew it wasn’t for me, but still handy to have the qualification under my belt as I made sure I finished what I started before learning something new.

So don’t be frightened to try something new and different, but make sure it is something that you have a genuine passion for. You are allowed to love your job, so why not have a go?