How My Photography Makes Me Better At My Day Job

Working with people is essential to my day job and documentary-style photography. From one-on-one meetings to global zoom meetings, from capturing a general street scene to documenting protests. 

Therefore, relating to people and understanding why they are doing and reacting as they do is crucial for success in both hobby and professional life.

After re-reading my article about finding focus, I realized that the skills I need to succeed at social documentary-style photography are also crucial for my day job, which mainly focuses on leading and executing projects with global teams.

In this article, I explain why these skills are essential for my social photography and how continuously developing them will also make me more successful at my day job.

Having a vision

While I sometimes go out on the streets to capture images of whatever piques my interest, I often have specific photos I want to take in mind. Whether for a long-term project, I am working on or going to a particular event, I want to document that day.

Having a vision of what I want to accomplish with my photography is important because it helps me define the images I need to create. And although I need to stay flexible in my approach, without a vision (e.g., the idea for a specific essay), I could quickly lose direction and create many images without working towards the final result I want to achieve.

This vision is also essential to explain to others and myself what I want to achieve with a photo project. Which ultimately translates into an artist's statement.

Similarly, having a vision for the projects I am working on at my day job is critical to focus on the final objectives and being able to explain the 'why,' the purpose, principles, and intended outcomes of each project.

Observing

Being a good observer is critical for documentary-style photography: to see what is going on, what to capture, and to be aware of my surroundings.

If I focus on one scene only or capture an image too quickly, I might lose out on other photos. For example, more could be going on than I noticed in the first instance, or a scene might develop. And sometimes, it is more interesting to capture what is behind me (e.g., people reacting to a situation) than the main event itself.

Being aware of my surroundings is also vital for safety reasons. For example, people around me might not be happy with me taking pictures, or someone could use unattentiveness to my environment as an opportunity to take my bag.

When working with teams in my corporate role, observing is essential to be aware of the team's mood and reactions in meetings. It helps me to ensure everyone is participating and understand who is supportive and who objects to ideas and topics discussed.

Observing is also very important for change management: knowing who supports, who is indifferent, and who objects to proposed change is essential to decide what actions to take or what additional communication is necessary.

Seeing patterns

Looking back at images created for a specific project or as stand-alone street candids, I always look for patterns to understand how they relate to each other.

It allows me to see trends and behavior patterns, triggering ideas for essays or a themed set of images that are an addition to my body of work. Seeing patterns is also crucial to building a consistent image flow within an essay or collection of images to create stories with a clear start, middle, and ending.

Similarly, understanding behavior patterns in my work environment enables me to understand group dynamics and the 'why' of people's actions: as an extension of observing, it helps me during meetings and making decisions to improve change management efforts.

When reviewing processes, awareness of patterns supports using and optimizing synergies and increasing efficiency and effectiveness for global operations.

Being creative in finding solutions and answers

Creativity is a skill any photographer should have - including those specializing in social-documentary style images.

And while creativity and finding solutions are essential for getting the composition and using the aperture and shutter speed that best supports the mood I want to create, they are also vital to find the right approach to each situation.

For example, how to get to a spot where I can get the best possible picture of a scene while staying safe and not interfering with the situation. Or how to best approach people I want to photograph without disturbing their activity.

A creative mindset to find solutions is also essential for my professional work to stimulate out-of-the-box thinking for me and others. Defining how to improve processes and simplify things needs a solution-minded approach for which we often need to break through established thinking patterns and change how we look at delivering services.

Creativity also is vital to find ways to bring people and minds together: depending on the team setting and the topic to review, different techniques are needed to get results, be it following a structured meeting agenda, brainstorming, or having open discussions.

Seeing and listening to stories

The stories I see and create are my "why" for focusing on this genre of photography.

Sometimes I see stories while walking the streets, taking one or two images of a situation. In other instances, I am working on a project and deliberately creating sets of pictures that tell a specific story. And sometimes, I look back at individual images and realize they, combined, tell a story bigger than each photo on its own.

In my work, listening to input from several team members, often from different cultures, helps me to understand what the outcome of a specific project will mean for them. Especially understanding how they will react to change is essential. Understanding the stories they tell also helps me find solutions that will work for specific groups and the global team simultaneously.

Telling stories, explaining things

Not only is listening to and seeing stories vital for my photography and project management job, but the other side of the coin is as essential.

With my photography, I need to keep my audience in mind and create and present my images in the best possible way to show them the why, what, who, when, and how of what happened that I found essential to capture in images.

Similarly, when leading change projects, it is required that I can explain clearly to different audiences the why, what, how, and when of change and how the change will impact people and processes.

I often use analogies to help people visualize things and understand what will change and why. An additional perk of being a photographer is that I have a visual library in my head that helps me develop those stories.

Staying open-minded and objective

As a documentary-style photographer, I must be open-minded to tell my subjects' stories as objectively as possible. However, as I explained in a previous article, no photographer is one hundred percent objective: by choosing the angle of the picture, choosing what to include and what to exclude from the frame, by selecting apertures and shutter speeds that create a specific mood, they bring in subjectivity.

Therefore, it is necessary to recognize this subjectivity bias to be as objective as possible in depicting the action captured, especially for social-documentary photography.

The same necessity applies to my day job: working with people with different knowledge levels, cultural backgrounds, and change-mindedness, I constantly need to be aware not to be judgemental and bring my thoughts and ideas immediately to the foreground.

I first need to understand and acknowledge why people are making certain assumptions or are change averse before I can answer any questions.

Also, I need to be aware of not falling into the trap of the 'not invented here' syndrome myself and not reject any ideas only because I did not come up with them.

Bringing it all together: seeing the bigger picture

All skills mentioned above help me see the bigger picture (no pun intended), whether working on a photography project or leading a process change project.

Having a vision is indispensable for keeping the end goal in mind while working through the day-to-day activities to reach those goals. Irrespective if it is taking, culling, sequencing, editing, and post-processing pictures, working on detailed project plans, having meetings, or drafting documents.

The ability to see the concept, strategy, and final objective and simultaneously roll up my sleeves and do the work is necessary to succeed in both my day job and photography.

And that need for skillfulness is what I like most in my photographic endeavors and my corporate job: I call it "having the agility to quickly move between the balcony and the dancefloor."