DIARY 029

A few thoughts on the last month, because I can't remember the day-to-day.

Jameos Del Agua, Lanzarote.

I’m sitting in London City Airport waiting for my flight to Florence to another overseas job, and thinking about what to write in the PP. diary. The past three weeks have been a complete blur. I feel like i’m coming up out of a weird month-long dream where work, travelling, personal commitments, and generally burning the candle at all ends have resulted in my feeling a bit… I’m not sure how to word it. A bit like I’m on a another planet maybe? Or that life is happening somewhere ‘over there’ whilst i’m in a box over here? Not sure if that makes sense - but if it does, then you know what I mean. I also turned 39 in the middle of it all, which can’t get my head around at all, so there’s been a few things to take in. Anyway, in the melée I haven’t made my usual notes about what i’ve been doing each day and quite honestly I’m not sure how interesting it would be to read if I had so, instead of our usual format, I thought I’d just have a ramble on a few different subjects that have come up for me of late.

The Kit Question

Ah kit… the perennial photography subject. I go through various stages of wondering if / when / how to update my kit and if it’s necessary or not but I think after all my jobs and personal projects I’ve finally decided what my next investment will be. And boy, is it an investment. The Fuji GFX system is a medium format, mirrorless digital system which I’ve been dancing around for about 6 months and it costs... a lot. Asking various people (always Mark - but others too) what they like about it, what’s tricky about it, what it’s limitations are, trying to figure out why it is that all the predominantly film photographers I follow and love the work of have chosen this to be their digital work horse. All of them. I can only assume it’s the medium format that’s the draw and I do just love that about it. The choice has been between the GFX and the Canon R5ii for a long time, and the Canon would be a much simpler jump as I already have compatible lenses (as long as I use an EF to RF adapter) but something about it just isn’t grabbing me. Maybe it’s the way it looks? (Shallow? Yes. But I do really struggle with buying anything I think looks ugly and the GFX looks so so good - all sharp angles and big screens). Maybe it’s just that I feel like a total change from the Canon system and am ready for a fresh start? I don’t know. But speaking to Mark in our interview last week, he mentioned a past life when he just used the 5DIV and how much technology had come on since then - and I just thought… I need to change. I need to get on board with new technology. It’s time to ‘level up’. I could spend £5k on another medium format film camera (the Contax 645 has been the other on my ‘should I?’ list). But in reality a really epic digital is going to be the commercial workhorse I need to elevate the digital side of my work (which is still about half.)

Editorials

At the end of April I went on a trip to Lanzarote which I’ve been hoping to make since 2020. You might remember the WNU in Mallorca case study I posted last year, which started with a pitch to Lanzarote but changed location half way through. Previous to that I had booked flights in March 2020 but was grounded with shingles (lockdown followed the next week, so the shingles turned out to be a blessing wrapped in a very sharply painful surprise). It’s been a long time coming. When a previous client showed her interest in the location this year, I was so happy to finally have an opportunity to get over there, and vowed I would work towards an editorial commission to really make the most of this trip of a lifetime. But did I actually do that…? No.

I’ve spoken a lot about my relationship with editorials on here, my desire to do more of them, but hit and miss attitude to pitching them. With this particular trip, I pitched to one magazine (to a contact that it turned out had left the title) and then basically left it there. I sat around feeling a bit sorry for myself, felt as though I’d put some effort in and not got the result I wanted, and slunk back into a cave of self doubt. A couple of weeks later, a fortnight before the brand shoot, there was a freak weather event in the Canaries so I decided to delay the shoot to the following week, thus buying myself a bit of time to pitch the editorial story again. This time, in a manic state but still with very little time to pull the story together, I sent it out to a much wider audience and landed two editorial commissions, both for great magazines. But when I tried to deliver the story and pull together the team, it became clear that I’d left it too late. There just wasn’t enough time to get it all done. I was totally gutted - and have had to really inspect my actions as to why I let this opportunity slip away.

Why didn’t I reach out to all these magazines, editors and stylists earlier, when I could have feasibly sorted this shoot out? Was I that afraid of rejection? And if so, why? In my haste and mania, I’d reached out to so many stylists who I’d been to afraid to reach out to before, for fear they wouldn’t be interested in working with me and to my surprise they all said they’d love to. Some of them tried so hard to move things around in order to get this opportunity off the ground but weren’t able to in the last minute squeeze. Why has it taken me this long to get in touch? There’s some self sabotage at work - I’m not giving myself a fighting chance to succeed, and it’s made me realise with even more certainty that I need a mentor of my own to start to tackle some of these limiting beliefs. When you do start getting over your embarrassment, or lack of confidence and start reaching out to potential collaborators, good things start to happen. Case in point: a week later I was standing on a black sand beach, shooting the brand campaign in Lanzarote, receiving an email out of the blue asking me to shoot a UK magazine cover in a few weeks. One point to outreach, nil point to hiding behind my shyness.

*will explain all this in detail in an audio case study asap.

On travelling and work

In the past 12 months, the jobs I’m being hired for have completely changed. In 2025 so far, out of 12 jobs, only one has been in London. I’ve had shoots in Mallorca, Nice, Devon, Lanzarote, and Florence and the others I’ve been asked to quote for, but haven’t ended up on for various reasons have been in Umbria, Mallorca (again), St. Tropez… It’s an incredible privilege to be asked to go away on these trips and it’s something I definitely sought out and subliminally cultivated when journalling, and the jobs I posted on my channels and featured in my portfolio but wow, I wasn’t expecting it to happen so wholesale. I now treat getting on a plane like taking a bus and have managed to become a light packer for the first time in my life. These jobs are an absolute joy and travelling more has been such a wonderful outcome - but it takes a lot of time and energy, and a lot of committing to time away from family so I need to figure out a new minimum that I’m willing to travel away for, financially speaking. I was recently approached to shoot an overseas event (two travel days, two shoot days with overnight turn around - so delivering content the following morning) and when presented with the budget, a budget I normally would have been ok with, I suddenly realised it wasn’t enough; to justify the time away from home, away from the kids, the upheaval of travelling, the extra childcare, the late nights editing and early mornings delivering. My boundaries have quietly shifted to a new level, and the only way I could really tell was by the instant gut reaction.

This might seem a bit belated, but I really feel like the industry has fully returned to life pre-Covid in the past 18 months (albeit with smaller budgets…). I have so many messages from mentees, PP. readers, other photographers asking me how they should pitch, where they should pitch, when they should pitch. ‘Why aren’t I getting a reply?’, ‘how should I structure my email’ etc. are messaged I receive a lot and I’m struggling to word the replies in a positive light. My feeling (and this is very much just my feeling) is that brands are moving (/ have moved) back into the pre-pandemic model of entrusting their in-house creative teams in tandem with external production companies to pull their shoots together. Although it does still occasionally happen, I feel brands are doing less remote shoots, sending the photographers their collections to shoot as they wish in a pre-approved setting. And so pitching to brands I feel is becoming less easy and less successful. Would you guys agree? How much success do you have pitching to brands at the moment? The brands who do say yes to this, tend to be the brands with smaller budgets, who are happy for someone to take the responsibility off their hands, but expect a huge amount in return for the meagre amount they want to pay. (* A quick caveat to this - the brand shoot in Lanzarote was a remote shoot like this - but I feel this type of trusting and well-paying client are increasingly hard to find).

So what do you do about that? In my opinion it’s time to get face-to-face once again. Time to organise meetings, coffees, portfolio previews and drop ins, desk side appointments, in-person events and introductions. It takes a while to see what changed in the pandemic and what legacy it left behind but now, with five years distance, I can see that my first few years as a photographer I was able to hide behind Instagram, email and pitching. But now, it’s time to show up in person and make myself known.

Coming Up on PP.

Last week I interviewed the truly lovely and ultra-talented Lucy Laucht for our next interview. Chatting with these incredible photographers is such a joy and a privilege and fast becoming one of my favourite parts of running this newsletter. Is there anyone in particular you’d like to hear from, or think would make an interesting interviewee? It can be a photographer, a producer, a brand representative; it could be someone who’s worked on a specific project you want to hear more about, or who works in a part of the industry you’d like to explore further. I’d love to hear your suggestions below; it’ll really help guide me in my next round of outreach.

OK i’ll leave it there for now. We’re about to land in Firenze and I’m so excited to explore this beautiful city (any tips please do put below). Lucy’s interview will be out for Paid Subs next week and there’ll be a case study about Lanzarote to follow so look out for those. And in the mean time, don’t hesitate to slide into my DMs with any other thoughts or questions you might have about PP. or about life in general - I’m hear to talk through it all.

A x

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