(this post has been updated from a post at RESOLVE http://blog.livebooks.com/category/contributors/sas-becker/)

A career in photography requires you to adapt and change.  I guess any career that involves technology demands that you always keep up to date.  Gone are the days where you stayed at one company for 30 years.  For someone that is a technophobe like me, this basically stinks.  You mean to tell me that to continue doing what I love; I have to always learn new stuff?  I guess there are worse things.  I mean I went kicking and screaming into digital and now I curse myself for not switching sooner.  I am not sure where this fear came from? I know most people are afraid of change.  Although, growing up my role models, my parents, where always the first to try new technologies.  We had the first microwave on the block…. which was enormous if I recall.  My mom also had one of those huge cell phones with a brick size battery you had to carry around with it.  So one would think I would have developed some desire to be the first to conquer the new frontier.  Not really…. but what I do have is tenacity and this has served me well.

I graduated photo school with some great contacts but not a lot of practical photo skills.  I didn’t feel technically astute enough to be a first assistant so I became a photo editor.  That taught me a lot about producing great photography, but it wasn’t as fulfilling as creating it myself.  So, in 1993 my husband and I took the leap and starting building our stock library.  We walked into a stock agency with a box of 8×10 black and white prints and got signed on the spot.  The thing that was great about stock is that we could learn how to shoot on our own time.  Granted it was our own dime too, but through trial and error we figured out what we were doing.  The stock allowed us to build a portfolio, which led to magazine assignments.  The editorial work led us to a rep, which got us a few advertising gigs.

We continued to shoot stock and assignment work for the next decade.  We were happy as clams….but, then digital happened.  Now all of a sudden everyone is a photographer.  The cameras got better and more affordable.  The price of equipment was no longer an obstacle for beginning shooters.  The market was flooded and our stock sales dropped, a lot….  Now, here comes the bride…. All of a sudden weddings are looking pretty good and so are family portraits.   Great, now I have something new to figure out?  The great surprise is I actually love weddings and family portraits.  All the things that drove me to photography to begin with exist in weddings and portraits.  I love people!  As long as I get to photograph them, especially if it’s at a big party, I am happy.

So what you know or learn today might not matter in 5 or 10 years… this maybe true.  But what doesn’t change is your vision and your desire to create.  You love making photos right?  You can’t imagine not doing it…… Now you know how the kids feel at school, they constantly have to learn new things.  It may be a little easier for them, they are not as old and scared of change.  So you know how to eat an elephant don’t you……. one bite at a time.