Passion is contagious

I’ve just returned from a few days in Dili, East Timor where my old mate Ashley Roach and I ran some training for local photographers. East Timor’s news industry is in a developmental phase at the moment, with many publications having sprung up in the period since the Indonesians left in 1999. And they all run on the smell of an oily rag.

In a previous life I went there as a soldier, following the Indonesian rampage in the wake of the 1999 independence vote. That trip spanned five months and much of the country, and all the while I carried a Nikon F5 and a couple of boxes of film in my pack. Along the way I met several Australian photographers who would later be instrumental in guiding me into this work. I returned on a couple more occasions after later landing a job as an army photographer.

For Ashley it was a similar story. He spent six months wondering the country with a camera for the army. So in a very real sense, our photographic careers started in East Timor. And that has something to do with the motivation behind our trip there last week.

During the workshop we met nineteen photographers. None of them had the latest or fanciest of equipment. In fact few had SLRs at all, and nobody had more than a couple of lenses to choose from. But what they all had was passion in spades.

This had me thinking about how passion has got to be one of the most important assets in photography, indeed in any line of work. The distinction between the photographer who still thinks of their craft as a way of life, as compared to one for whom it’s just a job like any other is obvious. But if you’ve been shooting daily for decades, I suspect you can’t help but have your enthusiasm dampened at least slightly by the daily grind. So it’s worth finding ways to renew and maintain it.

One way is through community. If you work at a big newspaper you’ll know how lucky we are in this respect. The value of back room discussions, debriefs, pep-talks and miscellaneous musings that are common place between assignments is inestimable. You can find two hundred years of collective experience in the same room at the same time and the effect is stark. The seniors guide and mentor the juniors, and the old-hands get something out of the enthusiasm of the new.

If you don’t work in that sort of environment though, professional associations like the ACMP and AIPP offer you the same opportunity for peer-review, advice and camaraderie.

How ever you go about it, it’s well worth your time and effort getting out and rubbing shoulders with industry colleagues. That’s because unless you’re jaded beyond all hope, passion is contagious.

Nikon paid the bill on this trip so here’s some product placement for them.

We had to watch what we said because they seemed to write it all down.

I am not sure there would be a studio light in the entire country, and being on the equator means the light can be harsh. So tips on AL portraiture went down well.