Breaking into the creative industry can be difficult, there is no doubt about that. However, with the right amount of work and dedication, anything can be achieved.

A perfect example of this is a dear friend of mine, who found his love and passion for photography at 30 by picking up a cheap camera ahead of his road trip in America, which he self-taught how to use. He was generous enough to sit down for a chat and let me in on his experience and how he found his footing in the business.
David is now a well-established craftsman in the field, with his work mostly centred around weddings mainly in the Greater London area, but on occasion spreading nationwide. Although he’s recently been picking up work in the sports world a little bit more as well.
He initially took pictures at local football games and friends’ events as a hobby, but the dream of buying his own property pushed him to get fully emerged and take the art more seriously, which also made him realise how much he was enjoying himself. For about two years, he was doing two full-time jobs, working in an office during the week, taking pictures on the weekends and editing at night. Eventually, what started out as a simple side job to earn some extra cash began to bring in enough revenue for his dream to come dream and become a happy homeowner. As word got around about his work and the bookings kept flowing in – now in larger volumes – the opportunity naturally presented itself for photography to become his main job.

During our conversation, he was also very kind and open to talk about the ups and downs of making it in such a dense medium. He recalled the hardest part being the very beginning, when making any gains would be difficult due to obstacles such as other artists undercutting his prices for example. It required strength, and enough trust in his own ability to push through these, until customers came to understand what they were paying for, like the quality of the product they were getting.

With all he has achieved so far, he’s still not quite at the summit of his career with plenty of goals and aspirations in his mind. He pictures his ideal future shooting weddings in the summer and sports events in the winter. He’s recently got an exciting opportunity with WSL – Women’s Super League – to take pictures at some high level games. He finds great pleasure and importance in representing women in sports – which is a rather male-dominated territory – especially given his lovely wife is an amateur football player as well. He’s also hoping to be able to photograph Premier League matches one day.

His advice for young people trying to find their breakthrough is to keep going, keep creating and keep putting yourselves out there, no matter the hardships or how much you’re doubting yourselves, the tide will turn eventually. Start by collecting your nos. Find contacts, email and call them with the expectation of being turned down, you’ll be surprised how many of them will turn into yeses over time. Don’t worry about not being qualified or experienced enough, the point is to gain that experience and build a network.

At the end of our chat, he left me with these thoughts to share with you: “You’re gonna work harder than you think you’ll have to to get noticed and rise above anyone else, and when you get to the point where you are doing what you love for a living or doing cool stuff, people will say you are lucky and words to that effect. You don’t need those people to know how hard you had to work to feel satisfaction, because you will know. The harder you work, the luckier you get.”