2024 07 08
Night drive through Nashville, Tennessee. April, 2024. © Clayton Hauck
Another Monday so it’s time for another Life Update post, in no clear order:
My commercial photography career continues along at unsustainable levels, causing me to continue to consider new career options (fine art photography? full-time motion directing? bar ownership?). Yes, I’m keeping quite busy on hospitality jobs and smaller projects, but the big budget jobs are less and less frequent. Something needs to change (I hope it’s more work!).
The photo studio has been more stable (profitable, even!) lately, but I’m not yet optimistic this will consistently be the case moving forward (again, commercial projects have been way less frequent among photographers I know, myself included). I really love the studio space and want to make it work, but the amount of my time required just to get it breakeven is also not sustainable. Again, something needs to change (I hope it’s more work!).
While the big jobs are not going on, I spent last last week and a half diving deep into the world of portrait photography via my “Keep it 100” setups. I’m learning a lot and it’s actually been quite interesting, exciting even, to feel like I’m starting all over again and hustling for clients. Very much re-learning to appreciate every single dollar I earn through photography. Definitely planning to write more in depth about all this in the coming days.
I’d been planning to document both the RNC and DNC, however, stupidly had the wrong dates on my calendar and my one week of vacation in the Wisconsin Northwoods falls on the same dates as the RNC being held in Milwaukee, so I will likely miss most of all of it. Kind of annoyed about it but also really need to give myself some time off as I’ve been pushing myself way too hard lately. Still hoping to cover the DNC, which might be an absolute shit show. Politics are very depressing lately, but this might be one of the larger stories of our lifetime.
Had my first tarot card reading yesterday. It was surprisingly apt in its assessment.
I started reading/doing The Artist’s Way after finally finishing the 640 page The Big Store, which was inspired by this previous post: 2024 03 29. I should do a book review or followup post.
I booked my favorite musician (David Dondero) to play a show at the studio September 9th. Save the date! More info to come!
Now that this blog has been populated quite a lot, I’m getting rather annoyed at Squarespace’s rather minimal (bad) handling of blogs. This platform is not really designed for intensive writing or bulk posting. A search bar would be great! If only those had been invented.
Can you tell I’m stressed about money these days? While that does suck, I’ve been quite high on life otherwise and feeling great about most everything else! Money stress is never fun but I continue to tell myself it’s just money and we’ll figure it out.
-Clayton
