It's not the industry, it's you.

[@SusanneGeert]

Great insights 👐

[@jaegerschtulmann]

Yeah 💯 on growing your network being the single most important piece of advise you can give. 🤝 👍

[@sergiopstudio]

Easily the last thing I wanted to hear when I was starting out

[@Ryansavagesstla]

love you man

[@sergiopstudio]

Head down, chin up 🫶

[@andyrails9742]

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you weren't working in the professional commercial industry 20 - 30 years ago, but I can tell you, from personal experience, the budgets and expectation for scope, scale etc have changed, significantly. So as a senior photographer with over 30 years of experience, I am not interested in working for, inflation adjusted rates, that are less than I was making when I was a keen as mustard 18 year old. Can you honestly tell me that when you are 50 years of age, you will really hustle as hard or harder against inexperienced new comers who are less than half your age to get jobs with the same, or in a lot of cases, less earning potential, less creative challenge, and less prestige, than you are doing as a 20 something? It's a reality, not just a thing in my head, or laziness, that the landscape for making advertising imagery has shifted sooo much. More to the point, the value, from the perspective of the buyer, has gone South so much that it's no longer the same business. It's not even the same sport any more. So it's little wonder that experienced senior photographers have lost interest. Fallen out of love. Because what I love doing is now valued so low, it's no longer commercially viable. That's been all but replaced with a new trade. A new practice. A new craft. One which I, and others, simply have no passion for. Yet I know professionals who had a full lifetime career at practicing their passion. Their careers fortunately started 20-30 years before me. So we're able to see out their career successful. But for some of us, caught mid career, in the midst of a enormous technological and global economic shift have had our careers interrupted. And it's not the change of process from analogue to digital capture. It's the digital distribution, and the new economic environment that has brought. And it's not just still commercial work. The film and TV industry has also been forever altered. Disaplines, that the industry used to be built on, have been lost. It's a loss for the industry, and for the audience. Just an example, the streamers have more quantity, but far less quality. It's like a bucket sized filtered coffee from Starbucks. I'd much prefer a barista made espresso. Rich and full of flavour, than a bucket full of dish water, sweetened with a load of sugar to make it barely palatable. The rich and carefully extracted expresso is only possible because of the discipline, and extra time and effort it takes to learn and make it. Yet in the market place, at least on our screens, it's getting really hard to find quality viewing product. Take for example the newest Adam Elliot film, "memoir of a Snail'. It's due for cinema release in a matter of weeks, if not days. I'm lucky to have been a part of the camera team for this beautiful film. but sadly, it will likely be the very last of its kind ever to be made in Australia. Look up Adam and the film to find out more about this 100% hand made animation film. Proudly 100% human made. No CGI. Everything made in camera with discipline, which comes at a cost. But when this cost can't be recovered, the process must change so it's cheaper. Hence the declines in quality over quantity that I'm talking about. And so to the point... There are plenty of extraordinarily experienced and talented commercial and advertising photographers, film directors, tv commercial directors, cinematographers who simply are not interested in selling their soul for scraps in a race to the bottom. So yeah, the industry has changed.