If you have been following along for the last six months then you are aware I have been working on a memoir and posting sneak peeks at the beginning of each month.

At the end of March into the beginning of April I completed the first draft and have started editing and revisions. For those of you who aren’t writers it is the tedious and boring part. So it feels like it is taking me forever to get through that phase but I am hoping to get it into publication for the beginning of 2022.

Check out the sneak peek for June below.

Excerpt from Chapter Six below:

A decade of experience has allowed me to meet photographers from all walks of life, and at all kinds of different levels. I have meant photographers who have purchased their first cameras and are eager to learn and experience making images and I have meant professionals who have been threatened by new photographers— I have also been entirely blessed to meet a great many professional photographers willing to part with their knowledge to help others learn.

I always found incredible value in the photographers willing to help others grow and realize their dreams.  I am honored to know such photographers, to have traveled with them, and to have had them in my early years to seek advice from. 

For me as a photographer in the Midwest, I was focusing on rodeo and portraits, honestly I didn’t have a lot of resistance or competition in the early years. Perhaps it was due to the areas I was traveling and working or perhaps because I was blindly following my dream regardless of what any professional was conflicted and challenged by— if you haven’t discovered by this point, I can be a tad bit stubborn. 

I was just going out doing my thing, learning, growing, and occasionally seeking out the contacts I made on a ship in the ocean for advice. It would be those photographers who would tell me things like: ‘fill the frame’, ‘motion blur can be a good thing’, ‘have fun’, and ‘use your gut’.

They were confidantes for me when I first decided to start entering images in photography competitions and had no idea how to make those selections. They were the fresh eyes to my tired ones trying to figure out the difference between my best work and just an image I was emotionally attached too. 

They were the education I never would have gotten if they hadn’t been so willing to help. As in my hometown, in my area, in photography in general I see more photographers grasp tightly to their knowledge, unwilling to help others break into the field for fear of lack of clients or money.

New and Competitive, Chapter 6, Glass Eyes: A Photographers Journey by Tiffany Bumgardner