Memoir Sneak Peek 11- Unforeseen Challenges
November 3, 2021
Tiffany Bumgardner
It is that time of the month when I again share an excerpt from my book aka the current work in progress. I am still working on edits, formatting, and determining what is going into the completed work photography wise but I am getting closer day by day.
This excerpt deals with the challenges we can not plan for and do not see coming. Most of you can probably guess what one of the challenges discussed will be however the excerpt I am sharing is something good that happened because of it.
I am hoping that after I deal with some issues, fix a few sections and add some new material I will have a release time frame to announce. I had honestly hoped to have that by November but that wasn’t to be. Check out your sneak peek below.
During a viral outbreak is apparently the time to learn your reach as a photographer. As a creator and as an artist, I sometimes doubt myself, my work, and my abilities, so seeing my work find reach in such trying time was amazing.
At the start of the pandemic in the USA, one of my very first rodeo images found its way from my Pinterest account to the pages of Facebook from a Texas company. At the time, I happened to be randomly scrolling through Facebook when I saw the post about praying for our country and the image made me take pause. It was familiar.
It took a minute for recognition to dawn on me, but the image was one of my first to be shared on my Pinterest when I made the account. It also happens to be one of the most widely re-pinned images I have on there. In a way, I shouldn’t have been surprised to see it reappear in such a way. Again, this isn’t anything anyone expects until it happens.
I took the image when I was new to the rodeo photography field, had little to no clue what I was doing, and was taking more terrible images than good ones. So, to see my early work used in such a manner, with a message to pray for hope with hundreds of comments and thousands of likes and shares really stopped me.
The work was ten years old at the time, had motion blur from my handheld camera shake—I’m going to attribute that to nerves or rushing the shots—but it was hardly my best image, especially compared to my work today. Yet it was reaching thousands, and in the course of minutes, it was flooding my own Facebook feed.
This unexpected surprise was more than welcome when I was staring at the idea of possibly stopping my pursuit of photography as a career and scaling back into a hobbyist. To imagine re-embracing the idea of the 9 to 5 lifestyle in my life. I had even sought out and researched closing my LLC with articles of dissolution.
I seriously considered filling those articles out and sending them in, I was considering giving up, and then I saw my own image on my Facebook feed, being shared over and over. I couldn’t bring myself to give up so easily. I wasn’t going to let a pandemic, which was something out of my control, be the end of my business.
I’m not going to say it was easy and things turned around. That my clients and shoots came back, because none of that is true. 2020 was a difficult year, and I was still subject to complying with health mandates the same as every other person and business was.
Glass Eyes: A Photographers Journey, Chapter 11 Unforeseen Challenges, by Tiffany Bumgardner