Wrap-up day

Fits and spurts.. that's what freelance is all about; or at least has been for me, even in my fourth year. Last week began with plans to work on a couple of different personal projects, including the Everglades essay that I began describing. But within 24 hours that totally changed, and I ended up shooting for 5 different clients over 8 days of work in 3 states. It's all finished now, and I'm excited to have ended up shooting for a couple of new magazines through my agency in the process. I also wrapped up work on another story for People Magazine that I've shot bits and pieces of for more than 2 months -- and quite honestly, am glad not to shoot anything else connected to that particular story for a long, long time.

And so after the quick burst of work in the last 10 days, today is a wrap-up day, in which I mostly just bang away getting the rest of my files captioned, JPEG'd, transmitted, and archived; get my new invoices squared away, receipts collected, and faxed to Redux; and get my apartment and life back in a little bit of order; remembering to buy presents for family and flowers for the girl.

For some reason, I get a strange sense of pleasure in the wrap-up day. Its the same sort of sensation as crossing off the last items on an especially long to-do list. And that weird ambition that I have in getting the business and logistics end of this job done is something that I've come to appreciate and nurture more and more. You learn as a freelance photographer that everything but the shooting is really what you spend most of your time on, and having the drive to be efficient and professional in getting on top of all of that other stuff, is an easy and smart way to put yourself a step ahead of other photographers who are slow and lazy in finishing off their assignments.

While away this week, wandering through Houston's giant grid of highways and shopping malls, I meant to write a bit about doing out of town assignment work, but never got around to it. There would not have been much to share about my time in South Carolina and Texas this week, as I really didn't do much other than get what my clients needed, and lay low. I was reminded, once again, how exhausting business travel, with all of the gear and logistics, hurry up and waiting, can become. And I feel this way despite having worked really hard to get to a point when some of my clients are convinced of my skills enough to send me out of your own backyard. But after a long weekend of work, very little sleep Sunday night, and a early, early flight up to Charlotte on Monday morning, I was totally exhausted by the time that I got to Houston later that night and found my hotel.

And as my 3rd set of gold DVDs get burned this afternoon, I'll look forward to the new egg timer on waiting for the next spurt and call from my agency and clients. It's OK if it takes a bit of time... I have the 3rd season of The Wire to get through.

Ha ha. Well, that was premature...

Not 20 seconds after I wrote that last paragraph, I got a call from another client. I'm heading to Minneapolis for the next few days for ESPN the Magazine...

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