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"Bright Bulb" by Steve Jurvetson

Ship or Shut Up

Doug Daulton 01/16/2015 8

“What you do for a living is not be creative, what you do is ship.” Seth Godin

At the bottom of this post, you will find a video recently posted by a good friend of mine who owns small game publishing house. He and his partner are well-respected in their industry for delivering quality products that their audience love. So, when he posted this as a call to all creatives, I had to make time to watch.

I wasn’t disappointed.

As creatives, we live and die by our ability to see the world, real or imagined, differently than the average person. However, we also have a tendency to focus on our vision and our process, often times to the detriment of our deliverables. We want everything to be “just so”.

This did not truly hit home for me until I started the long overdue process of consolidating old photo libraries in anticipation of my move from Aperture to Lightroom. As I dug through my digital stacks, I found lots of personal side projects. Some of these were experiments that ultimately resulted in a dead end. But, just as many were viable projects that were put on the back burner (and forgotten) because client work took precedent. Were it not for the unsexy, very technical process of migration, most would have remained forgotten.

As I move forward with my migration, Godin’s words seem terribly important to me. Though trained as an artist, I realized I become to comfortable living in my technical, logical “left brain“.

For the past five years, so much of the focus of my “creative” work has been on the technical side of the business. I show up on location, execute the shoot and hand off the resulting digital assets. My entire focus, while on the job, is to ensure the technical viability, if not perfection, of those assets. I set the table for other creatives down the pipe, but I consistently set aside my own creative projects.

The rationales are myriad. I won’t bore you with them. But, the true reason is pretty simple.

I have been afraid.

My daily work is a known quantity. I can reproduce it, at a high level, consistently and reliably. It is safe. Putting my more creative work out there is anything but safe. Some of it is experimental and much of has been part of my learning process. Frankly, some of it sucks.

I want to wait until my technique is flawless and my vision is perfectly executed. The problem is that day will never come. There will always be something to improve and a new approach to evaluate.

So, what to do?

Listen to Seth Godin. And, recall the first lesson Scott Bourne taught me:

Show the work show the work show the work. That’s the number one secret. Show your photos to anyone and everyone. Scott Bourne

Then, get to work.

Adobe’s Aperture to Lightroom migration tool has made getting the photos in one place pretty simple. Now, I have to scrub for dupes, cull the remainder and get to work on post-processing.

Until this is done, I am not going into the field to make new images.

What will I ship?

Starting no later than March 1st, I’ll begin a public, modified Project 365 which includes the best of my back catalog and eventually new images.

I am done with fear. It is time for me to ship or shut up.

Now, what’s hiding on your hard drive? 😀

Photo Credit: “Bright Bulb” by Steve Jurvetson

  • About
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Doug Daulton

Storyteller; words, stills & motion. Bokeh, a sci-fi feature shot in Iceland, is Doug's current project and is now finishing post-production. When not telling stories of the fantastic, Doug loves putting the natural world – from waterfalls to wild horses – in front of his camera while traveling the world. For regular updates, follow Doug on Twitter, Instagram, facebook, Google+, tumblr or his blog.

Latest posts by Doug Daulton (see all)

  • 100 Years/100 Shots - April 22, 2017
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  • Photographer of the Day: Pablo Reinsch - October 12, 2016

Categories: Inspiration Tags: business creative deliverable discipline Seth Godin

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Comments

  1. maxroadster says

    January 16, 2015 at 10:53 am

    OUCH! Direct and to the point eh? Now I have got to get busy!!! Thanks for the push- have a good week and I am looking forward to your coming posts.

     
    Reply
    • Doug Daulton says

      January 16, 2015 at 3:13 pm

      Thanks Max.

       
      Reply
  2. Terry says

    January 16, 2015 at 11:23 am

    Good for you!!!!

     
    Reply
  3. soniamesquita46 says

    January 16, 2015 at 12:16 pm

    Reblogged this on Eu Vivo a Melhor Idade and commented:
    SENSACIONAL

     
    Reply
  4. socalgal2013 says

    January 16, 2015 at 9:27 pm

    Ahhh! too true buddy! I have a dearth of overlooked images, old projects, bad photos and a jacked-up gallery (or three) in LR that needs a serious purge. I’m also in a creative rut with nothing to inspire me. I did two years of a 365 project then ‘got bored’. This is a great reminder to purge or process and “Show the work!”

     
    Reply
  5. Wyatt says

    January 17, 2015 at 9:23 am

    This article applies to life in general. We stay in that zone of comfort because it gets us to the next day without issue or fuss. But in the end all the projects, hobbies, trips, etc., never get done because we are afraid to take a chance when the only ones losing out is us. I’m not a photographer, but I can say I had many articles for my own personal blog that got put on the back burner for those same reasons.

     
    Reply
  6. ceciljameslaw says

    January 20, 2015 at 11:45 am

    Reblogged this on CL pics and commented:
    Wow,

    I know I don’t write a lot about my life in this blog as that is not what it is intended to be. This video though speaks a lot of the current struggle I have been going through with my creative self. If you can apply this type of thinking to your creative self, just use the imagination we have all been blessed with to think of the possibilities.

    I know I will.

     
    Reply
  7. Doug Daulton says

    March 5, 2015 at 11:04 pm

    For those interested, I have shipped. 😀 My project 365 has launched at the following link:

    http://365.dougdaulton.com

     
    Reply

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