Today we’d like to introduce you to Jonathan Washer.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Jonathan. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I started as a full-time freelance photo/video professional in July, 2015. I’d been working as a marketing director in the biotech industry for about 7 years before heading out on my own. I studied film production in college at Northwestern University, but never really sunk my teeth into the industry after graduating. After more than a decade working through retail positions, and into marketing, I found myself really dreading the 9-5 office grind and started trying to take on freelance photo gigs (large and small) to fill out my weekends and free time in an effort to get my creative juices flowing. Doing that reinforced exact what I felt was the career path I needed to be on. So I spent several years planning out life after leaving a company with steady pay & benefits. It was absolutely terrifying, but in July 2015, I made the jump. Three years later I don’t consider myself anywhere close to working at full capacity… But having the variety and challenges of a multitude of varied clients has been a massive positive in my life and I’ve been moving onward and upward ever since.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
No. Not in the slightest. I fight every day through self-inflicted anxiety and apathy both as a creative artist and a wildly unprepared business professional. When the work rolls in, it’s easy to lose myself in it and forget to keep an eye on the future, which leads lulls in work and extended periods of needing to find more clients. This is the struggle every self-employed freelancer goes through, but in a creative field, it can be even more challenging to navigate – often times inaction leads to creative apathy, which leads to subpar photography for me. Fighting through this is as easy as doing creative photo/video projects for myself rather than a paycheck while I am hunting for new clients.
Please tell us about Jon Washer Photography & Videography.
I consider myself a hybrid shooter. I started primarily as a photographer, but and building out my portfolio to include smaller video projects as well. Subject matter doesn’t usually matter to me. I specialize in food photography solely because my biggest repeat clients have been in that space. But I certainly make over half my income taking pictures of food. In photography, there’s no single thing that sets anyone apart. We are all creative artists with unique perspectives and wildly different styles. I love talking about the technical side of photography with my clients – explaining to them what I look for in a shot while I’m working, and what would work best (and why) for their product/subject. I think everyone creating art on spec needs to be able to be open and communicative with their clients – many of whom may share a passion, but not an expertise, with the artist. My best shoots are when I can get a client really involved with the process – getting a chef excited about depth of field as we set a table for a plated meal, for example.
Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
I’ve never been a terribly nostalgic person. For someone who has been capturing images of life for nearly 30 years, I have very few pictures of myself, my family, or my childhood. But as a child, I was always obsessed with storytelling. It’s what drew me to cinema, and ultimately to film school. I loved every aspect of it – shooting, directing, writing, editing. Very little excited me as much as getting to craft a story from my own imagination and then relay it to an audience. I still own several VHS’ from narrative stories and short films from my childhood that I made for class projects (and many just for myself), and some of my fondest memories are of those hectic weekends where I’d be trying to make some epic movie about Aeneas for my Latin class, or telling a story about the Vietnam war in lieu of writing a paper.
Pricing:
- Photo/Video Dayrate for most event coverage: $500
- Single sessions (90 minutes or less): $250
Contact Info:
- Website: www.jonwasher.com
- Email: jonathanwasher@gmail.com
- Instagram: @JonWasherPhotos
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jonwasherphotos
- Twitter: @JonWasherPhotos
Image Credit:
All photos credited to me as “Jon Washer”
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