#12 Beyond the Brief: Do the Damn Work

There’s a feeling I’ve learned to pay attention to.

Not excitement exactly, but not entirely dread. Somewhere in between. A low burn in my gut that shows up right before I’ve said yes to something I’ve never done before. Something outside where I’ve been but have been wanting to go. Those damn butterflies.

I’ve learned during those moments to shut up and say yes.

A few years out of photography school I landed a national holiday campaign for Bacardi. Green as they come and my first real commercial photography job. I was bidding against some badass photographers who I had a ton of respect for and had been doing this for years while I was still figuring out what I was doing. The only reason I was even in the conversation was because I had been building a beverage portfolio on my own time and got the opportunity to do a spec shoot with the agency.

SIDE-NOTE: Always shoot the spec work, by the way. ALWAYS.

That job scared the hell out of me and my nerves were completely LIT on shoot day. It also told me I belonged in this industry. Looking back, that job gave me something more than any other shoot has since then, it gave me confidence. You have to earn it the hard way, in the deep end, hoping you remembered how to swim.

A job for Monsanto came a few years later. This was one of the first productions where I was pulling everything together from my end. More crew, more moving parts, all of it dependent on weather, multiple locations and working with talent the client and agency had already selected. What feels completely normal now was genuinely overwhelming at points, all while desperately not wanting to blow the type of job I had been dreaming about landing.

Something funny happened once we got to location and started shooting though. It felt like the hard part was over and all we had to do was make photographs. The butterflies burned off the moment we started shooting and what was left was just the production doing what productions do when you’ve prepared right.

That job taught me what it actually feels like to run something at that level. No classroom at photoschool taught me that.

Propper was a different kind of nerve.

This was just after COVID. We hadn’t worked together in a while and I had been pushing hard to move our work away from the studio and onto location, toward what is now the absolute core of what we do. Everything has to start somewhere and somebody has to be the first client you take that leap with.

Real risks on both sides. I had enough productions under my belt to know that if we lined everything up right we’d make it work, but there’s always the element of “I don’t know what I don’t know.” One bad production and a good client relationship can go sideways fast.

First scene, client looks at the back of the camera. Thumbs up. Whew…let’s do this!

We were off to the races. That production pushed Propper in a new direction and it pushed us in one too.

The APDA project was different from all of them.

As I’ve mentioned before, my mother has lived with Parkinson’s Disease for over 30 years. My connecting with the American Parkinson Disease Association was personal before it was ever professional. When they came to me with the idea of telling David’s story, how the organization had helped him navigate life with PD alongside his husband Mike, I felt a different kind of butterfly. This was a different kind of story; real, raw, vulnerable, and intimate. PD can flip your life upside down and it’s not always pretty.

This wasn’t ag or industrial. It wasn’t workwear on a job site. This was sitting across from a real person and asking him to share some of the most intimate details of his life. A completely different kind of responsibility than anything I had taken on before. Ugh, the damn butterflies are back.

What gave me the confidence to say yes was knowing that whatever David had been through on his journey, I had probably lived some version of it alongside my mother over the past 30 years. That connection didn’t make the nerves go away, it just made the work feel worth doing anyway.

We did the pre-production and had the meetings. Scouted locations and prepared everything I possibly could with my team. Then came the production days and we loaded in, set up, and got started. Somewhere in the middle of that first interview, about halfway through, my nervous system finally relaxed. The trust we had built with David in the weeks leading up to that moment had created the space for him to open up completely. To say the things he maybe hadn’t said out loud before.

That production opened a door I didn’t know I was standing in front of. Human interest and healthcare storytelling now has real focus in the work we are doing. So much so that we are wrapping up another project that I’ll be sharing soon, and this one is on another level. A whole category of work that didn’t exist before one personal connection and one decision to step outside our lane.

Every one of those jobs I had butterflies. Every one of them pushed me somewhere I hadn’t been. Not one of them would have happened if I had waited until I felt ready, because that feeling never comes.

The butterflies aren’t a warning to stop, for me they are the green light.

Do the damn work.