Log
I have gone countless rounds in the past few years on the topic of mini-businesses. The idea of coming up with a simple, single-product business that I can run under an independent brand, independent from my own face that is, is very appealing to me. Part of that appeal is the pseudonymity so that I don’t feel like it’s me on the line if it fails. Another part is the speed and simplicity: set something up in a few days, that’s a complete package, standardized, so I can offer it on-demand without needing to do any of the maintenance, marketing and other ongoing work a typical business requires. Basically I would set something up, set it on autopilot and only engage with it again if there is an actual customer that I need to provide the service to.
I’m back to this idea today, but there is a slight difference. The current iteration acknowledges that I don’t need to provide what I think is the best, most universally valuable thing I can, that it doesn’t need to be at the bleeding edge of my capabilities. I can set something up based on simple skills that are well within my comfort zone. I’ve been struggling for years with a pattern where as soon as I become comfortably competent in something I immediatly feel it’s not valuable anymore. This is not a business issue, this is an issue of identity and mentality. This current mini-business iteration is a step towards resolving this and becoming comfortable with just doing acceptable work, boring but simple work, something that doesn’t challenge me on a skills level. For many people this will sound like I’ve discovered that jobs exist, and I don’t think they’ll be entirely wrong.
Another aspect of this that I feel reluctantly proud of: I am inching towards setting up work that can provide an income, that’s based in what I can comfortably and easily do and separating that from my passions and ambitions in both tech and photography. I’ve been telling myself for over a year that I need to do this, that photography can be a calling but it doesn’t seem like an easy path towards it becoming a living. So now I’m trying to take a step into what could become a more sustainable model for me: a simple business for making enough money with not much effort and time and resources made available to pursue what I truly value but can’t seem to figure out a way to make a living off of.
Well, anyways.
I was listening to a podcast about aphantasia today and it made me think about my relationship with photography. Aphantasia is when someone doesn’t have a “mind’s eye”, ie. they can’t visualize things in their head. Some people have strong visual imaginations, they can see close to realistic looking objects in their mind. When they imagine for example a red apple, they see vivid colors, a clearly defined shape, texture, light reflecting off of the waxy surface of the apple, almost like seeing it in real life. On the other end of the spectrum there are people who see nothing. Try as they might, they cannot conjure up an image mentally, it’s just all black, with the general concept or idea of the thing taking the place of a visual image.
As with most things in life, this is a spectrum and most people fall somewhere in the middle. While I don’t think I have aphantasia, I feel that I am closer to that end of the spectrum than the fully vivid, technicolor, shiny apple end. When I try to imagine things, the images are blurry, vague, with most of my imagination taken up by the concept. I see things as if they are behind a fog, or far away. There is a general shape and some coloring, but I can’t see details and most importantly I can’t imagine complex images. One apple? Maybe. But ask me to imagine a bowl of fruit on a table and I can only do one at a time, the table, or the bowl, or the individual pieces of fruit.
I think that this is part of the reason why I struggle with what photographers call “previsualizing” - imagining a picture before taking it. Many photographers use this method to figure out the picture they want, then creating it in real life. In constructed photography, like posed fashion shoots or still life type work, this is highly important. You need to know what you want the final image to look like, so you can figure out the perspective, composition, arrangement, lighting, etc. Maybe it’s no accident that I’m not very good at this type of photography.
Even in documentary genres, especially when working on larger projects, photographers often go out into the field with an idea of the image they are looking for. They don’t arrange the scene of course, but they know what picture they need for the project and can actively look for it, compose for it, place themselves in a situation that is likely to produce that image. It can help with simple things as well, like picking the time of day to shoot to get the quality of light you want.
For me, all of this is a struggle and most often makes me more confused than prepared. So I’m thinking, this might be part of why I gravitate towards more reactive types of photography, like reportage or street photography. In these genres, I place myself in a situation that has interesting content and be open to seeing pictures as they come together. I don’t need to plan shots ahead, I can instead rely on my intuition and quick reaction to see a moment coming and capture it. I can compose through the viewfinder, but I need something to be in front of the lens to know how I want to photograph it.
During photojournalism school I often struggled with exercises where I had to come up with concepts in advance and then go out and photograph them. I ended up putting this down as a symptom of my ADHD: planning is not my strong suit. I get lost in the weeds and I get anxious about needing to nail down every detail. My concepts and project plans come out overly complex and baroque and more often than not completely abstract. I then struggle to create reality based images that form a coherent photo series based on these plans. And I do think that ADHD is part of the picture. But part of it might be my weak visual imagination. I can’t really “picture” images, so I fall back on abstract concepts to feel like I’ve come up with something.
Over the past year I feel I’ve learned a lot about myself through learning and practicing documentary-style photography. One of the bigger lessons is that I need to lean into my strengths and stop trying to force myself to make photography in a way that doesn’t come naturally to me. I’ve learned that “coming up with a project” for me means a very basic starting idea, rooted in reality, like an event or a place or environment. I then need to immediately go out and try shooting in that environment. I can’t come up with a well rounded project in advance, but I can learn from the pictures I’m taking what the project is. I don’t plan, instead I discover the project. My work emerges from the picture taking, and for that I need to be out there, trying things and seeing where they lead.
Well, anyways.
It is nearly impossible to architect and manage a project that you’re a developer on. Let me rephrase that. I hate this fucking project and the chaos and that there is no PM to hold things together and no product design and no business logic and nothing, just me, ad-hoc bodging things together in a framework I’m new to.
So, it turns out, my PM and product skills and approach are role-dependent. Now I feel like I’m in a dev role, and I cannot, for the life of me, imagine thinking about product logic.
This project is a mess from the start and is showing me that I’m not a multiple hats guy. I need a context and a point of view to act from. So I’m not great as a solo founder type, because I can’t easily switch perspectives and roles. I’m either product, PM, arch, dev, BA, whatever, but can’t to multiple.
I also started out with a techno-retro feeling in my heart and so I’m looking at this whole thing as a perfect little UNIX thing, where it needs to be a single thing and then options and it’s like a fine instrument that if you master can make incredible music. In the meantime my designer girlfriend is trying to break it into user flows and screens and stuff and I hate it. Kind of funny, how I’ve come to dislike modern tech and software approaches along with the bullshit that comes with modern software businesses. When actually, a mix of oldschool clear functionalities and separation of concerns plus modern UX and putting things right at hand for the user could be the perfect approach.
Sadly I started with a different approach, a deep-down desire for an older, simpler, more sane world’s software, or an idealized, imagined version of that, anyway. Now I’m stuck in this approach and I’m not sure I even want to change it yet. Thinking about this project as a good old, web 1.0 era, unixy, hackery, long bearded smart guy program makes me feel a bit better about it, makes me a bit interested in it. And that feels nice, cozy. Not sure I’m ready to come back to the real current world yet.
I get this periodic urge to go on an adventure. As often, today it was triggered again by bumping into a reference to Poles of Inconvenience, a yearly adventure rally where participants spend three weeks trying to get to hard to reach locations with purposely unfit cars (like 1l Suzukis or old Nissan Micras).
The weird thing is, I’ve never really been an adventuring type. I like the sense of uncertainty and freedom that comes from being on the road without a specific plan, but I’ve never followed that to anywhere beyond a randomly picked other town a couple hours from home. But every once in a while I’ll feel this strong longing to go out without a map and purposely do things the inconvenient way.
A lot of the fun of the rallys organized by the Adventurists (the company organizing Poles of Inconvenience) comes from having to problem-solve on the road and making unexpected connections with locals as a result. Maybe that’s what I’m longing for, the unexpected, unplanned, unchoreoghraphed human connection.
That’s something I can find elsewhere, in smaller scale I think. But that’s a story for another day.
Part of my dreaming about doing POI at some point is getting an ultra cheap beater car. Looking at a big local used car marketplace, an old 1l Nissan Micra or 0.8l Daewoo Matiz would cost me about 1-200k HUF (about €250-500). Add to that 500GBP for the participation fee for the rally and it’s a bit out of my budget for now. But getting a car that cheap that actually runs, that feels amazingly liberating.
I briefly drove a 20 year old three door Ford Fiesta. It wasn’t a good car and it had lots of mechanical issues. But I honestly enjoyed that car more than anything else I’ve ever driven or owned. There is something about a small, light, crappy car that puts a smile on my face. Driving the country in that Fiesta felt like a mini adventure every time. Add to that the fact that with a cheap beater like that I don’t feel like I need to be careful with it and it was the most fun car ever. It wasn’t practical, but I honestly miss it sometimes.
At some point, when my finances are in better shape, I want to get a beater like that again, maybe even crappier.
Well, anyways.