Useful stuff I got from 2024 which I highly recommend to every professional, and some of them to everyone (read first sentences if you want to read-through quickly):
— Got paid licenses/subscriptions for every professional bit I use. I can’t appreciate enough how much headache it took away: Lightroom, DaVinci, CapCut, WFolio (content delivery website, much much more professional looking than yandex/dropbox or google drive)
- Start working on my photo portfolio, organize shoots for free, get my ideas out, don’t be scared editing how I like it — that’s much better showing what I like doing and what I’m good at
- Try and learn new things — best thing that happened to me is multiexposure, that you can see on these photos, makes photos so much more interesting and it’s not that hard.
- Rebuild my website corresponding to my new style, make it cooler and user-friendlier
- Sort my drives including clouds! I’ve spent at least a week of Christmas holidays going through 3 cloud drives (oh I just realised I have one more), 2 SSD’s just looking through files, photos and videos sorting them, binning and moving across.
That’s a very good thing to do:
1. I cleared about 2 TB of space overall, binned all the old photoshoots I don’t ever need, deleted raw files from shoots I’m not going to re-edit,
2. Backed Up personal photos to main photo feed: google photos (I love this tool — face/document recognition, date sorting), 3. Backed up important documents: Photo ID’s, Visa, Driver’s licenses, important letters etc to two cloud drives and made these folders always downloaded both on my phone and laptop.
- Started to treat my photography videography thing like a business — listening business podcasts, working on building my pages, portfolio, budgeting, services list and many more. There’s no work-free time for a freelancer, you always have things to do even if you don’t have client work atm
- Saved a little financial cushion! After 3 years of being absolutely out of financial independency and thoughts I finally started making some regular though still little money, and after paying all debts I finally not spending everything to 0, yay!
- Got myself in front of the camera. I didn’t have any photos before this year except for selfies on my phone, this year I made it consistent and I feel soooo so much more confident about my whole appearance and speaking to the camera/public now.
- Sorted out my health and personal shit! Wisdom teeth, surgery, skin and allergies, all medical tests to know my health needs better, and family, friends, partners/ex-partners talks got my headspace finally clear after years of struggling. That required a lot of dumb and braveness but I did it for myself and satisfied with the point I happend to end up now.
- Became a woman I love seeing in the mirror every day.
Plans for this year:
- overthink less, do straight away more
- start being more communicative in business. collaboration, cold outreach and ads. change the way of thinking that it’s embarrassing and selling-myself
- make video portfolio
- vlog and blog consistently
- find another ways of income not getting full/part time employed
- increase income and save descent cushion to feel safe
- hardest thing — come back to Russia and switch work patterns completely and decide what’s next (and finally enjoy normal winter during the process)
Hope this was helpful in at least one thing for you. Let me know what it changed in your way of thinking, if you want to, I’m always keen to hear about it.
Cheers!
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