What you can learn for your field of expertise by looking at other professions

9 Great tips I learned from Photographers that you can apply when you want people to react to your work or efforts

The way photographers work and think has much to offer for how to work and think in any other profession.

Being surrounded for one week by amazing photographers and photography stories at the international photography festival Xposure in Sharjah, Dubai, gave me much input for work, in fact, for any discipline you are working in. If you are an artist, a writer, a business owner, an entrepreneur, an activist, or a scientist - any profession or activity can take a leaf out of the photographer's book.

Excellent photographers are great storytellers and thinkers through their pictures. They observe, evaluate, capture, communicate, criticize, and empathize.

Photographs have the power to inspire justice, welcome peace, explore diversity, embrace the future, reconcile the past, celebrate humanity and mankind, empower the forgotten, deny exploitation, go beyond boundaries, expose the untouched truth, realize the imaginary, and demand change.

I am fascinated by the broad knowledge, insights, and skills international working photographers have.

Here are 9 tips we can learn from photographers that you can apply when you want people to react to your work, business, activities, or efforts.

1.  Tell Stories

Storytelling is such an important element in any kind of discipline. Most photographers at the event who presented their work on stage started with a story. Throughout their talk, they repeatedly included little stories they experienced while on assignment or on the road for their photography project.

• Pull your audience or clients into your topic, product, writing, or service by starting with a story that is related to what you do
• Be curious about the world, whether it is in your immediate vicinity or out and about in the world because it provides you with an endless number of stories and input.
• Being open to unexpected experiences, or talking to people you have never met before, offers so much input for anything you do. Then you can weave those stories into the message you want to convey.

2.  Zoom In and Zoom Out

Photographers are excellent at choosing, changing, and challenging their lenses to see and capture life from different perspectives. They zoom in on the details and zoom out to see the bigger picture.

• To be good in what you do, you need both, the details and the bigger picture.
• Zooming into details means caring, depth, surprise, wonder, gems, engagement.
• Zooming out means understanding, contexts, connections, overview, clarity, bird’s-eye view, perspective.
• You need to understand where you and your topic are standing in relation to the rest of the subject and the world. We easily get tunnel vision, emotionally locked in and lose clarity of thought.
• You want to capture the essence and pull your customer, client, audience, followers into your world by connecting with them through details

3.  Induce Emotion

The British renowned National Geographic photographer and journalist Charlie Hamilton James was wondering how to bring out empathy through the lens. One technique while he was photographing various endangered wildlife is that he wanted to get the viewer, the audience to feel immersed in the world of the subject matter, so people care, listen, and look.

• Think about how you can engage your clients or audience, so they stop and pause and think.
• Find the lowest common denominator with which everybody can connect with emotionally.
• Introduce a hero figure that is connected to your subject matter with whom the reader, buyer, listener, client can identify with.
• Give a different perspective to open up the hearts and minds.

4.  Find a Hero

Photographers often have a hero in a picture that helps the viewer to stop, to get pulled in, and to identify with. The hero can be the one tall still standing tree admits a wildfire, or it can be the one bull standing at the edge of the valley above a large herd of bulls covered in dust.

• You can define, create, build, identify a hero for your message, or product, or service, or writing so your clients or audience have a hook, something they can identify with.
• Heroes are vehicles to create connections.
• A hero is rooted in our universal human experience, and a hero resonates across cultures and ages.

5.  Focus

Photographers focus with their camera and focus on a subject matter, a message they want to convey. Some photographers are known for their focus on one topic. But the focus for a while on one topic helped them to craft their skills and expand their knowledge which they, or many of them, would then transfer to other areas.

• It’s the focus that helps you to be efficient, hone your skills, and build substance.
• From your skill set, knowledge and experience you gain from focusing, you can branch out.

6.  Perspective and Creativity

Looking at other photographers works gives you a different perspective on a topic or on different ideas you have not thought of before. The great thing about being a photographer is that you get to explore your own curiosity.

• Watch the world, study shifts and culture.
• Get away from your screen or work in front of you and go to museums, look at art, read books about totally different topics than you are used to, travel – there are so many things out there in the world that help you gain different perspectives.

7.  Timeless versus Current

Pete Souza, the White House photographer for Barack Obama, documented and captured the current events with the Obama administration which were important and of high relevance at the time. But the images also have a timeless aspect because what was documented is history and can be referred to no matter when.

• With current images, stories, media, products, service you gain traction very fast.
• With timeless materials, you need time to be seen, recognized,

8.  Crafting

Craft is everything. There are people who take pictures and there are people who take photographs. And there are people who stop, and they look, and they think, and they consider, and they build and build and build. They are crafting instead of just walking in and spraying and praying. It’s the little details that make all the difference.

• Crafting gets easily connected with the art world, craftsmen, working and refining something with your hands. But crafting can be working on, and refining, and improving just about anything.
• Crafting your words. Crafting the way you lead, consult, or present. Crafting your product, your service, your cooking.
• It comes down to your research, your script, your edit, your fine-tuning, your collaboration, your heart and mind you put into whatever you do.

9.  Finding Your Style

Darren Heath, known for his unique way of photographing Formula One cars and races, explains that to succeed in photography, it’s important to create a unique style that sets you apart. Don’t just copy what other people do.

• Take in all the input, information, and advice from others and the surrounding industry. Evaluate, appreciate, see what fits for you.
• Follow your own path, one that comes from within, shaped by a mix of what comes from outside and your own inner north star.

Hi, I'm Claudia, the founder of the publication Un-Rush -The Power of Slow in a Rushing World Crushing Your Life.

Un-Rush is a place for curious thinkers who question whether our addiction to speed and busyness yields happiness and progress, or if it leads to destruction and dissatisfaction instead.

 You can learn more (and subscribe :-) if you enjoy it - here >>>