When Opportunity Knocks, Answer the Door
When I heard that President Carter had fallen the day he was supposed to arrive at the Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project in Nashville, I knew that he would still be there. His unwavering dedication to showing up, not just at events, but with his heart and his mind toward service, is an inspiring lesson I’m fortunate to have learned first-hand. Photo and article by: Annalise Kaylor
Yesterday, I was 2000 words deep into an article for you about NFTs—what they are, and why photographers should or should not care—when I received a text message from my former boss. Not long after we spoke, news broke that former President Jimmy Carter had elected to enter into home hospice care after several visits to the hospital.
This news is deeply personal to me. I’ve spent 7 years photographing the former President and Rosalynn in various professional capacities. Each and every time he spoke, even if he spoke words of wisdom I had heard him share countless times before, I left that assignment inspired and motivated to be a better human.
I’ve spent time with the Carters in quiet rooms, time with them when all heads were bowed in prayer, time with them in their modest home in Plains, Georgia, and the milkweed that surrounds my house in Atlanta was grown with seeds from Rosalynn’s seed collection; she’s long been a proponent of the Monarch butterfly and pollinator gardens as a whole.
This news is deeply personal to me.
I promise this has to do with the business of photography, so please bear with me.
I had just picked up my first full-frame camera, a Canon 5DMKIII, when I met and photographed President Carter for the first time. Other than some test photos around my house, it was the first time I was using the camera in a professional capacity. I had traded in my old camera, so the only backup camera I had available to bring along was my Canon Rebel T3i, an entry-level camera with an ISO that cranked all the way up to 6400. Given that this was an assignment I couldn’t risk failing, I brought it along.
President Carter was speaking to a group of international students at the school of law at Emory University. After leaving office, he joined Emory’s faculty in 1982 as a University Distinguished Professor. As part of his role, he often spoke with students in the various schools at the university on topics like the rule of law, world affairs, and leadership. This had an additional benefit to the Carters, though, as well.
A lot of people don’t realize this, but because Jimmy served only four years in the federal government, he fell one year short of qualifying to receive retirement benefits afforded to former federal employees. Instead, his benefits are provided by Emory via his long-time professorship.
The first part of the event was fairly easy. I photographed a handful of faculty with the President and then went into the auditorium to scout out the setup for the group photo of the students with him. Not long after, the dutiful students piled in. I arranged them, carefully leaving a spot in the center for the President so he could easily walk in and join the group for the photo - easy peasy.
Everything was going smoothly. After the group photo and everyone had been seated, an introduction of President Carter was presented by one of the students. I took a couple of photos, and then…
…my brand new camera died.
Dead. Wouldn’t work. It was powered on, but nothing worked. I tried all of the usual options—removing batteries, turning off and on, attaching and detaching lenses—it was done.
But I wasn’t. I still had a solid 75 minutes of photography left and this was hands-down the most important assignment of my career thus far. And all I had was my $350 consumer-level crop sensor Canon Rebel T3i.
Moving my 70-200mm over to the Rebel, I continued doing my job. I photographed my heart out, working every unique composition and angle I could in the small room. It wasn’t an easy assignment, and it was made doubly hard by my camera woes.
The walls of the room were made of teak and finished in a color I can only call “sunset orange.” The curtain behind the President was a deep, cool, blue velvet. The stage lights were the color of daylight, while the can lights overhead seemed to land somewhere around “old hotel light bulb yellow”. Suffice it to say that this was the day that I mastered Kelvin white balance.
As I began editing the images at home, I cringed at how noisy so many of them were. Low light and complicated light photography - we hate it, but working in it only makes you better.
I posted the photos to PhotoShelter for Emory and thought nothing else of it. No one else had any concerns about the noise in the images, but me. They used those photos everywhere, and a couple of months after that job, I was contacted by a staff member at The Carter Center, the NGO founded by the Carters after his presidency. They wanted one of my portraits for his presidential library and collection.
I had my favorite boutique photography lab print and mat the photograph at the requested dimensions, and signed and dated the mat, my first time ever doing such a thing. I suppose you could say this was my first gallery sale, too, in a way.
I share this story with our workshop clients on a fairly regular basis. There is always someone who feels like their camera or lens is inadequate. There is always someone who is frustrated that some camera body or lens or insert your favorite piece of aspirational gear here is out of reach. It’s hard to avoid getting in your head when you see other people with the gear you only wish you had.
As photographers, we’re the first to balk when a non-photographer says something like, “Your camera takes nice pictures.” No jerk, the PHOTOGRAPHER behind the camera makes nice pictures. But we’re also the first to tell another photographer that they NEED whatever gear next.
While higher-quality gear does indeed help create better photos from a technical perspective, it will never make a bad photographer a better photographer. Only you can do that part.
I continued to photograph President Carter via Emory events and various other photography assignments, and in 2017, I landed a job as a staff photographer and video producer for Habitat for Humanity International, which is headquartered in Atlanta. A lot of people think Jimmy Carter started Habitat, but he didn’t. It was started by a man named Millard Fuller, who just happened to live down near the Carters’ home in Plains, Georgia. President and Mrs. Carter indeed played a crucial role in its growth and success, but it had been around for a while before they got involved with their annual homebuilding project.
Landing that job was serendipitous. I applied for the job in May, knowing it was a long shot at best. A few months went by, and I heard nothing. I assumed I hadn’t made the cut. I flew to Ghana, Africa, for another assignment, and right as I was about to return home, Hurricane Harvey descended upon Texas and Louisiana. Not long after, Irma arrived, followed by more devastation with Hurricane Maria. 2017 was a destructive year, to say the least.
Habitat for Humanity isn’t an immediate emergency NGO. It’s an organization that comes after the triage. And, with an incredibly small photo and video team covering the entire globe, it can be difficult to document all of the good and hard work that Habitat and its volunteers do.
As part of the disaster coverage, Habitat photo/video staff had been sent to Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and Puerto Rico. Spread thin, the director of the team reached out to me, having found me through the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA). Habitat volunteers were putting together emergency shelter repair kits for Puerto Rico, Texas, Florida, and Louisiana and the organization needed a photographer to document that effort. Since their in-house team was everywhere except Atlanta at that moment, he hired me to freelance for the day.
At first, I thought it was a test assignment. Something easy to lob my way and see if my work cut the mustard. But after a long day of working my butt off, I learned from the director that wasn’t a test at all, and my resume was one that never made its way to his desk. However, they were still interviewing photographers for the job. The hurricanes had pushed back their efforts to fill the open position.
By the time I made it home from the assignment, HR had called me to schedule a round of interviews. That hard work in a warehouse had, indeed, paid off. In my time with the NGO, I traveled to dozens of countries on assignment. I’d find myself drowning in sweat in the humid rainforests of Guatemala and freezing in the post-war low-income housing in Poland. I’d find myself almost kidnapped by guerrilla rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo and I’d find myself steaming up my viewfinder with tears of joy when I watched a family move into their new home in Tennesee.
I found myself in these places not because I was the best photographer who interviewed with the organization. I earned that job by taking what most photographers would consider a crappy assignment—photos of volunteers in a dimly lit warehouse packing tarps and nails into tubs—and I owned it. I took the luck that was handed to me and spun it into gold. Often, it’s never about the photography that you create. Rather, it’s about how and why you create those photos.
My best photographs are not those that are copycats of something I saw on social media. The best photographs in my body of work are the images that were made while I was feeling the scene in front of me and approaching those photos with a point-of-view that is distinctly my own. When you dare to be yourself, you, too, will find yourself making your best images.
In my years as a staff photographer and video producer, I honed my skills as a storyteller, including working with the Carters and their team any time we collaborated. My time there is dotted with moments of magic. I’ll never forget when a U.S. Secret Service agent gave me a pin to wear on my shirt when I obtained my security clearance, for example. While I was doing work with Habitat, I continued to also do assignments with The Carter Center, Emory, and pretty much everywhere else that called for a photographer for the Carters. My photos of the former President have been stolen for made into memes and served as backdrops for his inspirational words in social media photos. Given how many Google Alerts are coming in with my name today, I expect to see many more of these pop up on social media in the days to come.
And then yesterday, February 18, 2023, came the news that 98-year-old President Carter, after hospitalization, had decided to enter into home hospice care. To say I was crushed is an understatement. For me, Jimmy isn’t only a former President and humanitarian and Mrs. Carter isn’t only a former First Lady. They are people that I’ve come to know and who, while I was working with them regularly at least, had come to know me. The Carters saw photos of my dogs on my phone. They asked me how the yard was coming along. I remember showing Rosalynn photos my milkweed garden and how much she loved it with all the Joe-Pye weed planted in swaths, too.
I gave myself some time to sit with the news. And then I got to work.
My work with Habitat is “work for hire,” and they own the copyright to everything I made while there. I used their cameras, I was on staff, etc. But, I have a license in perpetuity to use anything I created in my time there for my own portfolio, social media, and self-promotion with few exceptions.
In a time of sadness, I’ve never been more grateful to have developed a habit of thoughtfully keyboarding my images. I have never been happier to have written beautiful, thorough captions. I have never been more relieved to have a Smart Collection in Lightroom for all of my Carter-related work.
Many of these photographs are images I haven’t looked at in years. But I needed them to create what will eventually be released as my tribute video to President Carter. Because I had keywords and captions and a Smart Collection at the ready, it took me a mere 30 minutes to pull together a hundred photos to work with. It whittled down what could have been a 10-hour job of video production to just a handful of hours.
While this isn’t wildlife-specific, it’s an important lesson in workflow and management. As a working photographer, you never want to be in a situation where you cannot access your newsworthy and timely photographs. They needn’t be newsworthy or timely when you make them, either.
I have a photo of an alligator in the Okefenokee swamp, for example, that continues to be licensed every month because the Okefenokee is currently fighting to keep a mineral mining company at bay. Newspapers and conservation organizations all over the southeast United States license that photo. On the surface, it’s a relatively boring photo of an alligator. In the context of news and time, however, it’s illustrative of the stakes if the mining company should prevail.
You can’t sell your photos if you can’t find your photos. Being organized means saving countless hours searching old hard drives and poorly labeled folders and trying to remember what year you made what photos.
Keywords and captions and creating collections are not the sexy part of being a wildlife photographer. They are tedious on their best days and mind-numbing on their worst. But they are one of the MOST important aspects of making a living as a wildlife photographer. Not only because they will keep your archive neat and tidy when it needs to be, but because virtually every art buyer, stock agency, non-profit, or other client uses them, too. And just like you can’t sell your work if you can’t find your work, they can’t buy your work if they can’t find your work.
Don’t worry about your backlog right now. Don’t worry about the years of photos you never cataloged this way. You can go back if you need to, but begin with your current work and make this tedious task part of your workflow.
Yesterday, being organized was more than an efficient workflow. It gave me space to relive some memories and grieve someone who has greatly inspired me and directly impacted my life and work. It provided me with what I needed now so I can compartmentalize and do my job as a photojournalist later, so I am present to tell stories of this loss from the viewpoints of others.
It reminded me of why I do what I do. Why making an impact with my work is so important to me. Why our photographs and the stories we tell with them are meaningful and important.
Make something beautiful today (and then keyword it and caption it).
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