Careers Day

I took this photography in Germany and have always been drawn to it because it tells many stories.

School Talk

I was asked to participate in a careers talk with students today. My initial thought was to say no with the excuse in my mind that my time could be better spent elsewhere. This couldn’t be further from the truth and once again I probably got more out of it than the students. My working career has never been straightforward but I wouldn’t change it at all because it has led me to where I am today.

The following is what I wrote and talked about. Thank you to the Students from Cleve, Tumby Bay, Cummins, and Port Lincoln High.

Hi, my name is Matthew Dodd and I am the person behind Doddlife Photography. I am 36, I have a partner who teaches at the Primary School, and two little kids who are 3 and 1. I now call myself a full-time photographer but that hasn’t always been the case. This is a bit of my background before becoming a full-time photographer.

I went to school right here in Port Lincoln at the Port Lincoln High School and in all honesty, couldn’t wait for it to finish. I wasn’t a huge fan of school but I did enjoy the social side of it. I didn’t fail, but I was far from the top of my class. The goal was to finish year twelve and assess my options after that.

I remember having career days towards the end of my schooling and the careers officer/councillor would ask me what I wanted to be. I always felt like I needed to have an answer so I would make it up, copy whatever a friend was saying, or simply say the truth, that I didn’t know and I had absolutely no idea. Even at that age, I felt pressure from society to know exactly where I was going, and I had the impression that it was abnormal not to know. It was common for people that I looked up to or the older generation to only ever have one or two jobs for their entire life and I found that ludicrous.

I had no ambitions at all to be a photographer at that stage of my life and if you told me that was what I was going to be now, I probably would have laughed. I didn’t know the first thing about photography, photography was not a class I excelled at in school or even enjoyed. I didn’t know the process of developing film in the dark room and overall because I wasn’t a natural when it came to the creative arts I struggled to apply myself to it.

I left school after year 12 and had a gap year in Port Lincoln working for a courier to try and save some money. I went off to University to study Event Management and looking back now I can see that this probably wouldn’t have been a bad fit. I enjoyed working with others to complete tasks, being social, I could network, and was creative, I could manage time and I enjoyed meeting people from diverse backgrounds. Even within the short amount of time I was there I felt like I could be myself at university. I wasn’t studying with anybody that I knew from school and hardly saw anyone from my home town on campus. In saying that I lasted four months and then I quit. I was struggling financially, I was trying to play football and I had found a job labouring. I could only see the short-term goal of money and gave up before I had even started with the longer-term goal of finishing university. I felt like a quitter.

I found myself in Adelaide, with no university, a labouring job that I wasn’t loving but paid the bills and allowed me to have a social life. The problem was I still had no real career direction. This lasted roughly 18 months before I returned to Port Lincoln a little lost. This is probably when it all started to change. I decided that I was going to go overseas. I didn’t know anything about Canada but knew that I loved the snow from previous school ski trips and booked a job through an online travel company working as a lift operator in Lake Louise, Alberta Canada. It was here that I took one image that at the time I didn’t know would change the direction of my work life.

I ended up spending 11 months overseas during that first trip. Nine months in Canada and two months traveling throughout Western Europe. I returned home financially broke but mentally wealthy and filled with excitement for what was to come. I remember sitting in my room once all the happiness from catching up with family and friends had worn off and thinking now what? I pulled out my camera which was a little Olympus shockproof and waterproof thing, and started to go through the images. There was one image that caught my eye instantly and it was looking at Lake Louise before it had frozen over through the snow-covered pines.

Lake Louise, Alberta, Canada

Seeing it brought back all these memories and emotions, happiness about the people I met during the snow season and whilst traveling but also a sadness that I was now back where I started with no money and no quick fix to get back overseas.

I went instantly back into what I was doing before and that was working as a skilled labourer. I realised that if I was going to continue to labour in the building industry then I should get a trade for the work I was doing, so I started a mature-age apprenticeship. I was fortunate enough that my boss appreciated my work ethic, and my prior knowledge and put me on a decent wage for an apprentice. I could complete sections of my apprenticeship that I had already covered through recognition of prior learning but would have to study and finish the remaining over two years. That two years seemed like a jail sentence at the time.

With the apprenticeship ticked off I then began to again start saving for more travel. I worked locally and rurally saving whatever I could. I also spent a fair chunk of time in the Whyalla building because I was offered better rates to work away from home.

This routine of saving and traveling again continued into my late twenties, I didn’t particularly love carpentry and building but I didn’t hate it either. It paid the bills and allowed me to travel which is what I wanted to be doing. I took great enjoyment in working with timber and pride in seeing the finished result. It allowed me to work in other towns and cities because it was a job that was easily transferrable and socially it was a great career to make instant connections and life long friends.

While traveling I had the chance to try out different jobs such as working in the snow fields, tree planting, festivals, or summer camps and what I realised was that the amount I got paid never determined the happiness at my job. In some jobs, I would be making next to nothing but loved doing what I was doing and in other jobs, I could be making really good money, but that higher amount of money wouldn’t make me love doing what I was doing. I quickly realised that money didn’t equal happiness, it helped relieve stress and it allowed me to live a flexible life but even still it didn’t seem worth the trade-off given how fast life speeds by.

I read once that one of life's secrets is determining the difference between happiness and pleasure. What brings happiness? Friends, family, and things you love doing bring real happiness. New clothes, cars, and materialistic items can bring pleasure but pleasure isn’t everlasting and pleasure will rarely turn into long-term happiness. The secret is to find a career path that makes you happy.

I had gotten to the stage where I began to take a camera with me everywhere I went. Whether it was traveling overseas, walking the streets of Melbourne, or going to the job site back on the Eyre Peninsula. I was constantly taking photos. Some photos were absolute garbage and some were not. I found that the images that drew me in the most were landscapes. I could lose myself in a landscape, I could capture the raw undisturbed colours of the surroundings and I found that people started to resonate with them online. Sitting on the coast with just myself and my camera capturing whatever was before me would bring long-lasting happiness.

I started to have a couple of inquiries regarding print sales and quickly I realised that I might be able to at least partially fund my photography because at that time, I was funding everything through my carpentry wage and it was beginning to be an expensive hobby.

My first financial reward most probably came in 2017/18. I put together a calendar of landscape images that I had taken over the previous twelve months showcasing the Eyre Peninsula. I contacted local businesses (which I found hard to do) to see if they would like to sponsor a month and this sponsorship gave me the money to make my first large calendar order which consisted of two hundred copies. This process also took me out of my comfort zone. I had people say no, I had businesses where I’d shopped for years say no and I had to swallow my pride and realise it wasn’t personal. From their perspective, I was a carpenter asking them to financially sponsor my hobby as a photographer with no promise of an advertising return for them at all. All two hundred copies sold and it was a win for me and a win for the sponsors involved.

The funds from those calendar sales allowed me to do a couple of things. One was to purchase new camera equipment and build a website where people could order prints online and the other was to book a ticket to Japan to go snowboarding. I realised that if I could make money through photography then I could somehow turn it into a job and in my mind being paid to take photographs was a dream come true. I loved every aspect of it.

Over the next two years, I continued to build the website, incorporated a small clothing range, and started to commit more hours to this ‘side hustle’.  A big eye-opener came in 2022 when I had the opportunity to rent a pop-up shop space in the month before Christmas. Now people will tell you what not to do in business and this is probably one of the times but I maxed out a credit card, purchased frames, clothes, and prints, and filled the small space. I then bombarded my social media with advertising and it was a success both financially and mentally. I paid off the credit card right away and made enough during that month to continue to fund my photography for the coming months.

I also decided around that time to finish up with carpentry and pursue photography full-time. This was far from an easy decision but I was finding it harder and harder to put on my work boots every day knowing that it wasn’t what I wanted or felt that I was meant to be doing. I realised that life is short and I needed change but I had a 2-year-old and 6-month-old at home and I also knew that I had to provide for them. Society seemed to be yelling at me to stay in my lane and my self-doubt became crippling. My boss at the time was not only ok with my decision, but encouraged it.

I started my move to a full-time photography career in 2023 operating out of my garage. I said yes to real estate photography, weddings, events, products and pretty much anything. If I didn’t know how to photograph something I would research it in the lead up to the job. I would also reach out to other photographers, swallow my pride, and ask for help which was more often than not given.

I was lucky enough to land a couple of dream jobs photographing the Gawler Ranges for the Wudinna and Kimba Councils and also a big job photographing the Kimba District. These two jobs confirmed to me that this was exactly what I wanted to be doing. I won’t lie, that first year was hard, and looking back I was living week by week which was tough with a mortgage and a young family. I was calling businesses to see if they needed a photographer, I was working out of our garage at home and I had some weeks where I had no work at all. I was initially under the impression that because I had a little online following I would be able to find work easily but quite quickly learned that this wasn’t the case. I had to reach out to businesses, had to learn to promote myself, and had to be productive with my time. If I wasn’t working a commercial photography job then I was out on the coast capturing landscapes, photographing wildlife, or learning how to operate a drone while starting to dip my toes into videography.

As 2023 dragged on I knew that I had to move out of the garage. I couldn’t have meetings in the garage next to the washing machine because it wasn’t a great vibe. I struggled to make phone calls in the garage with the kids banging on the door and it was not a great space to be in for hours of the day with little natural light and just myself for company.

I was on the lookout for a commercial space to set up an office and a gallery but everything available locally was well out of my budget and anything in my budget was in pretty horrendous conditions or located well out of town. I had seen that this building right here (the Doddlife Studio) had been vacant for a decent period and I found out who the owner was. I sat on the phone number for a couple of days not wanting to make a call or send a message just because I thought that I would hear the familiar response of “no”. Eventually, I made contact and the owner responded. Within 20 minutes we had a meeting scheduled for the next day. She said the building was mine if I wanted it and I found the rent was manageable but returning the premises to an operating condition would be up to me.

It was one of those occasions where it seemed like it was meant to be. I used the skills and connections I had from being a tradesman to remove some internal walls, rip up the carpet, grind the concrete floors, paint the walls inside and out, install some lighting, and add some hanging rails. I sought out budget-friendly second-hand furniture online and kept it simple.

I am happy to say that the Doddlife Studio has now been open for 5 months. There are weeks where I am still second guessing if this is going to work or not and then there are weeks where I think I have made the best decision I possibly could regarding my work life/family life.

I am luckily in a position in life where I can say I genuinely love what I do. I am not making the most money I have ever made, I don’t have the job security I once had but every day I get up with a smile on my face knowing that I have leaped.

I am not sure how long this will last but I know that when I look back on this in years to come I will be proud that I made the leap and at least tried to make a career out of something I love doing.

I won’t die wondering and I suggest you don’t either.

Cheers,

Doddy

(A few thought so far)

The internal monologue that you need to listen to and then place to the side:

Self-Doubt

Financial stresses

Worried about what others would think

Underqualified (I am not the best)

It is not all fun and games but you need to learn to love the hard times:

You won’t enjoy every aspect of your chosen career but the good times need to far outweigh the bad

Understand your weaknesses and ask for help when it is needed

Research, if I don’t know how to photograph a subject, product, or location, or even if I don’t know the camera settings needed I will research it.

The main thing I have learned since opening the studio:

Some days are quiet, some days are busy, don’t get caught up on the day-to-day. Think ahead of time. What are your long-term goals and what can I do to get there

Networking:

Say yes to meetings

Say yes to catch up with coffee

Say yes to those jobs that scare or intimidate you

Work-life balance:

Enjoy the little bits of happiness in what you are doing

Make time for those that matter

A little bit more:

Listen to your critics because you can learn some of your best listens from them but don’t dwell on them. You will always have critics no matter what you do in life. You can’t please everyone

Being self-taught is not a bad thing, I encourage study but you can also study in your own time. Especially with photography, there are many free tutorials online and YouTube is your best start.

Engage with your followers, treat them as if you are having a conversation with someone in real life and that they are not just a number on social media. Some of my best clients have been people I started talking to through social media and some great new friends are people I have met with the shared passion of photography.

Be true to yourself and your work. It is easy to try and copy what someone else is doing but hard to admit it.

Don’t be afraid to admit you’ve made the wrong choice to initiate change. Sometimes you have to take a step or two back to move forward.

Value your work. I made a choice when I started photography as a job to never work for free because at the end of the day if it’s your job then you should expect to be paid for your time. Social media exposure doesn’t equal followers or sales. The only person that is winning by using your content for free is the business using it. There are exceptions to this rule such as if you are the one reaching out offering free services or if you feel the opportunity is too good to pass up on.

If possible keep your camera on you or close at all times, shots you miss can sometimes be the ones you remember the most.