Hi,
Like John writes, wrinkles do producer a somewhat different way of looking at the world, if not simply the mirror.
I think what might happen is that one's own sense of reality becomes moderated by, well, reality: you look backwards and consult experience, and learn to recognize potential traps that just hurt your foot and deliver you nothing but the sense of relief when you escape! Now, that's not to say that experience saves you every time; far from it. In my own case I realised long ago that there are mistakes that I shall continue to make, over and over again, not because I'm particularly stupid, but because some things can't fail to lighten up my imagination and, in the end, to travel hopefully is often the best part of the journey.
Somehow, filling the coffers of companies that desert you without giving a fig doesn't fit that description for me. Have a good day, HP.
Keith goes on to say that he feels the print is the final expression. Well, in many ways I guess that it is; for years it was pretty much all that I handed over to clients. I even went on to make prints on larger papers than the images required - I felt it looked better and raised the job closer to an artform than a simple commercial exchange of benefits, and best of all, I felt good about it! And as long as I did the printing, I was happy. Where it fell a little bit apart was in giant prints which I had to farm out.
Trannies, on the other hand, provided a sense of freedom to me: shoot, edit, submit and bill! Until calendars came along, and all the added responsibility of learning how that printing industry worked, the pitfalls, the ways printers would try to convince you they were right when they were visibly not so, and like that. But, it paid a lot better than just shooting and gave access to far more exciting work for me. But, and a big but, the creative reward part, for me, lay - and still largely does - in the shooting: the seeing and catching it. Once the model signed off and there was just the empty studio or the flight back home, it felt rather a bit flat. Time for a cigarette, no doubt.
So, when the pro ends and the am takes over, how to adapt? Not so easy, least of all because of the need/desire to find a self-motivated reason to do the shooting in the first place. It took me years to get it into my mind that carting the kitchen sink around wasn't going to cut it; it didn't depend on being ready to conquer every possible mountain at all. It depended on being in that rare mental state when you can truly forget what's going down beside you and just look.
You can do that with one body and one lens. In many ways, printing or not makes little difference to me, which is not to deny that I feel pissed off now, being denied the choice.
Rob C