7 hours ago
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The empty calendar is the part of a photography career nobody warns you about. Shooting is only a fraction of the work, and how you spend the hours away from the camera often decides whether the next job ever shows up.
Justin Mott lays out ten things working photographers should be doing between shoots, drawing on nearly 30 years in the field and a career that now includes a production company and several photography businesses. He remembers watching talented friends in Hanoi spend their afternoons in coffee shops complaining about the industry and their evenings doing the same at the bar. The talent was real, but the careers quietly disappeared. What they lacked wasn't ability, according to Mott, it was direction and a plan for the time in between.
Some of the advice targets the parts of the business most creatives would rather ignore. Mott argues that every social media platform should serve a clear purpose, and he walks through his own setup, where LinkedIn promotes his production company Mott Visuals to the luxury hospitality market while Instagram funnels people toward his educational work and his store. He pushes hard on file organization too, describing a system built on a NAS drive, sensible file names, and cloud backups for client deliverables, and he suggests asking AI to help design a naming structure if organization isn't your strength. Then there's the website, which he says should reflect the photographer you are now rather than every stage that got you here. He still updates his own sites several times a year, and he recently rebranded both mottvisuals.com and justinmott.com.
The stronger material comes when Mott turns from housekeeping to honesty. He wants you to track your numbers, meaning quotes sent, jobs won, jobs lost, and why. If inquiries aren't coming in, you may have a marketing problem. If people contact you but never hire, look at your portfolio, pricing, and pitch. If you win plenty of work but see no money, examine your estimates and production costs. He calls identifying the real problem the single most important point on the list, and he's blunt about the trap of staying busy. You can spend months becoming extremely efficient at avoiding the actual issue. A well-organized archive won't fix a weak portfolio, and posting daily won't save a business that loses money on every shoot.
The through-line here connects to a wider shift in how photographers actually earn a living. The old model assumed a clear split between the creative and the business person, and plenty of shooters still cling to that identity, resisting anything that smells like a spreadsheet. That divide has largely collapsed. Clients now find you through search, through GEO, through a LinkedIn presence, and through referrals from people who aren't photographers, which means the marketing, the tracking, and the networking are part of the craft now, not a distraction from it. Mott's point about networking outside your own field fits this exactly: other photographers rarely hire you, so the writers, hotel managers, and clients who do are the ones who need to remember your name. If you're early in your career and treating the business side as optional, the honest read is that the market stopped treating it as optional a while ago. The photographers holding steady tend to be the ones who accepted that a working career runs on trust, access, and follow-up as much as on light.
He closes with the idea most likely to stick: make a slow day plan before the slow day arrives. When the calendar goes blank and your confidence starts slipping, you won't make good decisions about what the business needs. So assign yourself tasks in advance, whether that's redesigning a LinkedIn banner, following up with a past client, or revisiting an old shoot to see what you'd do differently. Mott uses Apple Reminders, but he's clear the app doesn't matter as long as the plan is ready. He also carves out room for creative curiosity, arguing that administration will expand to fill every hour you give it, and that studying a cinematographer or spending a morning in a museum feeds directly back into stronger portfolio images and better pitches.
Press play on the video above to get all ten of Mott's between-shoot habits and the reasoning he's built over two decades in the industry.
English (US) ·