Connecticut-based portrait and sports photographer Christopher Beauchamp‘s recent project is a perfect example of why you should never stop exercising your creative mind and, more importantly, never give up on your work.
Chris was traveling all over the world working on a mixed stills & motion campaign for a big pharma company, with one of the locations being Bogota, Colombia. Chris immediately made a connection with a Colombian rock climber he had previously photographed to see about opportunities to shoot for a few days after his client project wrapped up. As luck would have it, his friend would be in town and they planned a little climbing rendezvous.
With this shoot, Chris had one specific objective in mind: to recreate a fuzzy cell phone shot of the statue of the virgin overlooking the cliff at Suesca (where they were shooting) that he saw somewhere on the internet:
I immediately knew the shot I wanted to create, how I wanted to light it, how I wanted that image to feel. Ultimately I believe I was 100% successful in realizing that vision. So often I feel like we (photographers) work hard and come really, really close to achieving a vision, but it’s rare when you get to exactly where you were aspiring to go with an image. Unless, of course, it’s a big production advertising type shoot where every detail has been meticulously orchestrated, but to pull it off on your own without the production support, in the Colombian jungle, is a big win in my book.
Around this same time, I was chatting with Chris about the shoot and the fact that he had pitched the photos to various publications with no luck. Just as I was preparing this very feature, I got a pleasantly surprising email from him:
So my putting together everything for you prompted me to put a pitch together and send it off to another magazine that I had some old contacts at. I’d sort of been stalling after it was rejected by my first choice. Anyways they’re stoked on it and, as luck would have it, they just had their next cover story fall through so this is going right to the front of the line.
This is just one example of the importance of timing and persistence in a photographer’s marketing plan! The story ran recently, with the very image Chris was aiming to capture hitting the cover of DPM Climbing:
“There are so many reasons to create personal work, whether it’s to help create the portfolio you really want, show clients another dimension to your capabilities or just to make something that looks cool, just because. But I think it’s often a mechanism to more intimately engage with or experience a place or a people. I find there’s a deeper connection to people or a place once you’ve taken that person or place and added your personal perspective to create something new.” – Chris Beauchamp