I found a post about the topic of how to advise your younger photographer self on a photography website, and thought I might weigh in.

It’s also worth noting that I am almost 61, older than most professional photographers, and their advice to five-years-ago them will be completely different than my advice to 45-years-ago me.

So what would I tell my fledgeling photographer self?

• Shoot more film in high school and college. This seems obvious, but in my high school and college days, film was expensive in my Ramen-noodle budget. I made a point to drag a camera along with me almost anywhere I went in college, thinking that I would be ready if the jumbo jet crashed on the South Oval. But since I had almost no money, I was reluctant to use up what little film I could afford. On a trip to New York in 1984, for example, I brought just four 36-exposure rolls of film.
• Shoot more film early in my career. This also seems like a no-brainer, since the company, not I, was buying the film, but I often faced pressure to scale back and save money for the bottom line, in what I like to call the “editor paradox”: an editor or publisher says something like, “We need more color on the front page,” or “Let’s expand our coverage of such-and-such.” Two weeks later, I’d be sitting in his or her office listening to, “Why are we spending so much money on film and chemicals?” I sometimes wish I’d been the guy who said “that’s too bad,” but I’m not. And as I did in college, I made a point to take cameras everywhere, not just to work, but still didn’t shoot a whole lot.

• Shoot my heavy primes at or near wide open, like at f/1.4. This is something everyone does today, but with film and lenses in the 1970s and 80s, we all correctly assumed that some lenses needed to be stopped down a couple of stops for them to be decently sharp. The only consistent exception to this rule were the 180mm f/2.8 and the 300mm f/2.8, which were super-expensive so you could shoot them wide open. Even some primes that we count on today to be amazing, like the 50mm f/1.2 I owned for a couple of years, needed to be stopped down a little to be sharp, but renewed interest in things like freelensing are showing me that these lenses always had something to offer, but many of us were too stubborn to try it.
• Make more time to print. I worked in six different darkrooms over the years, from the grim concrete tomb at Eisenhower High School, to the messy shared one in college, to the three different darkrooms at newspapers.
• Print everything you can afford to print, and store it safely. One or more versions of the Digital Dark Ages could be around the corner, and you don’t want to be the last one holding the Zip Disc.
• Figure stuff out for myself. In high school both an advisor and a fellow photographer were sore afraid of film grain and, mysteriously, a phenomena known as “reticulation.” The fear of film grain meant we had to shoot with Kodak’s worst film of the era, Plus-X, and the 125 ISO meant long shutter speeds, large apertures, and, so much of the time, direct flash. It ruined a lot of potential images. The concept of film reticulating said that changes in the temperature from one solution to the next during development would cause the film to expand and contract, creating an alligator-skin look to the image. I tried it a few times in my darkrooms as a adult professional, and could only get the effect using near-boiling water, so a couple of degrees between the developer and the fixer was negligible. They also believed, very incorrectly, that drying negatives with hot air would damage them, so they would hang film in a closet to air dry, adding an hour to their workflow for no reason at all.
• Come down from my ivory darkroom. I don’t know why, but photographers think they have a better pot to pee in. We called everyone else in the newsroom “word herders.” So many of us did this, but it creates friction that benefits no one.
• Don’t be afraid of being visually messy. A slightly blurry image might not dazzle with technique, but if it’s the only image and the only way to get it and tell the story, blurry it is.

• Quit obsessing about cleaning gear and keeping it clean. I spent much too much energy using lens caps and canned air to keep my stuff like-new. I abruptly stopped doing this as soon as I started working full-time at a newspaper and saw that my colleagues across the state didn’t give a hoot about cleaning their gear, and I discovered that beat-up cameras equalled great images.
• Don’t dismiss photo opportunities because I think they aren’t my goal, my strength, or “newsworthy.”

• Consider an affordable intro into medium-format film photography. A 6×7 negative, treated right, can give you an edge that helps you discover the next level of photographic artistry. In the 1980s at The Shawnee News-Star, I had access to two twin-lens-reflex (TLR) cameras, but found myself setting them aside when I slid back into my happy work groove. As an aside, after I left the News-Star in 1988, I never saw either of those cameras again, and that newspaper recently moved, so they could be in someone’s garage, or at the bottom of the dump. In the 1990s, I owned a Fujifilm rangefinder medium format camera, which I tried many times to fold into my news and sports workflow, but I should have been more aggressive in figuring out a way to take these cameras where they needed to go.
• Be friendlier, have more fun, and try not to take it all so seriously.

Let’s not also forget that we did some things very right as we grew more adult, with one of them being photographing my wife a lot, and keeping track of, and not accidentally deleting, my digital archives.

A buddy of mine said he would advise his 20-something to focus more on storytelling.

Another friend sort of sidestepped the question, saying he’d tell his tiny grasshopper to go into real estate. And sure, it might be super-dope to go back in time and give stock tips to yourself, but that dilutes the idea of photography as the creative goal of a lifetime, and makes it into the chase for more money. I have known some photographers who showed promise, but left the craft when their first opportunity to grab their parents’ fortune, so that answer almost sounds like a sellout.

I also acknowledge that I have been both smart and lucky to get on board with my newspaper, for which I have worked since 1988. The lucky part comes from the fact that we are still in business, and the smart part was that I waited out a dozen or more bad choices, bad decisions, and bad co-workers (disclaimer: not you) to stay in this community, and at least for the moment, I feel like my staff and I are still making a great product, and are doing good journalism.