How Photography Made Me a Better Software Engineer
I have been a wedding photographer for about three years at zhkphoto.com, throughout my time in university. In my time as a photographer, I had the amazing opportunity to meet and document the love stories of dozens of couples from different walks of life, learn about their journey, and immortalise a moment of their lives through images. As I grew as a photographer, I picked up a ton of lessons I found valuable as I journey my way to become a Software Engineer. Here’s some of the key things I’ve learnt along the way.
You can never please everybody, but that’s okay.
Photography is an art. Every photographer is different, and there’s a style of photography suited for every couple. I had to deal with rejections a lot, from couples who didn’t like my craft. For the longest time, a little voice in my head attributed that ‘failure’ to a shortcoming on my part — maybe I wasn’t good enough, maybe the work I doing was mediocre. Either way, I saw it as a failure on my part, and I beat myself up pretty hard for it. It really affected the quality of my work a lot, as I felt drained trying to be a photographer I’m not.
It would’ve probably stayed the same had it not been for a friend who berated my half empty outlook on the situation.
Think about the couples who trusted you with their big day. You’re good enough for them.
Boy, did that really change things. In my quest to be a Software Engineer, the hunt for internships was a road faced with rejections. I tried my best to take them positively, to see every rejection as a reminder to work harder, to seize every opportunity I’ve received as an opportunity to prove myself. To see rejections as a cup half full.
Treat people well.
I was influenced from a very young age with this amazing series by Ron Kaufman (link to the first part here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJGymUHk2Nk). In his session, Ron shared about the importance of service quality, and how a unbelievablably bad service quality can make a make an unbelievably good product, bad. And it was something I actively tried to practice when dealing with couples.
Couples are extremely nervous leading up to the big day, and as much as I could, I took it upon myself to make sure they didn’t have to worry (about me at least). One of the strategies I employed was to befriend them. Silly as that sounds, I try my best to see my couples as my friends, not my clients, for this very cliched reason:
Life is always better with friends.
When I befriend my couples, it becomes a lot more comfortable, which translates into more raw emotions in the images, and couples feel less awkward with me around as they share their intimate sessions on their wedding day.
I’ve managed to keep in touch with some of my couples beyond their wedding, and we’re still great friends years after their wedding. Its hard to tangibly quantify the impact that I might have made on their wedding, but by going the extra mile, it did feel good on my part, and helped me to establish a deeper mutual connection between us.
In my experiences as an intern, I started to realise the importance of treating people well. Engineers often work in teams, and a team is only as strong as its weakest link. Teams feed off the strengths of each other, and any positive momentum can carry a team far. For that reason, the importance of treating teammates well and fostering closer bonds cannot be stressed enough. It takes the commitment of everyone in the team to build a strong team culture, but it also takes one ill-mannered or uncooperative team member to ruin everything. This is a reminder for me to remember to treat teammates and co-workers well, and build strong connections in the process.
It’ll pay off (I wrote about it in my previous article).
Learn from others.
There’s always a better photographer out there, and there’s always somebody better than me. While it’s no reason to beat myself up, it certainly is a great yardstick for me to work towards. Resting on my laurels and being satisfied is a dangerous predicament to find myself in — it means I’ve stopped growing as a photographer. There’s so much to learn from others, so many techniques to try out, so much inspiration to feed off from, and I should always strive to stay hungry for knowledge, to learn from the experiences of others, to ultimately make me better than I was yesterday.
The same can be said for my engineering journey as well. In my journey, I have come across many incredible people who have vast amounts of experience and wisdom, and I’ve made it a note to learn as I can from their experience, and grow as an engineer in the process. Even the wisest people are always learning, always humble, and always curious for knowledge, and I should do the same.
Stay hungry, stay foolish
I’m still documenting weddings from time to time nowadays, as a creative outlet, as a great way to exercise the right half of my brain. The lessons that I’ve taken away are great lessons for me to learn from, and to transfer these skills to make me a more holistic team engineer in whatever team the future has in store for me. My journey as a software engineer has barely started, but these are lessons which I hope to take with me.
Thanks for reading, and I hope it helped you too!
