Even my entrance into the world of technology came because I could write – in this case, training materials teaching people how to use Microsoft products (God help me).

This might seem like a lot of wasted time, or at best lots of irrelevant experience.

But since I’ve been pursuing photography more seriously over the last four or five years, I’ve come to see that a lot of the things I learned writing have been very useful when I have a camera in my hand.

Learning to See

A good writer is observant – you can’t tell a convincing story if you miss the important stuff. And often what’s important are subtle changes to the ordinary that most people don’t see.

For a journalism article, it might be a telling quote, and for a photograph it might be way the light catches a face just so, but you need to be paying attention to catch these things.

So by character or by training, writers notice all kinds of things that others don’t – a trait that’s also invaluable in photography.

Showing Only What’s Important

A common mistake among people just starting with photography is to show everything in a photo. They might want to photograph someone enjoying their first sip of Guinness after a hard day, but their photograph includes half the pub.

Which is kind of like a writer of the same scene describing what everyone in the bar looked like, the names of all the drinks on offer and how many beer mats were stacked up near the pumps.

Not everything matters the same amount, and knowing what are the important things in what you’re communicating is key.

Writers might do that with careful editing of a first draft, stripping away the irrelevant and polishing what’s left. Photographers have less time to do it in the capture (but some later cropping might help), but it’s a different application of the same skill.

Part for the Whole

Related to the previous point, there’s a classic writerly device where you use a small detail to represent a larger idea – synecdoche it’s called if you’re being precise. And it’s something that really helps in photography.

In the pub example above, maybe you don’t even show the whole drinker’s face, or the whole pint. A detail of the fingers round the top of the coldly glistening glass as the beer settles might be all that’s needed.

To do this well you need to stop asking ‘What is this a picture of?’, and start asking ‘What is this picture about?’.

The Dramatic Moment

As well as spotting details that carry weight, a good writer has an eye for that key dramatic moment – the point at which time stands still.

To my mind these come in two flavors. Either it’s the one moment that is a crystallization of an emotion – the utmost point of joy, sorrow, reflection, bravery . . .whatever. Or it’s the point at which everything changes, where there’s no going back to how things were before.

This is obviously related to Cartier-Bresson’s idea of the decisive moment - the point in time and space where the camera captures the perfect representation of an event.

Some of this is luck, of course, but some of is practice and a feel for how events unfold. There are times when I’ve been working on an article or a section of the book when I’ve been watching events unfold and I get a sense that what’s happening at that exact moment is the key, that I need to remember this or get it down on paper right away.

I get that with the camera too, where there’s a strange sense of anticipation of an event, and when it happens it’s like the Universe went out of its way to arrange things for you. Just make sure you don’t miss it.

Telling Stories

If there’s one thing a writer should be good at, it’s telling stories – arranging material so there’s a flow from beginning to end.

A single image can tell a story, though often it captures that crucial dramatic moment (see above), leaving the viewer to fill in the back story or speculate about the future. That’s a great thing, but it’s a sequence of photos can more obviously have a narrative drive.

David duChemin has a great outline of how this can work in his book Within the Frame, but a version of the approach goes like this:

• establish the scene with a wide shot to give context
• follow up with some activity shots to show what happens there
• add in some details to flesh out the environment
• show the decisive moment shot that captures the essence of the place or event
• leave with a final image that suggests closure or shows the way to the future

In its own way, this is a pretty good model for a piece of writing too.

Knowing when to break the rules is as important as when to follow them, of course, but photographers should definitely be thinking about narrative as much as writers are.

Words and Pictures Together

When I was on a recent journalism assignment for New Mexico Magazine, writing about a week-long cattle drive in Roswell, NM, I spent a long time talking to Chuck West, the photographer who accompanied me.

He wanted to know what I was going to write about, so he could make sure he covered it with his images, and I wanted to know what he was taking pictures of so I could write about it.

We were really asking the same thing – what have you seen that strikes you as important? What sense can you make of all this? The details, the story, the decisive moments, the part-for-the-whole vignettes . . . we were communicating in different media, but there could be no real communication without observation and reflection. We each noticed particular things and then arranged a story around them based on what we thought was important.

You can’t write or photograph well without there being a thought behind the act, and that thought is driven by careful observation.

Would I like to write and photograph a single topic, to try both media to communicate the same ideas? Yep, that would be great, although the concentration required for each is a little different, and it might be hard to do both at the same time.

But being able to communicate the same conclusions across the two media would be a great opportunity.

Clearing the Vision

The similarities of writing and photography for me are captured in a quote of Ansel Adams:

“Through the art of brush, pen, and lens … we possess a swift and sure means of touching the conscience and clearing the vision.”

Which is why my photography business is called Clearing the Vision. We see so much – just can’t stop ourselves without closing our eyes – and miss almost all of it.

In my earlier career as a writer it was my job to sort through all that and present what really mattered elegantly and succinctly with words. And now it’s my job to do it with a camera. But while some of the craft might be different, I think the crucial skills are the same.

As we enter a new year, it’s a time for reflecting on what happened over the last 12 months, and making plans for the next.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what goals I should have for the year, and how I might reach them. Some of these are practical-sounding – like working out my budget for the photography and web design sides of my work – but once you start asking these sort of questions, they quickly end up bringing up much larger issues.

I’m in the fortunate position of working for myself, and last year I made money building and maintaining websites, taking photos, training photographers in Aperture, and writing articles. But I have to admit none of it was really based on a detailed business plan.

So I was very interested when I came across a great article by photographer Doug Menuez about how he came to redefine the work he did and enjoyed a more fulfilled (and more successful) life as a result.It’s worth reading in full, because it offers the kind of hard-earned advice that only comes from being broken down and finding a way to put yourself back together.

The thrust of the piece is that planning for a long career in photography (or I’d argue, any creative profession) must involve not compromising in the sort of work you do.

It’s a scary notion, especially in an economic climate like the current one, but Menuez argues that there’s really no choice:

If you create a book that you think will get you work based on your perception of what sells, or on the advice of anyone who steers you away from your core, you have a complex problem ahead. Yes, you may find some work that way, which is really tempting short term, while you tell yourself you’ll do the real stuff on the side or in the future. “Show the work you want to get” is a lasting truism and if you have chosen to show work other than the purist version of your creative vision then whatever jobs do come in will be based on that work. There are many shooters who do this exact thing and end up with a middling level of success, stuck on a financial and creative plateau, slowly starting to run out of gas.

His argument is that to do the work you think people want might get you short-term limited success, but you can’t really sustain it. The real money and success will follow those who are true to their own vision.

As we make our resolutions for 2009, it’s a good time to think about how we can pursue the work we find valuable (and how we can make it pay).

It’s a topic I’m still wrestling with myself, but having some kind of plan is better than just taking any and all work that comes your way. So the first step has to be working out what you will and won’t be prepared to do next year. That’s where I’m at right now – learning to say no, and working out what to say no to.

If you’ve got any insights or suggestions, feel free to share them with me in the comments.

It’s tempting to feel like we’ll never get there from here. And it’s quite possible we never will. But neither would they if they’d stopped trying.

Merlin Mann, who has a lot of smart things to say about creativity and productivity, is an amateur photographer looking to improve, and he’s hit on a crucial point about learning to do anything like this:

I think finding your own comfort with the process (whatever that process ends up being) might just be the whole game here — being willing to put in your time, learn the craft, and never lose the courageousness to be caught in the middle of making something you care about, even when it might be shit and you might look like an idiot fumbling to make it. What’s the worst thing that could happen?

This tolerance for creative sucking lies at the heart of making anything worthwhile.

I recently filed my article about the cattle drive I was on, and I’m happy with it. But up until the version that I finally handed in, it wasn’t all that good.

If you’d peered over my shoulder at any point before that – especially before my editor Ashley at New Mexico Magazine got involved – you’d wonder how I’d even managed to get the commission.

And that’s after years of working as a professional journalist. So how much more dodgy is most of our photography going to be when we’re just starting out.

We seldom see the first drafts of good stuff, or all the rubbish that good writers wrote before they got good. The same goes for photography. Ansel Adams said ‘ Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop,’ and he was Ansel Adams.

So I’ll just keep shooting and paying attention, and getting our of my own way. Slowly increasing my tolerance for creative sucking.