You may have noticed that I haven’t posted here much lately or on social media outlets, except the posts about the super cool roller derby stuff. (Take a look at the most recent shoot at the Emerald City Roller Girls.) I must thank Scarletta Vendetta for introducing me to the sport. You can see some of her roller derby photos here.

One of the main reasons that I haven’t been posting more here is that I have been working on a writing project that has been keeping me busy and making it difficult to think of something to write here. Thus, now that I’m done with that project and am waiting on the editors, a post about how important writing can be in a photography career seemed a fairly obvious choice.

The editorial market is a big part of many photographers’ careers. It doesn’t pay as much as advertising, but they publish credit in the editorial market, something unusual in advertising. In addition, editorial pieces are often oriented towards important issues. These two issues mean that editorial work is often more instrumental in establishing reputation. Being able to write ups your odds of getting editorial pieces published. Often a magazine will expect you to be able to provide everything, which either means you write it, or have a writing partner lined up. Writing partners will mean sharing the fee, not to mention you need to find someone and make the agreement with them.

Now, high end magazines will usually publish pieces with a separate writer and photographer, but the sort of magazines that will more than likely be your first publications will certainly publish pieces written and illustrated by the same person.

I close with a slideshow of Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge. A body of work that inspired many writing ideas in my head, one that was published. A species profile of the Black-footed Albatross in WildBird.