Ten Years On...

Ten years ago Karl and I started Nichter Photography. It would take me almost six more months to wrap up the last project of my soon to be left behind business career, but I took my camera on every trip I could and shot photographs in my spare time. Karl focused on learning Photoshop CS whatever version was newest then, learning to print professional images matching archival inks to various papers, cutting custom mats, framing, and generally sharpening all of the technical skills necessary to convert the digital images we captured to our own one-of-a-kind artwork.

What a time! Early morning alarm clocks several mornings a week to get us on the road to various destinations so we could begin shooting before the sun officially rose. The thrill of capturing THE shot, the disappointment of spending all day and realizing it was good, but not quite the best and getting up the next morning to do it again. Our first exhibition, our first locally published photographs, our first nationally published photos. The first time I wrote an article to go with some of the photography, trying to work that skill into readable prose after decades of business correspondence, and having a newsletter publish both! Shooting free-lance, shooting on assignment and finding out that sometimes our vision needed to be tweaked to meet the vision of the client. Nurturing along our first blog, the excitement of having a following, the excitement of being recognized the first time: “I know you, you are the photographers”, the excitement of finding out people really read our stuff: “Are you the one who writes that blog? I read it all the time”. The first time an article appeared about us in a major newspaper, the first time we were invited to get a few minutes of fame on television.

Wow, what a decade!

This past year we took some down time to really think about the future, and our future. The market has changed, and we have changed. We decided to bow out, gracefully we hope, from most of our commercial and marketing pursuits. We are not giving up photography, or our naturalist and interpretive work. We will be pursuing both more slowly, and experimenting with different approaches and areas. The blog will continue, and may even grow. We will still offer some of our work for sale, just in a very limited way. Rather than looking for ways to grow the business, we will be looking for ways to grow ourselves.

We will still be there, just maybe not as often. And as time goes on, who knows, we may jump back into the fray again!