Resilience is a Muscle

If you’ve been a photographer for any length of time, you already know this job takes resilience.

Recently, I had a brutal reminder of this. One of my hard drives failed. No original files were lost, thankfully. But all of my culling and editing work for multiple weddings vanished. Entire days of effort gone in seconds. And of course, it didn’t happen in a slow season - it happened during the busiest part of summer, while I was balancing a packed shooting schedule, family travel, and caring for my senior dog.

We're talking: previews I was literally just about to hit send on, a wedding gallery that was in the process of being uploaded, another one that was over 13,000 images and I had just finished culling.

Resilience in that moment looked like this:

-Taking a deep breath and refusing to spiral into “what ifs”
-Sitting back down and re-doing the work, even though I was exhausted
-Remembering that my couples deserved their memories, no matter what it took on my end

Resilience for photographers means understanding:

• Setbacks will happen. Equipment fails. Life gets heavy. Deadlines stack up.

• You can prepare. Backups, workflows, and systems mean setbacks don’t end you

• Your mindset matters. Choosing to keep showing up is resilience in its purest form

Final thought: Resilience doesn’t always mean carrying it all alone. I lean on tools like Imagen to help me get galleries out when my bandwidth is low. Having that support in place makes resilience feel a little less overwhelming. If you’re struggling with a diminished bandwidth and are finally ready to take the dive into Imagen, here are 1500 Free Edits to get you started!

Resilience isn’t glamorous, but it’s what makes us sustainable. It’s what keeps us in this industry long term.

I'd love to hear about a time your "worst case scenario" happened, and you got back up. Drop your thoughts in the comments!

And don't forget to join my community for photographers, over on Facebook!