Planning ahead to the future is scary, I thought I had a lot of time to think about exactly what it was that I wanted to do after university “oh I have three years to think, that’s so long”. In reality, you spend most of that trying to tackle the task ahead of you and make sure you pass the project. For me, I have really enjoyed undertaking projects that meant I was educating myself as well as other’s. I really like to push myself with my projects, I would have never thought that I would photograph 100 women in less than 30 days, or work with the Street Pastors on their night shifts, or liaise with charities and be able to produce a book focusing on three individuals living with Cerebral Palsy and I would have never thought that my final major project would be on politics! I’ve spoken to and worked with so many different people over these last three years and I can honestly say that it has shaped me as a person and a photographer.

Moving to the future, I feel as though I have found an area of photography where I could see myself working in the future. My project ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ has given me an insight into journalism and interviewing subjects as well as photographing them in their environments. I really enjoyed this side of photography as I felt as though it pushed me to really think about my subjects and what they stood for. My final output of this project was a newspaper, which I created from scratch with all of my interviews and photographs, as well as gathered information. With this in mind, I am considering going in to journalistic or editorial work as I felt really alive with this project and that I could actually take it further.

When I showed Kellie my newspaper, she commented on the fact that I should seriously consider going into editorial work because there isn’t many people who can say they have created a newspaper from scratch all by themselves. This got me thinking about the potential jobs that I could go in to after university.

I am signed up to so many job opportunity sites and am constantly getting emails with graduate jobs and internships. A lot of them, however, revolve around graphic design with not many of them having opportunities in photography jobs. Thinking about this, I have come to terms with the fact that I may not necessarily get a full time job in the creative industry straight away, but I have always said that I will continue with my freelance work with the charities and photoshoots for families.

Currently, the future career plans that I am considering are; a photographer for big charities internationally, editorial and journalism, a photo editor for a magazine and then eventually a lecture after studying a masters later on in life. I would like to wait a few years to study my masters because I feel as though this will give me a greater opportunity for photography experience as well as life experience. I will go into these more over further blog posts.