My interests in photography, writing, multimedia slide shows and making a living at it go back to my childhood. Inspired by my father and uncle with their 35mm cameras and darkrooms, and surrounded by picture magazines like National Geographic, National Wildlife and Life, I bought my first Pentax Spotmatic in 1972 at the age of 15 for $200. A couple of years later I was submitting slide sheets and selling stock photos to illustrate poetry in Christian Herald Magazine for $50 each. In my first year of college I used “technology” (two Kodak Ektagraphic projectors, a dual tape deck and dissolving unit) to produce a slides-to-music presentation and won a $100 “Multimedia Award”. This is where the passion began.

A 10,000 km bicycle tour of eastern North America (1979, 1980) launched me seriously into documentary photography and rural weekly newspaper journalism. I gained respect for the community media while living in remote places from Nova Scotia to Texas. I believed that the small newspaper was an excellent avenue to pursue professional documentary work.

I first wrote for newspapers as a staffer on the Daily Collegian newspaper at Penn State University and was encouraged to become a "complete" journalist who could report with both the camera and pen. Now the complete journalist needs to know audio, video, computer and any other tool for storytelling.

Over the following three decades I have worked professionally as a photographer and journalist on staff at weekly newspapers and freelance for national magazines. The Gleaner in Huntingdon, Quebec, an English-French newspaper founded in 1863, is where I learned on-the-job between 1983 and 1993 as editor. “Cut & Paste” back then really meant Xacto knife and hot wax for page layout. Before computers we did it all by hand on deadline.

I don’t do weddings and I don’t do portraits but doing the kind of photography I like has meant constantly finding new clients and learning new media to display it. Making a living in photography means running a business so the artist in me has had to struggle with constant tasks of marketing, bookkeeping, price negotiating and choosing subjects with profit in mind.

For stock photography the past 35 years have been a revolutionary period as the age of print media yielded to the boom in broadcast media, then computers and the Internet made the photo market global, and now digital cameras and online newspapers are bringing television, radio and newspapers onto a common playing field.

Although I have no university degree in photojournalism, I have pushed myself to get specific training as the industry evolves and keep abreast of the cutting-edge trends. During the digital revolution from 1996-2002 I had an office in the photo department of the Montreal Gazette where I was the Stock Photo Administrator and shot occasional daily assignments. It was an historic time I will always cherish, becoming friends with veteran photographers who once shot with flashbulbs and 4x5 plate negatives, and at the same time getting my hands on the first film scanners, modems, digital SLR cameras, digital archives and email transmission of image files.

During the 1990’s I was inspired by meeting the world’s best photographers at conferences of the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) in the US as well as working alongside National Geographic journalists on two Quebec assignments.

In 1998 I built my first website and from 2003 to the present I have been taking university courses in website construction, HTML and computer graphic design. At the same time I began scanning and archiving my old film images and keywording them in a searchable digital database that now numbers over 200,000 files (including digital camera files since 1999). I first saw this technology in 1990 at the Washington DC office of US News & World Report and it still amazes me that I can have that kind of power on my own desktop.

Web publishing continues to be my business focus and I have acquired 100 domain (www) names in hopes of developing regional portals. But no one really knows where the next big media trend will be. As a colleague from The Gazette said recently, he was doing multimedia on computers 10 years ago and now they’re saying it’s the newest, hottest thing. In May 2007 I was among 43 North American photojournalists attending the first-ever "Multimedia Summit" by the NPPA in Portland, Oregon. This added audio recording and video editing to my toolbox. Click here to view my first online multimedia slide show.

Teaching has been another way of making a living in photography. I run a high school journalism project that publishes a monthly newspaper supplement about local entrepreneurs, CV Magazine, using the text and images by the students. This model could easily be adopted by other schools and expand to incorporate video and web applications. The students love the technology and learn so much by interacting with subjects out in the real world.

At age 50 and as I juggle the duties of a father of 3, I look forward to finding time for new documentary challenges armed with my digital SLR's, photo/web/multimedia studio, and the longtime experience as editor/writer/photographer/web/graphic designer in this ever-changing multimedia environment.

Phil Norton
January 2008
www.philnorton.net