I Didn't Lose My Job. I Quit It. (There's a Difference.)

On choosing career chaos at 52, the economy's terrible timing, and what any of it has to do with portraits on your wall.

I want to be clear about something, because the distinction matters: I did not lose my job. I was not laid off. I was not downsized, restructured, or quietly pushed out. At 52 years old, with my 53rd birthday around the corner, I walked away from a 23 year career in the world of nonprofit work to become a full-time photographer.

This is not a flex. But the story is way more disturbing when you understand that nobody made me do it.

2025 was a brutal year for a lot of people. Job losses. Financial whiplash. The particular kind of exhaustion that comes from watching the ground shift under industries that felt steady. I watched friends and colleagues navigate layoffs and uncertainty, and I thought: I did this to myself, voluntarily. I chose this. I have no one to blame, no severance to soften the landing, and no company to be angry at. Just me and a camera and an excruciatingly slow growing list of clients who trust me.

That realization has been, depending on the week or the day, either deeply motivating or absolutely terrifying. Sometimes both, before breakfast.

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Photography has been part of my life since high school. For most of those years, it was a serious hobby and then a side business, the kind of thing people do on weekends when they love something enough to get good at it but have not yet figured out how to make it their whole livelihood. I photographed families, weddings, elopements, engagements, nonprofit events, headshots, people who wanted their stories told well. I got better. I raised my prices. I started to wonder.

The wondering is what got me. Not a crisis, though 23 years in any field leaves its marks. What got me was the persistent, inconvenient question of what I might build if I stopped treating the work I loved as something I fit in around the edges of the work I was paid for.

So in late 2024 I answered the question. I went full time.

The timing, I will admit, was not ideal.

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Nobody tells you the work itself of building a business from scratch in your fifties is not the hard part. The craft I had been developing for decades. The equipment, the light, the way you talk to a family in those first few minutes to get them out of their heads and into the moment, the way you know when you have the shot and when you are still looking for it. That part I trusted.

The hard part is the machinery around the work. Marketing. Lead generation. Learning to say out loud, without apology, what your time and your talent are worth. I spent the better part of a year learning to get better at that machinery. I am still working on it. 

My word for 2026 is "unapologetic," which is not a word I would have needed to choose if apologizing had not been such a problem. 

Over the past year and a half there were slow months. There were weeks when the phone did not ring and I sat with my very nice camera gear and my very quiet inbox and had extended conversations with myself about whether this had been a catastrophic mistake. Yet, there were also time that reminded me, without any ambiguity, exactly why I did it. A couple who had never liked photos of themselves seeing for the first time in a long time photos they are now proud to display. Receiving feedback from the executive director of a nonprofit how excited they were to use the photos I had captured at their event because they had never had such professional looking photos before. The specific silence in a room when someone sees themselves, really sees themselves, and recognizes something true in their portrait.

I spent 23 years in work that was about seeking to genuinely seeing people, meeting them in the weight of real moments, and helping them see what I see. In some ways, I did not actually change careers. I just changed the space in which I do it.

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I am writing this partly for the people who are in their own version of the wondering stage, asking whether the thing they love is the thing they should actually be doing. I do not have a tidy answer. The honest one is that it is harder than you think and, at the same time, better than you are probably allowing yourself to imagine.

I am also writing this for the families I photograph (or will soon photograph), because I think it matters that you know something about the person on the other side of the camera. I am not a 25-year-old building a portfolio with a presets package (though, nothing wrong with that and I've met some amazing young photographers in the past year!). I am someone who spent a long time learning how to truly and honestly be present with people in the moments that count, and then decided to make that the whole job.

That is, in the end, what I am providing to my clients. Not just photographs, though the photographs are very good. The thing I provide is the experience of being in a room with someone who is genuinely paying attention, for the specific purpose of making something that will outlast the day.

As it turns out, that is worth more than I used to charge for it. And that is just one of the thousands of other things I learned this year. I love my job. I love the art I get to create. And I love seeing people and helping them see themselves a little differently than they had before. 

If you have been thinking about commissioning a portrait session for yourself or your family, or if you are just curious about what the process looks like, I would love to talk. There's no charge for talking! You can reach me at (480) 257-6757 or through my contact page (www.ericoledermann.com/contact). No pressure, no pitch. Just a honest conversation.

~Eric