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.

Allow me 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 much more convoluted 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 or even sometimes the hour, 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. But I started to wonder and doubt.

The doubt is what got me. It wasn’t 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 lighting, 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 was the systems that undergirded the work and made the work possible. 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 those systems. I’m still working on it. 

So, for 2026 I’ve chosen a word to capture my intentions for the year: "unapologetic." It’s not a word I would have needed to choose if apologizing were 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 was a catastrophic mistake. Yet, there were also times 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 excited to display and share. Receiving feedback from the executive director of a nonprofit how excited they were to use the photos I captured at their event because they never had such professional looking photos to tell their organization’s story. The silence in a room when someone sees themselves, really sees themselves, and recognizes the beauty in their portrait.

I spent 23 years in work that was about genuinely seeing people where ever they were at in their journey, meeting them in the weight of heavy moments, and then helping them see what I see. In some ways, I didn’t actually change careers. I just changed the space in which I do it and the tools I use.

Writing has also been a big part of my life and career trajectory, trying to find the words and sentences that capture a moment or story in a way that the reader is invited to immerse themselves into it. I've written creatively and journalistically. My work has been published in national publications and in local congregational newsletters. I experience the same pull on my heart and mind writing a story that I feel when I'm behind a camera: get close enough, pay attention long enough, and try to render what you see and experience as accurately and authentically as possible. In many ways, writing and photography are the same calling, just different tools.

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I am writing this partly for the people who are in their own version of the wondering and doubt-filled stage, asking whether the thing they love is the thing they should actually be doing. I wish I had 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 people 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 Photoshop presets (though, nothing wrong with that and I've met some amazing young photographers in the past year!). I am someone who has 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 my whole job.

That is, in the end, what I provide my clients. Not just photographs, though the photographs are good. The thing I provide most to my clients and anyone wishing to embark on this kind of photographic journey 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 did 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