When I tell someone what I do for a living, there’s typically an immediate disconnect. Usually, the response is, ‘Oh, that’s nice.’
I would nod my head in agreement, but inside I’d be grumbling.
But over the past few years I’ve been explaining that yes, we’re taking pictures. Yes we’re having fun and being creative. But, hello! We’re also running our a*ses off, carrying heavy gear, dealing with semi drunk people and we need to be sharp as a tack the entire time.
In all honesty, I think we can say, while we run a creative business, we’re also endurance athletes.
And once Apple’s Health App started recording everything we do I’ve really started using it to, not only teach people more about what we do, but also help quantify what I’m putting my body through each day.
And if my hunch is correct, I believe we’re actually working harder than most of us realize.
Let’s peel back another layer by reducing our workload to the lowest common denominator, the calorie. By calculating calories we can look at how much we’re working and therefore, how we replenish.
Let’s look at how many calories we burn while we’re working.
I use this calculator here which will tell us how many calories we burn while we’re walking.
I weigh 190 lbs. So, on my April 22nd wedding (see below), I burned 1,523 calories during 8 hours of walking or 190 calories per hour.
That’s all fine and dandy but for us photographers the whole thing is amplified.
During a wedding day, I actually weigh 190lbs + 20lbs of camera gear. My body, being built for maintaining 190lbs, is actually managing 210lbs.
I argue that I didn’t burn 190 calories per hour. Instead, I burned 218. That’s almost a 15% difference! I also argue that we’re not really walking. We’re hustling. Since photography isn’t considered a sport or activity in any research, it’s quite possible these numbers are a bit lower than our realities.
The moral of the story, if we don’t account for this exertion in our nutrition, we could be working at a big deficit and not replenishing our bodies accordingly.
And this amplifies itself when we work back-to-back days and weeks throughout the year.
And if someone ever responds to your career as ‘that’s nice,’ please open the Health App and break it down for them.
As a show and tell moment, here are just a few of my 2017 weddings.
In 2017, September through the first week of November were my busiest months and I shot a wedding each weekend. It’s amazing to look back on the numbers and see just how much work was put into those 8 weeks.
Nearly 100,000 steps in those 9 weeks. Whew! It makes this post about taking care of our feet even more important!
So, what was your busiest stretch last year? How many steps did you take?
Share your numbers in the comments! I’m sure most people will blow my numbers out of the water!
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