Ready to rediscover your passion and break out of creative ruts? Join Pat Miller as he sits down with award-winning photographer Larry Lourcey for an inspiring episode about the transformative power of personal projects.

Episode Highlights 🎤💡:

(13:21) - The emotional story behind “The One Thing” project and the photograph that contributed to an Emmy‑winning news feature.

(28:00) - A tough critique that changed how Larry approaches creativity and artistic growth.

(30:58) - Larry’s advice for photographers starting a personal project: don’t wait for the perfect idea, start creating now.

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Connect with Larry Lourcey ⬇

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I'm Pat Miller, and this is The Professional Photographer Podcast. Are you running a personal project, something that fuels your creativity, stretches the bounds of your imagination, and has nothing to do with making money for your business? If you are, high five. If you aren't, we're talking today with someone that's taken personal projects to the next level. Larry Lourcey is on the show, and he's done several, and the work, well, it's unbelievable. So good, in fact, he now has an Emmy for one of the shots that he did. An Emmy! You know how good you got to be to win an Emmy as a photographer? It's really good. We get to hear that story. There are a lot of reasons why you should be doing personal projects: for being more creative, for learning new techniques, and just to keep you so you don't get bored. Personal projects serve a great service, and today we'll talk about what works, what doesn't, and how you can get started. Larry's standing by. We'll talk to him next. Larry, welcome to The Professional Photographer Podcast. Great to see you. How are you today?

I'm doing good. How are you doing?

I'm great. I'm so excited to dive into this personal projects episode because it's something we can all do to sharpen our creativity and really become the artist that's trapped inside commerce. But before we get into all that, Let's start by introducing you to the world. If someone hasn't met you yet, tell them who you are and what you do.

Well, my name is Larry Lourcey. I have been a PPA member since 1999, so I've been around a while. I do mostly portrait work—families, kids, seniors, that type thing. I've been a juror for 15 or so years. huge fan of MIR, IPC, all those anything relating to creating images and trying to make them better is kind of what I really love to do. And so I'm also on the board of directors, so I keep really busy with PPA.

Yeah, well, we love the fact that you're serving PPA, and I love that you're taking the time to talk to us today about personal projects, because the personal projects that you have done, wow, they are something to see. And we're going to get into the specific projects. But I want to step back and just look at it, you know, as an overview. Why did you start doing personal projects?

You know, well, I took a class a long time ago, a guy that did a lot of self-portraits. And I didn't really have any intention of doing self-portraits, but just kind of tucked it away. And I got to where I needed to. I mean, y'all, everybody needs to be pushed a little bit to do things, and you can kind of have external forces pushing you or internal forces. And so I tried to come up a way to, you know, push myself and make myself come up with different ideas and try and just grow your creativity. And so back when I turned 40, just a couple years ago, I did a project where it was called 40 at 40. And the concept was I did a— I was gonna do a self-portrait once a week for 40 weeks, starting on my birthday in March. And I was like, well, this will be pretty easy. I'll just do one and crank them out. And I went into it with a list of things I was going to do, and that's kind of the first real thing that I did. And it ended up being incredibly hard and not at all what I was expecting, but, it was a great experience, you know. And I think that's kind of a— for me, it's been kind of a recurring theme that sometimes the difficult things are the good things. They're the growth things. And, like I said, it was an amazing creative adventure, and it just kind of— I guess after that I was hooked and started doing other ones every few years.

Sometimes when you're a portrait photographer, you do headshots or high school seniors or whatever, business can be great, but you can end up in a rut. I would imagine personal projects will help you find that creativity and that inspiration again?

For sure. Yeah. You know, we all start out— well, a lot of us start out doing it for fun, that it's just you enjoy taking pictures. And like anything, if you start making it your job and you have to do it every day, 9 to 5, and that's how you're making your money, and it does take an element of fun out of it. You know, and it becomes your work. And so I think when you can step out and just do something for fun, that you kind of get that spark again. And so I think it's really important. And whether that's full-blown projects like this or, you know, to a lesser extent, even just, you know, photographing your kids, like, I'm going to try something different and try some sort of unusual lighting setup or whatever. I mean, that, you know, will help as well. But the personal project really puts a little structure to it, which really helps.

I get the idea that it will make me more creative or reignite my passion again. But Larry, come on, I'm trying to run a studio here. How in the heck am I gonna find time to go play around with a personal project? How did you carve out time to do these things?

Well, part of the thing you have to do is you have to have some way of keeping yourself accountable, you know, some sort of a deadline. It can't just be, I'm going to start doing photographs of dogs or something. That's too broad, and you'll just never do it. You know, it's like taxes. Are you waiting until, oh my gosh, taxes are due next week. I better file them. You know, if they were due in January, everybody would get them done in January. I mean, that's just how it goes. And so what I did with that very first project is I kind of announced to everybody, here's what I'm doing. I'm doing this project. I'm going to be doing one a week. I'm going to post them every Monday. And I kind of let all my friends know and say, look, it may come out every Monday. And I knew that if a Monday rolled by and I hadn't done one, I would hear about it. These are the kinds of friends that I have. And so, you know, it was like pressure that it was like, oh yeah, I got to do it because I don't want Monday to roll by. And then people are texting me going, hey, what happened? Did you stop doing your project or whatever? And so that was kind of a way to force me to do it. And then it becomes just like any other thing. It's like, how do you have time to market? How do you have time to, you know, practice your lighting? How do you have time to edit images? It's just, it becomes part of the day and you allot a certain time. Like I said, mine was always being posted on Monday, so I would try to do them over the weekend. And it was funny because I don't like doing it. Like, I don't like spending my Sunday afternoon editing images or doing sessions. I generally don't work on Sundays, but if it's something like this, I don't mind going in the studio. And I think that kind of proves the point that it's a different animal. And so I would go— a lot of them I would do on Sunday, and if I didn't get them done or it needed some editing or something, I would do that Monday. But Monday was a good day for me because it didn't really interfere with the work week.

It may be obvious to everyone else except me, but are you saying it might be smart when we create our first project that part of the project is a mechanism like you did 40 at 40? I'm doing 40 of these pictures as a part of the bit, or 21 weeks to the thing. Is that part of that structure? Will that aid us in the accountability?

Yeah. And well, it does two things. One, the structure, you know, it feels like less structure is more freedom, but it actually makes things more difficult. You know, if I told you, hey, I want you to go out and create an image and we're going to meet up tomorrow and do this podcast again. And I want you to show me the best image that you came up with. You would spend all the rest of today. Well, what should I do? Should I do this? Should I do this? But if I said, hey, you've got to create an image, it needs to be, you know, an adult male. He needs to be doing some sort of manual labor. And I want him dressed in red. You could do that really easily because it would narrow everything down for you. And then all you've got to do is stay in that lane. And like I said, the more restrictions you get actually make things easier. And so when you have some sort of theme around it or a deadline, I mean, deadlines are the big thing, you know, because if you don't have a deadline, no one ever does it. And so yeah, the more structure you can put in place up front. And like I said, I always put it in writing. The first thing I do is I will post something and say, here's this new project I'm doing and here's what I'm going to be doing. And then it kind of accomplishes two things. New people that you approach about— if it involves other people, when you go to them, they can go look at that website or blog post or whatever and say, okay, this is the project, see one or two sample images. But it also kind of keeps you directed. And sometimes it goes off the rails and you do things that aren't quite within what you're supposed to be doing. And that's fine too. That's the beauty of it, is you kind of control the thing.

I want to talk through 3 particular projects off the record—40 at 40—but we have to start with The One Thing. This thing is such an incredible project with such an incredible story at the end. Tell us about The One Thing and walk us through how you came up with it and how it unfolded.

I don't really remember how I started it. A lot of times, I'll just come up with these concepts. You know, one of the jokes I have with my wife is that she will make suggestions, hey, you should do this, you should do this, and 99 times out of 100, no, no, no, no. But I will generally pick one of them and take an element of it, and then that will lead to some, what if I did, what if I did this, what if I did this, and it kind of morphs into something. And so then there's always this big argument between us whose idea it was. And so this, I'm sure, was one of those type things that was a couple of different things evolving. But what was interesting about the project is it was all about storytelling. It was— and the concept was basically, you get home, the house is on fire, all the people are out, all the pets are out, you've got time to run in and grab one thing. What's the one thing you would grab? And I photograph people with that one object. And so it was interesting because I didn't control really the scene. I mean, the people came in, I would give them direction on what to wear. They generally dressed a little more formally. I did pretty much as close as I could the exact same setup on everybody. They all look very similar. They're all in black and white. It's them holding the image. They're not displaying it, you know, so it's not like this. It's somehow incorporating it where you can find it. And so that was the, the route. But what I found was the story was what really made it interesting, because I was posting them all on Facebook. And what I would do is after I would photograph the person, I would have them write up just a short thing on the story behind it. You know, this is, like you mentioned, like the mask that someone had a mask that was important to them. And so they wrote up a little thing about what it is. And so But what I noticed is when I would post these things, and if there was, you know, the first 20 comments on it, there might have been 1 or 2 that were beautiful image or wonderful portrait. All the rest were what a great story, what an amazing story, what a cool keepsake. And so it was really interesting because it was all about the storytelling and it wasn't really even visual storytelling, honestly. It was their words that were what made the images so great. I mean, I thought the images were all nice, and they were very strong on their own as far as just portraits go, but it was the story that elevated them. And so it was just a very interesting experience to, to see that. It really showed you the power of storytelling in images.

And it doesn't always happen like this and you can't plan on it, but you now have an Emmy for this particular project. So tell us about Marsha and Neah and how you ended up with an Emmy. This is wild.

Yeah, this was a crazy story. So that I had done a bunch of those portraits, and near the end, I got a call from a reporter here in Dallas that wanted to do a story on me about this project. And a local– they had done something, some sort of like one of the local online papers had done a little article on me, and this reporter saw it and said he wanted to do a just a short feature, you know, and it would have just been kind of one of these fluff news pieces that, you know, you get at the end of the newscast all the time. And it would have been a cute story. And so I was excited about it. And then about a week or two before we got around to filming it, he said, hey, there's another story we're working on about this lady. I'd like to connect you guys. And basically this lady, Marsha, who basically had a fire at her house, and her house burned down while they were gone and her daughter was there and died in the fire. And one of the things that survived the fire was the daughter was really big playing the fiddle, and her fiddle was in a case. And when they undid everything, going through all the, you know, remains of the house, they found the little fiddle case, and they had that. So that was her item she wanted to be photographed with was the daughter's fiddle. And it, it was just this whole crazy thing about— I had been doing this whole project about what, what's the one thing you would save in the event of a fire? And hers was kind of what's the one thing you have left after a fire? And so it was difficult. And that, you know, they're there, and they filmed the whole thing. When she came in, I met her and I photographed her. And got a nice picture of her with it. But it was very emotional, as you can imagine. And so the guys put it all together and ended up winning an Emmy for the piece. And the producer of it, I guess, had won multiple Emmy's and he went ahead and gave me the Emmy. So I've got it sitting here in my studio. So it's a great conversation piece. But it was wild. And that pretty much brought that project to an end. And that is one of the hard things with a project is knowing when to stop because you kind of get comfortable. And I really enjoyed this one, and I could keep going. It could have become a lifetime project, but I kind of decided that was after hers. Everything else kind of seemed silly and I was like, we just need to kind of end with hers. I did one. I hadn't done mine yet, so I went ahead and did mine. And those were kind of the last two, and we called it a day. But I mean, it was an amazing way to end it. It was— that's the kind of thing you get from these projects, is that experience. I would have never met her. I would have never been a part of that. I'd never have, you know, the little Emmy sitting on my shelf. So it's just, you can't really— you know, I didn't make any money off her session. But it's one of the most memorable sessions I've ever done in my life. And it's not like she's a celebrity or, you know, some powerful, you know, business owner or politician or something. It's just a person. And it just shows how just any person could have some sort of an amazing story, and finding it is the fun part.

I'm a big music fan, so I love the off-the-record project, and this is a chance for someone to tell their story through something that they love—music. Describe the project, talk about some of the album covers that you shot. I thought this one was really cool.

Yeah, this one— I always talk about when you're doing these projects, there is creative challenges and technical challenges. When I did the self-portrait one, that was a very creative challenge. I had to keep coming up with ideas, coming up with ideas. The album project was basically, the concept was based on— I grew up in the era of vinyl records, which is making a comeback now, but that's all we had when I was young. And so, there were so many album covers that were just iconic. When you saw that image, you knew what that was. You know, so many. And so, the idea was I announced the project and said, if you've got a favorite album or one you always thought was cool, you can come in and I will photograph you in that. We will recreate that album. Now, your part is you've got to pick the album and you've got to put together your outfit, any sort of props, and things like that. And I will put together the set. And I had a lady that does hair and makeup here in town, and she volunteered her services too. And so if you went in– Like one of them we did was, and so, but we'll get back to that. But what the thing is this was a very technical challenge because there was no creativity. You would come in and say, I want to do Michael Jackson's Thriller or something, and we all know exactly what that album cover looked like. And so the challenge for me was looking at it, the lighting–is it hard light, is it soft light, is it what direction is it coming from, are there kickers or no. You know, so many things like that. And it was way harder than I thought it would be, but also a great learning experience to look at an image. I think as a professional, you should be able to look at it and diagnose what it is. And so it was really cool technically, and it was a fun one. But like one of the ones we did was there was a Mötley Crüe album called Shout at the Devil, I think, and it was the 4 images of their faces. You know, and so what we did was these moms got together, and they went in and they had their hair done in like the '80s rock band crazy hair. And we did the pictures of them that looked like the album cover, and they called it Shout at the Kids. And that's what we did. And we would do the album. And again, same thing would happen. We would post the picture, and there'd be a little— there wasn't so much write-up about that. There wasn't too much story at all. It was more just entertaining. People would look at it and go, "Oh, my God, that was so funny. I saw the one you did." But it was a great technical challenge. And so, like I said, some are creative, some are technical, some are a combination. And so it depends on what you want to, what you want to grow, what you— what's your weak spot, what do you need to get better at. If you're great at creativity and technical is a problem for you, something like that would make you a better photographer. And so what's crazy is, again, when I do stuff like that, I don't do it with a financial gain in mind. I'm doing it just to make myself better. And the financial gain is the better I get, I think I will do better with my business, and I will create better images, and I will sell more images and that type thing. So I don't ever do it to make money, but almost always you'll have people that are in there, and as they're leaving, they're like, hey, do you do children's portraits, too? Yeah. Oh, could I bring my, my two kids in? And so it would generate business. But I mostly did it to, you know, like I said, for fun. And I would— in that case, I gave everybody the images. I think White House actually helped me out with it, and they printed all of the 12x12 prints for me. And I found a local framer that basically framed them at cost for me. And so at the end of the project, I had, I don't know, probably about 30 of them all matted out and framed. And we did an exhibit here in town at a local theater, and we did it for a while, and then basically I gave everybody their prints and we all went our separate ways. So it definitely wasn't a moneymaker. In fact, you know, probably lost money in the thing overall. But that's just how it was. The One Project, the deal was you, you got— I gave everybody an 8x10 of the image. And so again, that wasn't a make money thing either, which very easily could have been. I mean, I don't have a problem with it. I just try to separate things. I don't like to say it's a personal project and then it's really a secret moneymaker, but you could have very easily made money. I think most of the people, because it's such a sentimental item, would have almost certainly bought a copy of the image. But that, like I said, that just wasn't what it was about for me.

The Album Project and The One Thing project were different than the 40 at 40 Project because 40 at 40, you were the subject. What was it like to be the subject, having to create your own ideas? And you talked about the rhythm and the accountability, but just you capturing your own self-portrait for 40 weeks. How did that go and was that different?

Well, and I always joked that that was, for that project, I was combining the two things people hate the most, having their picture taken and turning 40. So that was where the thing came from. And I actually got this idea from a musical artist, a guy named Ari Hest, a couple of years before had done something where he basically announced that he was going to write– he did a thing called 52 where he was going to release a song every week for an entire year. And at the end of the year, he had everybody vote on what their favorites were, and he made an album. And it had a great financial component, too. But that's how I got the idea of every week, every week, because I would listen in. And, you know, I dabble a lot in music, and I know how hard it is to create a song. And I was like, I can't imagine doing one every week. That's a lot of work. And so that's kind of what inspired me to do that as far as that specific thing. And then it was a matter of, you know, one, you had— you kind of learn there are tricks to it. You know, I would do a thing where I would get everything all set up, and I would have like a light stand that was right here sitting in front of where I was going to be. And then I would get back and compose everything and take a shot, then I'd move it out of the way. I'd go, you know, and you go back, and it's a lot of back and forth, very inefficient. And you know, there's ways now that you could do it with the app on your phone or even looking at the flip-up viewfinder, but I didn't really have that. So I would have to take one, you know, with the timer, go back, look at it. Oh, I need to frame it tiny bit. But it wasn't difficult. The hard part was the concepts. That was really the hard part because I went into it with a list, like before I started, because I said, I know I'm starting on my birthday in March. So, when I was thinking about this, I made a list and said, let me just have a whole bunch of them ready. And then, you know, almost like when you're batching content for social media or something like that, come up with a bunch of it, you could be ready to go. And I had the rule that I had to do each one every week. So, I couldn't create 5 in a week and slowly work my way through it. I had to do each one that week. And so I had a list of probably 15 or 20 ideas, and the minute I started, they just all started falling apart. It's just— but what was crazy was, I would almost— I'm gonna say half the time I would start with concept A and it wouldn't really work, and I would end up with concept B. And so, a great example is the very first one is I decided I was going to recreate— you know, years ago, there was the whole Apple did the campaign where it's, "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC." If you remember that, where it's the stodgy businessman in the suit, like, "I'm a PC." And they were like standing next to each other on the screen. You know, the ad that I'm talking about?

Absolutely.

I'm going to recreate that because I had just switched to Mac at the time. I said I went out and I found me a Mac t-shirt. And so I was going to do just a picture of me on the backdrop with I'm a Mac, then do me in the suit, I'm a PC, and then put them together. And that was going to be the thing. And it sounded like a really cool concept in my head. And as I started looking at the images, I was like, this is just kind of dumb. It's kind of— but I would photograph one, then I had— I look at it, okay, I got the t-shirt one. I put on the suit, photograph that. And then, of course, you know, like it always is, you get the images back on your computer and you look at it like, oh, my God, how did I not notice I had hair sticking up the back? Or whatever, the shirt was all crooked. I need to redo that again. So I take the suit off, do the thing in the t-shirt again, put the suit back on, and I do this like multiple times. And so at some point I realized that I'm kind of taking the suit off and I've got the Mac thing underneath. So I decided, okay, maybe instead of that, I should just do the pulling the shirt open, the Superman. And so I went back in there because I just wasn't loving the idea that I'd had. So the Superman thing, which I had none of at all, I did the thing like that. And it turned out great. In fact, it was the very first one. It really set the tone because it was a really nice one. And so what I did at the end, fast forward to the end of the project, I put them all in a book. And it was just one side was the concept and the right side was the picture. And a lot of them were like this. And I said, here's what I was trying to do. It didn't work out. Here's the final image.

Cool.

And so, and that was my speaking image for like the next year or two was me doing the shirt thing with the Mac. That was my speaker portrait that I would send people. And so, but I had this book and I was photographing– actually, my godson was in town. I was photographing him, and he had looked through the book, and he goes, "I'd love to do that, the Mac one that you did." I was like, "Okay." And he had his varsity letter with him, and he hadn't gotten a jacket. And I said, "Why don't we put the varsity letter on your chest and have you pulling open your shirt and that's your school letter on it?" And he's like, "Oh, I love that." We do the whole thing. At the end of the session, he's walking out and he goes, well, just that thing turned out cool, but what I was talking about was the side-by-side one is what I wanted to do. And I was like, oh, my God. So I didn't even photograph what he wanted. I just did this thing. And then that ended up being a PPA magazine cover and it was a loan image and did great for me. It was one of my best images I ever created, and it would have never happened if I hadn't done that project. And so, you know, a lot of times stuff just works out in a way that you're not expecting it to work out. And like I said, that project was great.

One of the effects of personal projects is to stretch yourself creatively. And you tell a great story about earlier in your career; you went to a session and got some harsh critique that changed the way that you look at your work. Can you share that story?

So years ago, I took this class up in Maine with a photographer named Arno Minkkinen, who is a very famous photographer. you know, there's kind of two different worlds. You've got kind of the professional commercial type photographer, and, you know, we know all these people that, that you see at all the photography conventions and all these kind of celebrity photographers that we would call them. But it's kind of a whole different world from the world of the, you know, artsy, old-school type photographers like Stieglitz, Steichen, all those type people. And so that group doesn't really know anything about our group. And frankly, most people in our group don't know a lot about them. You know, we all know Ansel Adams, but we don't really know too many other kind of famous old school photographers. And so this guy was kind of out of that old school group. And I went into this class and it was one of the first workshops I had taken that was, you know, just kind of really out of my element. It was on growing your voice as an artist, and I didn't even know what that meant. I was like, well, it just seems like a cool class to take. And I really went in, you know, we had to bring sample images, and I brought in all, you know, images, you know, loan images, what's IE now, but at the time they were loan images. Everything had done really well. And it just really, at the end when he was critiquing everybody's images, mine just got panned, and it was really deflating. But I left there a different person. You know, I went in thinking, man, there's not really much for me to learn. And I walked out of it going, oh, my gosh, there's so much more that I didn't even know that I didn't know. And it was just, again, one of those things where what I got out of it was not what I was expecting to get out of it at all, but it redirected me. And I think that's always, for me, the biggest thing if I take a class, go to a workshop, or whatever. Take on a personal project, even whatever I do, I want to be a different person when I come out of it, or what's the point of doing it? And that was while it was very traumatic, much like the portrait session with the lady with the fiddle. It was incredibly traumatic, but I wouldn't give it up for anything because of the value I got from it and the memories and just the back of your brain programming that kind of nudges you in a different direction.

Yeah. Someone's watching this right now, hearing what the benefits of a personal project can be. They may have some ideas bubbling up. Let's talk to that person. What would you encourage them to do to get underway with their personal project? Where should they start?

Well, I think first– the first hardest part is coming up with the concept. And, you know, it's funny because when I did the I guess it was the album project. And I went around, and I was doing a lot of speaking, and that was kind of my program, was talking about this. And then we did the albI talked about the album project and all this. And at some point after one of the programs, I was packing my stuff up; my wife was there, and she was like, "You realize, Larry, that was like 3 or 4 years ago. You need to start a new one." I was like, well, no, it's like we just ended. And it just— it's really easy to not start. And so the biggest thing you have to do is just jump in and start. And what I tell people all the time is, you know, it doesn't have to be complicated. You could do a thing where, you know, I told you back when I was doing all my 40 images, my self-portraits, I said, well, here's something you could do. Just recreate all the 40 that I did of me yourself. And you do all those self-portraits. And then that would be a very technical challenge. Because you're trying to replicate my lighting and all that type stuff. If you want to— you want a creative, just steal the idea. I mean, I stole it from somebody. Take the idea and do 40 self-portraits, do 20. You know, I'm going to do the, you know, 20/20 vision or something, you know, a vision of where I want to be in 20 years, where I was 20 years ago. I don't know. But it's just come up with something and do it. And I feel like that's the hardest part is starting, but decide on a topic. And the hardest thing to do— and I feel like a hypocrite even saying this because I'm terrible at it— but your tendency is to wait until you have the perfect thing. Like, what is the perfect project? This one's going to be great. And that's the thing that really holds you up. And, and I've had some ones that didn't work. I did one on artists that I was going to photograph all these artists in their studios. And I thought that would be a lot of fun. And I got one done. That was my— I always do one or two first so that when I launch it, I've got an example to show. And then I've got one ready for that next week. So I usually have two in the can ready to go. And then that gives me time to start working like that. And so I had done the first one, went great. And then after that, I just I couldn't get anybody to sign up. You know, artists are very flighty, you know, and it's hard to get them. And that it just, for one reason or another, I never could get another person. I did the one— I mean, I could have gotten some of my photographer friends, but I was trying not to do photographers, right? And I did this painter first. It went great, and then that was it. And after about a month or two, I said, well, that's so much for that project. And it just disappeared. No one ever asked me about it. And so it happens, but you just keep cranking them out. You never know when one is going to be, you know, a life-changing, this was the thing people are going to know me about type of a project, or if it's just going to be kind of an exercise. And there's nothing wrong with it just being an exercise. But my advice would be pick something and go with it. If you can't come up with something, take someone else's idea. You know, you take something as simple as I've told people before, pick your favorite album that's out, your favorite artist, pick one of their albums, look at those 10 names. The 10 song names and do an image based on that, you know, whatever, pick a Beatles album, and it's like, okay, I Get By with a Little Help from My Friends. Do an image that tells that story and that's the title of it, it's gonna be that. And so you could do albums at a time. Like this is gonna be the, you know, whatever. Pick your favorite album, and these are the 10 songs on it, and I did an image that represents that. And probably come up with some good stuff. Like I said, it's just you can't wait for a great idea. Don't wait for a great idea. Just start.

Which is great advice. And you've done all types of projects— personal, partners, technical, creative. Is there anything that you haven't shared that you think someone needs to know? Like a lasting thought to end the episode. If you're thinking about doing a personal project, this is something we need to make sure that you know.

I think, I think you just have to be prepared for where it could go. That, you know, if you're wanting something super technical, you got to decide how difficult you want it to be. If you want something that's going to be a creative challenge, how much of a creative challenge can you handle? You know, some of it's knowing yourself, but asking for help is a big thing. You know, I think you're going to have to do a lot of asking people for stuff unless you're doing self-portraits of yourself. You're going to involve other people. And, and that's the thing. And so it sometimes comes down to a numbers game where you're like, I want to do 20 different postal workers or whatever. I want to do 20 of them. And it's going to be, you know, Delivering the Mail is the name of the series or something. Well, you better be prepared to ask about 50 or 60 of them because it's not going to be just the first 20. And you may get some that just don't work out. You know, that was one of the album cover projects is I would have people come in and say, "Hey, I want to do this album." And you're like, "Well, that's one that's not really an iconic album. I don't even know what the album cover looks like. I'd have to look it up. If I have to look it up, then it's probably not an iconic album." You know? You'll get, if you're involving other people, you'll have people that don't do their part right. They don't show up in the right outfit. They pick something that you don't want to do. Honestly, I had some people with The One Project that had ideas for things that was not really what we, you know, it was like, that's not really what we're trying to do here. It's like somebody stole my hard drive from my computer or something. You're like, okay, but you know, hopefully you got that backed up somewhere, you know, offline. And so you don't really need that. You don't really need your laptop. You can go buy another laptop. And so some people aren't just going to understand it. And so like I say, you got to be prepared. And I would say that if you just give yourself a deadline, get someone to hold you accountable, and stick with it, it almost always pays off in some way. And I said that's the thing is I would have never predicted how that One Project was going to end up. And so, for me, that's the great part. But some people don't like surprises. If you don't like surprises, that'd be my warning, is you just don't know where it's going to end up.

And that particular story was unbelievable. We'll put a link to that Emmy-winning story in the description of the video when we put this out. It's an awesome conversation, Larry. Congratulations on your success. Thank you for the inspiration today, and thanks for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Well, thanks for having me. That was a blast.

Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of The Professional Photographer Podcast. Would you do us a favor? Click like, click subscribe, which is super important. And then even more important is to leave us a comment about the show. Let us know what did Larry say that got you thinking? what inspired you about this episode? And maybe what would you like to see us do next? All of those comments help us build a better show. Better show for you. Also, if you're not yet a member of Professional Photographers of America, you're missing out. PPA offers incredible resources like equipment insurance, top-notch education, and a supportive community of photographers ready to help you succeed. It's perfect for photographers who are serious about growing their business in a sustainable and profitable way. At PPA, you belong here. Discover more about membership at ppa.com. That's ppa.com. I'm Pat Miller, founder of the Small Business Owners Community and host of the show. Thank you so much for tuning in. We'll see you right here next time. Take care.