Like almost everyone else, I get a lot of suggestions on Facebook for products that I might like to buy. Some are worthwhile, a few are comical and a lot of them are pointless but the other day I had something pop up in my timeline that struck me as plain wrong.

The product in question was an application aimed, allegedly, at professional photographers and claiming to make big inroads into their post-production. As regular readers of this blog will understand – anything that can possibly improve my workflow has got my instant attention.

This is where the marketing struck me as somewhere between bad and misleading. I’m not going to name the product but in the first few lines it stated that the overload of images they needed to sort through led to an average burn-out time for professional photographers of four and a half years. I started to think of all of the photographers that I had known over the last thirty-six and a half years and which of them had ever ‘burned-out’ for any reason. Three former colleagues came to mind out of the five or six hundred that I have known and worked alongside. None of the three had run out of energy or love for the job as quickly as four and a half years and I don’t believe that workload was a significant factor for any of them. Quite a few have left because they couldn’t make a decent living from photography or had just fallen out of love with it. A far greater number of those I have known have retired after many, many years loving what they did. Sadly, many have died whilst still working in the profession that they adored. Burn-out? Not that common.

Maybe, I thought, it could refer to genres of photography that I have had little or no contact with. That’s possible. The software that started this chain of thought appeared to be aimed at wedding and social photographers more than at any other sector and so I contacted a couple of people that I know working in that sector (I know that it is a deeply un-scientific sample but they know their industry well). One had tried the application and thought that it had some promise and the other laughed when I explained the premise. Neither was able to name single a photographer who had left the business or had to take time away from it because of burn-out. Lots of new entrants to the wedding business last less than four and a half years (interestingly ‘seasons’ rather than years were talked about). Most who establish themselves and make a career from it do experience issues with the volume of images that they generate at a typical wedding and coping with the process of culling and editing is an issue but experiencing burn-out because of it doesn’t appear to be so prevalent that an average photographer experiences it before the end of their fifth season.

Marketing is a skill. Promoting your service or product honestly is difficult and I have always thought that exaggeration is a bad idea. I have to admit that I have always struggled with actively marketing myself. I have a half-decent grip on the passive stuff: website, branding and the odd bit of product placement but when it comes to getting out there and promoting me and my work I have never been particularly active, skilled or persistent.

I tried to imagine what the equivalent claim to the four and a half year burn-out would be when promoting Neil Turner Photographer. I literally couldn’t come up with it. There’s every possibility that the application mentioned above is good or at least will be developed into something good but marketing it to people like me with such a questionable claim has to be labelled as ‘bad marketing’.

Maybe I’m wrong and there are hundreds or thousands of former photographers out there whose burgeoning careers were cut short because they just couldn’t cope with the amount of work they had to do after each shoot. Even if that’s the case, I’m really not sure that pointing that out as a selling point for a new product is a strong idea.

Looking around my friends and colleagues I can see a huge bunch of people who would sign up to the old adage that “if you enjoy what you do for a living you never have to work a day in your life”. Many years ago, and after four and a half years in the business, I was working stupidly long hours. Shooting pictures all day and processing and printing my work late into the evening and even through the night. It was fun. It was joyous. It was what we felt we needed to do to make it in this industry. We all feel so privileged to have been able to do what we have done over so many years.

Don’t get me wrong; I am absolutely sure that there are photographers out there whose work has had an adverse effect on their mental health and I would never want anyone to think that I didn’t regard this as a serious matter. Whether a bit of software would help some of them out I have no idea but I am pretty sure that the scale of issue implied is a long way away from the truth.

There are bits of the job that are less enjoyable than others but I’m glad to say that even though I have had time off with a serious spinal injury and more time off with illness I haven’t burned-out yet.