Community Work Still Counts

In a video last year, Mike McCann challenged all of us to give back to our communities with whatever we can provide.

I think about this a lot.

Like, a lot a lot.

But being self-conscious about reaching out to nonprofits to ask about shooting their events becomes overwhelming for me. Then I never seem to feel completely comfortable just showing up somewhere and capturing events and random people at them, because people, despite being profoundly public with their social media selfies, can be incredibly protective of being filmed by other people.

Or maybe they aren’t, and that’s just in my head.

Either way, I want to do more community-based content capture, especially work that benefits those in need in some capacity.

I don’t think I necessarily did that yesterday.

For context, yesterday I shot footage and photography of the new farmer’s market in Neptune Beach, and while I had a ton of fun doing work that ultimately supports other small businesses, it felt a bit too self-serving at first.

It wasn’t focused on helping nonprofits.

It wasn’t some heavy story about people in need.

And it wasn’t some dramatic emotional documentary piece.

It was a farmer’s market filled to the brim with small businesses.

Coffee stands, sourdough bread, cheese, and artisan soaps.

Kids and dogs everywhere.

The people of Neptune Beach coming together, walking around in the heat, talking to vendors, buying things, and supporting something local.

And it was a lot further away from something that I would normally consider my lane.

The photos and videos were edited to be bright and fun, not gritty and tough. They weren’t dramatic portraits. They were airy coverage of community engagement by small businesses.

Honestly, this kind of warm community event filled my cup in a way that was totally different from my normal work.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wish that it had some potential for more wholesome work than the gritty suffering that has dominated so much of my career. I love that work, and it has shaped and defined me, but there’s a different emotional weight in documenting people who are simply happy to be where they are, doing things that they care about.

It’s the same reason that I enjoy shooting weddings, which, despite the relentless stress of the day, fill my cup too. Capturing emotion is a key part of what I do. It just isn’t always the positive side of emotion that I find myself documenting.

Everyone at this farmer’s market was so kind, open, and joyful about what they were doing there that it was hard not to feel that too.

Even as I edited pictures, I caught myself smiling while looking through images of other people smiling as they pursued their passions.

My daughter noticed.

“Daddy, why are you smiling at your computer?”

That’s hard to explain to a 4-almost-5-year-old.

But it’s something I catch myself doing whenever I’m capturing or reliving something that I’m proud of, or something where you can feel the emotion in the frame. A friend once saw me grinning behind a camera and later came up to tell me that she knew I was getting something good because I had a stupid huge grin on my face while I filmed.

Apparently I do have emotions of joy that can manifest, despite the GORUCK community calling me “the angry photographer” for so long.

And listen, you’d be a little testy too if someone blew your one chance at a shot by being dumb, especially when you’ve been awake for 30 hours and are repeatedly running in the middle of the night to get ahead of a 100-yard-long moving group of people while wearing a 40-pound ruck and holding two cameras at your sides so they don’t bounce around everywhere.

But that is such a weird niche environment to shoot in that I forget sometimes that some work can just be normal.

Simple.

Fun.

All things considered, pretty easy.

Even running around yesterday with the rigged out C300 Mark III wasn’t particularly grueling, outside of the 90-plus-degree heat that marks summertime in Northeast Florida.

It was still work. It was definitely still very sweaty. It still required paying attention, moving around, seeking moments, and trying to make something useful out of an uncontrolled and real environment.

But it felt different.

Dare I say, it felt good.

And that brought me back to the question that always seems to sit in the background of this kind of thing.

Is helping out small businesses with the ulterior motive of growing my own presence in the community the wrong move?

I don’t know.

There’s an episode of Friends where Joey tells Phoebe that there’s no such thing as a purely good deed, because everything ultimately benefits you. Even if it’s just the good feeling you get from doing the right thing.

I’ve thought about that for years.

On the 4th of July 13 years ago, I ran around the U.S. National Whitewater Center in Charlotte with a camera, taking pictures of people rafting and doing fun stuff. At some point, I accidentally found myself taking pictures of a newly engaged couple on the boyfriend’s birthday. They asked me for the pictures, so I shared them because it felt like the right thing to do.

Then I thought I’d post the pictures on Instagram and tell the story, and someone pointedly asked if it still counted as a good deed if I was benefiting from it.

That stuck with me.

Because in all these years of wanting to go to community events and cover them for the sake of covering community events, I’ve always had the knowledge in my back pocket that part of my goal was more viewership for my own work, more visibility, and hopefully, eventually, more clients.

So does that make it less good?

Maybe.

But maybe that’s also too cynical.

If the work helps someone else, supports people in the community, gives small businesses something useful, and helps me become more connected to the place where I live, maybe that isn’t a bad motive.

Maybe that’s just participation.

I don’t think I’m suddenly going to find a ton of work in this specific space. If you go to my website, the banner is basically intense fitness, tactical, and endurance content, with some more studio-style work later. I want to chase work in the fields I actually want to be involved in, so my website has to speak to that.

But that does not mean this kind of work is meaningless.

If anything, it reminded me that my skill set is not only useful in the harsh, dramatic, exhausted, high-stress corners of the world. It can also be useful in bright morning light, under vendor tents, around families, coffee cups, smiling business owners, and kids wandering through a local market.

That matters too.

And maybe I needed that reminder.

Maybe there is some self-interest in this. A real business reason to get out, make work, share it, and let people know that I’m here, and that I exist.

But I don’t think that has to cancel the good of the task.

And sometimes maybe the job doesn’t need to be looked at as here or there. Sometimes it’s showing people what their community looked like on a hot July morning. And sometimes that also looks like doing the self-marketing work to make my own small business run.

The world isn’t as black and white as I sometimes make it out to be.