Transcript
What inspires you from WFSU Public Media? Here's this week's Voices That Inspire. My name is Don Hays and I am a professional photographer. I wouldn't say at first I had a love, but I did eventually get into photography a long time ago and I shot film first, you know, which is a kind of dying art, but I like film and then I advanced to digital and we went from there. My wife was a photography major at FSU. I was shooting photography, but she went to school, became a photographer and she had night classes sometimes. I was dropping her off. When I drop her off, sometimes her classes would get shortened or canceled. So I ended up staying. So one of the professors was like, look, you could sit in the back of the class, you're not getting credit, but you could sit back there until she'd done. And I started participating in some of the stuff that was above what I knew. So that's where it really took off for me learning that. For a long time, I shot and I never showed anyone because I didn't think the work was actually worth showing. And then one day somebody was like, oh, this is good, you should actually try doing this as a job. And I'm like, nah, I don't think that I'm that person, but I like getting up and doing the work and seeing people's faces, creating good content for people. People who are trying to get into photography, there's a lot of people that start out. And I guess younger people, they don't think their work is good enough. I would like to inspire them to say, look, keep going. Keep doing it. You're gonna fail, you're gonna mess up. Some people are gonna get mad and not like the work you do, but don't be deterred because there's gonna be a whole group of people that love what you do. Just go out there and shoot what you love and stay consistent and it'll all make sense to you after awhile. My name is Don Hays and I am a professional photographer. You're listening to voices that inspire.