We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Megan Williams. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Megan below.

Megan, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Being a business owner can be really hard sometimes. It’s rewarding, but most business owners we’ve spoken sometimes think about what it would have been like to have had a regular job instead. Have you ever wondered that yourself? Maybe you can talk to us about a time when you felt this way?

The short answer is absolutely I’m happier as a business owner. Being a professional freelance photographer one of the best aspects of my job is my flexibility to work wherever, doing whatever as long as it lights me up From a young age I learned the lesson of not wanting to do the bulk of the work to earn half the money, for someone else.

I would rather work 100 hours for myself than 1 hour for someone else who dictates what I do and when I do it.

Pre-pandemic I didn’t ever wonder if I was on the right path professionally. I was getting to go to music festival after music festival all over the nation, I got to work as many pride’s as my editors could fit on my schedule and I didn’t really ever say “no” because 99% of the gigs really spoke to me.

When the pandemic hit, all of my work and shoots and business was in entertainment and music. So my life as I knew it completely came to a screeching halt.
In the bulk of the pandemic I questioned whether having a “real job” would have been better and would have been more secure. I wondered if passion was enough, did security deserve to play more of a part in my professional decision making.

So there was absolutely doubts. However, with the doubts came brutal, vibrant, core shaking conviction that I needed photography in my life. I NEEDED to be creative, at my very core that’s who I am and that’s what I ached to do.

Oddly enough, all of those fears and insecurities about getting a “regular job” vanished and I doubled down on making my business work. My striving for gigs and urge to network got louder and it pushed me to push ten times harder than before.

The conclusion for me will always be freedom to do things on my terms. I’m way too restless to be a vision in someone else’s head. Through it all, my photography business will always be my choice. Day life, nightlife and everylife is my slogan, but it’s also a personal goal to shoot everything that lights me on fire, so my images long outlive me. Why would I ever give that power to someone else?

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

My name is Megan Williams. I have been a professional freelance photographer for the last ten years. My specialy is music, nightlife, entertainment, concerts and live events. My business slogan is nightlife, daylife, everylife..and I really mean it. I’ll shoot everything that fills the world with color.

Originally I started photography when I was 17. I had a Pentax K1000 crank film camera that I fell in love with while shooting. Film is something special, the delayed satisfaction of getting your film back really makes you appreciate every single click of the shutter. Photography was an outlet for me, something I could do to escape and find a new piece of my brain to use.
I suffered a brain injury during a freak basketball practice accident and after my injury I had a hard time focusing, however the instant I’d get behind my camera the world made sense again to me.

I found that pocket to be comforting and familiar over and over until I really decided to take it serious. I knew I wanted to shoot artists, musicians, and other creatives mostly because I love to watch other people in their pocket and in their element. I love to watch shy artists completely click into their moments on stage and knew that’s what I wanted to gravitate towards.

I got lucky enough to work for a few publications who would send me on assignments to music festivals and concerts and I was in love with that feeling immediately.

My work is very much all over the place, I can go from shooting Rihanna, Megan thee Stallion, Alison Wonderland to local talent in Vegas and SF. If it’s creative and interesting I want in. My brand is me, I’m a restless person who loves capturing other restless souls light up in their craft.

I love photography because every single.one of us is different. So I can sit here and tell you what sets me apart from other photographers but the best way to actually see the difference is look a photographers aesthetic. What do they strive for in their finished product and for me, it’s to capture someone’s soul, to click into that moment and you can FEEL what’s happening. That’s what I aim to get. And the more vibrant colors the better.

So if you’ve got a bright, shiny, vibrant idea that you want captured in the most authentically candid way….let’s do it

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I think my main goal is for my images and work to outlive me. We can’t live forever, but images can. And my goal is for the power of an image to outlast me.

I would love a granddaughter to have an amazing photo of her grandma that she gets to pass down to her granddaughter.

Or an image that I took at a music festival reminds up in the hall of a record label until the building no longer exists years and years and years into the future. They may not have known me, but they know my image. That’s what I strive for.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

One of the lessons I had to unlearn or reteach myself is that humans, no matter how confident or how many followers or how famous or how impactful they are or have been…every single one of them has insecurities and every single one of them have doubts about themselves.

I went in to some photoshoots or assignments early on in my career with the notion that they performers or artists had it all, so of course they didn’t have anything they wished they could change about themselves.

When I picked up on it, I was photographing an artists near backstage, stage left. When she came off she was crying and I had no idea why. In an instant she gathered herself, wiped her tears, turned that bad bitch energy back on, changed her outfit and came back out like she ruled the world.

Everyone is human, and being a photographer sometimes I get to photograph people seemingly at their highest points, when in reality sometimes it’s their lowest. They just happen to be doing a helluva job finding their pocket to survive the moment. We do NOT know what someone is going through. And we can’t assume anything about anyone at any given moment.

Knowing the humanness of people has really helped me focus in on the humanity of a photo. Especially the people we tend to treat more like commodities and something we can consume.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.instagram.com/restless_mwtraining/?hl=en
• Instagram: Http://www.instagram.com/lgtimages
• Facebook: Facebook.com/lgtimages

Image Credits
Megan Williams LGT Images