I recently picked up a copy of Elephant Magazine, and lost hours of my day in a coffee shop glued to the editorial. Ana Inarra’s interviews are particularly interesting. Here’s a small excerpt from her Q&A with photographer, Stefan Ruiz. As a freelancer, I can relate to his response and believe many of you will too. Here’s an excerpt, you can read the article in full here:

…I prefer working on personal projects for the obvious reason, but finding a balance is difficult. There are constant interruptions. I often have to stop everything to go off on a job. It may take me weeks or months to get back to what I was working on before I went away.

I do commercial work to support myself and to fund my projects. But that’s not the only reason I do it. I wouldn’t like to do only personal projects. Commercial work has given me a lot of access to people and places, and it has exposed me to things that I probably would have never seen…Also with commercial work you have time limitations and deadlines. This teaches you to focus and work fast. 

My personal projects can go on forever. I’m trying to learn from my commercial work about finishing things. And finally many of my personal projects have started from something that I was exposed to on a commercial job.