Medicine to Landscape artist of the year

Yan wang Preston is a professional photographer who’s practice focusses on the representations of landscapes and the relationships that it has with it’s environment and communities. Yan was born in China and studied a degree in medicine, however decided to pursue her passion for photography.

Yan moved to the United Kingdom to deepen her knowledge of photography, whilst studying Yan had an admin job, however she decided to tell her manager about all the skills she had regarding photography, therefore could earn extra money from her job for doing promotional work for the business. This shown how important it is spread the word of the talents that you have as you can pick up extra money from jobs you least expect.

Once Yan had finished her degree she experimented with a range of different jobs in order to make money from her photography. Yan already had lots of experience shooting street photography, although this differed from the other jobs such as shooting weddings and school prospectus, the knowledge she had gathered from street photography helped as these styles of photography simply come down to ‘capturing the moment’.

Throughout the talk Yan expressed how valuable it is to ask people for opportunities, if you sit around waiting for things to happen then a slow start with little progression should be expected, the best way to bring in clients is by creating the opportunities yourself, and put the work out their with good marketing methods, Yan described marketing like playing a sport, if you don’t do it for 3 weeks, it is as if you haven’t trained for 3 weeks, showing the importance of keeping on top of promoting your own work and creating the opportunities yourself.