We Asked a Photographer Who's Won a Truckload of Awards
Kris Anderson has an award sitting in his office right now that doubles as a hard drive. He picked up first place at the ICON Awards in the US this year, and the prize was a 4 terabyte Samsung SSD that, by the time it landed on his desk, was worth more than the value they announced it at. It's plugged in and running as part of his backup strategy as we speak.
It's a nice story, and it's also, in a roundabout way, exactly the kind of thing that should have cured Kris of ever doubting himself again.
It didn't. And that's the most useful thing that came out of Greg's chat with Kris on this week's episode.
It comes down to a data gap
Greg opened up early about his own anxiety, and asked Kris straight out whether he has a trick for managing stage fright and imposter syndrome. Kris's answer is worth sitting with, because it doesn't sound like the usual pep talk.
"I feel like imposter syndrome is actually really closely related to, you know, how, like, forget, you know, like, just in general life on social media, people post photos of their best life, right? And people usually curate the best possible versions of themselves... So, you know, kind of the level of data that you have about yourself sucking is way more than the level of data you have about other people sucking." - Kris Anderson
It's really just a maths problem dressed up as a mindset problem. You watch yourself fail constantly, from the inside, in full detail. You only ever see other photographers' highlight reels. Of course the ledger looks unbalanced. Once you see it that way, the comparison stops feeling like evidence and starts feeling like a trick of sample size.
Even winning doesn't fix it, and that's oddly reassuring.
Here's the part that actually surprised us. Kris has entered and judged more competitions than most people will enter in a lifetime, and he was blunt about what an award actually does to the voice in your head.
"It's funny because some people think, oh, you know, when you win awards, that gets rid of imposter syndrome. And it absolutely doesn't like it. It gets rid of for like a week and then. And it comes back again." - Kris Anderson
There's something freeing in that. If the fix isn't out there, in a trophy or a client list or a follower count, then chasing it harder was never going to work anyway. The work itself is the thing you can actually control.
The real value of a competition is feedback you can't ignore
Kris now runs the judging for the Australian Photographic Prize, but he was refreshingly honest about his own start. His first ever competition entry, back in 2012, was one he was certain would blow everyone away.
"I was certain when I entered that work that I was going to win all of the things and everyone's going to go, oh, my gosh, who was this new face on the scene? And I sucked. Like, you know, the judges correctly hammered my work." - Kris Anderson
His point is that you can tell yourself all day to watch your composition, your light, your edges, but nothing lands like a stranger telling you exactly why an image didn't work. He mentioned a judge once pulling him up for cropping someone's feet off, and he says he's never done it since. That's the actual value of competitions, not the ribbon, the specific, personal, occasionally uncomfortable feedback that changes how you shoot for good. As Kris put it, the only competitor that matters is the version of you from a year ago.
A steady day job can be what makes the creative life possible
Kris has worked for the same software company for 31 years, most of that time managing people rather than writing code, while running a genuinely serious photography business on the side. He doesn't talk about the day job like a cage. He credits it, directly, with letting him charge properly for his photography.
"Because I have a non photography job, I don't need this particular, this specific photography opportunity to make money. I can charge whatever I like and if I don't get it, it's okay." - Kris Anderson
He noticed something else once he stopped underpricing himself out of fear: clients stopped haggling. Charging a serious rate signalled he was a serious operator, and the people who weren't a fit simply self selected out. It's a small pricing story with a big lesson buried in it about what confidence actually looks like from the outside.
The Wildcard Portrait: what happens when you hand over all the control
If you want to see what Kris does with all that hard won confidence, look at his Wildcard Portrait sessions. A client books him, tells him nothing, and shows up in whatever they've decided to wear, sometimes a full Lorax costume, moustache included. Kris then has 45 minutes to invent, shoot and deliver three finished creative concepts on the spot.
"There's definitely a very large fake it till you make it component in that. Fake it till you make it is not a bad thing. Like, some people kind of go, oh, that just means, you know, you don't know what you're doing. It's like, no, fake it till you make it means you've got enough confidence in yourself that you'll solve this problem actually no matter what." - Kris Anderson
He builds in room for that kind of experimentation deliberately. On the roughly fifteen studio days he books a year, he reserves the last two hours purely for unpaid, unbriefed personal work, projects that are allowed to fail completely and never see daylight. That discipline of protecting failure time is, in its own way, another answer to the imposter syndrome question. If failure is scheduled and expected, it stops being proof that you don't belong.
A print, a stranger, and the case for making things that mean something
Some of the most affecting part of the conversation had nothing to do with competitions at all. Kris told Greg about an image he made years ago for a friend who was seriously unwell, someone who had built herself a kind of happy place in public despite what she was going through. Months later, at a workshop Kris was teaching, a stranger saw the print, went quiet, and started crying. It had landed on something personal in a way Kris never intended.
"This person whose work I massively respect wants my work on their wall, and I get to have a piece of theirs? Yes, please. I'm into that." - Kris Anderson (on a separate print swap with the late Steve Scalone).
Kris now trades prints regularly with other photographers he admires, and insists on posting a physical print rather than a digital file, because, as he put it, getting something in the mail that another person actually touched still means something a download never will.
Where does this leave the rest of us?
Nowhere neat and tidy, honestly, and that feels true to how Kris talked about it. Confidence doesn't arrive once and stay. It's rebuilt in small, repeatable habits: pricing your work like it matters, entering the competition even though you might get hammered, protecting time to fail on purpose, and occasionally giving a piece of your work away to someone who'll actually feel it. None of that removes the voice in your head. It just gives you something more useful to do while it's talking.
Thanks to Kris for being so generous with all of this, and for putting up with Greg flying solo this week while Justin was off in Indonesia. If you want the full two hours, including the AI and headshots debate, the gear talk, and a very good story about a cosplay photographer named Lee Highland working around motor neurone disease with a featherweight Sony rig, the full episode is linked below.
This episode, like every episode, is brought to you by Lucky Straps, handmade Australian leather camera straps that are built to outlast the camera you're using them on. Head to luckystraps.com if you're after one.
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