Articles by: Hanna Brooks Olsen

Long summer weekends are great for lazily letting the hours slip away, but before you turn to Netflix to zone out, why not use some of your time to get inspired and start the second half of the year on the right foot?

[caption id="attachment_6859" align="alignnone" width="620"] Image via Flickr[/caption] Creative entrepreneurs, freelancers, and regular old people are forever searching for the secret to inspiration. Is it a flash, like lightning that strikes when you least expect it, or is it a slow burn that builds over a lifetime of paying close attention to everything around you?

Studio lighting can be intimidating — so much so that even renowned photographers like Sue Bryce admit to not fully understanding the complexity of it. Fortunately, editorial and commercial photographer Felix Kunze has a knack for making it look easy.

[caption id="attachment_6793" align="alignnone" width="612"] Image via Flickr[/caption] Networking events. Mixers.

[caption id="attachment_6797" align="alignnone" width="620"] Image: Chase Jarvis[/caption] At the tender age of 22, one of my friend editors gave me the most important piece of freelance advice I've ever heard: You are the product. Because being successful as a freelancer or creative entrepreneur requires a lot of things: Hard work, a few very supportive friends, and probably at least one credit card that you're comfortable putting some serious spending on until the work starts to pick up.

[caption id="attachment_6780" align="alignnone" width="640"] Image via Flickr[/caption] In school, you got in trouble for copying the work of others. As a college student, you may have worried that the RIAA would show up at your house if you pirated too much music from LimeWire.

The ubiquity of cell phones may have made the self-portrait a point of mockery, but it's not exactly a new medium. Photographers and regular folks have been setting up cameras with timers or posing in front of mirrors since the birth of the camera.

With the frequency that your scissors go missing, you'd think they'd become sentient and grown legs. And finding the right color of yarn (or thread, or paper, or ink) in fewer than 10 minutes?