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UER Forum > UE Main > Urbex translating into career (Viewed 13250 times)
philbegas 


Location: SFBAYAREA
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Urbex translating into career
< on 3/27/2014 6:28 PM >
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Hey guys, a lot of you don't know me but I'm Phil, 20, from berkeley CA. And being 20 years old, I'm now coming to the point in my life where I'm being asked where do I want to go with my life now, what do I want as a career.
Now, I've always loved urbexing, but I was wondering if it is possible/if any of you have ever turned it into a career. A few months ago I was thinking about a potential scenario: Working for a security consulting company, and then people would hire you to try to sneak onto their property so you could test the effectiveness of their motion sensors, alarms, cameras, etc. I know you would obviously have to be very good for this, but that's something I would be interested in being able to do, so I guess my general question to y'all is have you ever been able to apply urbex in your career? And if so, how?




rampantscyther 


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Re: Urbex translating into career
< Reply # 1 on 3/27/2014 6:53 PM >
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interesting idea man, my immediate thought tho was photography, maybe getting in with historians, and library archives, and selling your photos?




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Elwood_Blues 


Location: Phoenix Az
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Re: Urbex translating into career
< Reply # 2 on 3/27/2014 6:56 PM >
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Almost sounds like the plot of a movie..

Except.. what if the building was really a boat. But the boat was really a secret prison.. but the people on-board the boat didn't know it was a boat.. yeah. yeah.. that would be cool..

Sorry man.. couldn't pass that up..

Seriously though...

I don't think many companies have or are willing to spend the $$$ for that kind of security testing. If they get broken into.. insurance covers the loss.. they patch the hole & go on as before..

Governments?. maybe.. Still sounds like movie stuff.. But I think they would just draw from other government/military agencies to run infiltration tests..




philbegas 


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Re: Urbex translating into career
< Reply # 3 on 3/27/2014 6:58 PM >
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Well when I say private security consulting I meant people would pay for your services for example maybe politicians, drug dealers, art collectors. People for whom security is a priceless feature




Sands 


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Re: Urbex translating into career
< Reply # 4 on 3/27/2014 7:07 PM >
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I was able to get a job as a real estate photographer working a real estate agent. The fact that I experience photographing buildings helped out since you focus on the interesting aspects of a home and such. It's just a side job at moment and I get called when the agent has a house to sell, which is slow in winter so I'm not making bank or anything. I haven't been able to get called for an interesting abandoned factory, hospital or even a house yet but I hope it happens. So if you're good with photography I'd suggest giving that a shot.




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FauxBellum 


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Huzzah!

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Re: Urbex translating into career
< Reply # 5 on 3/27/2014 8:54 PM >
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Your best bet is making a career from the photography experience that you have.

For example, I shoot newly planned developments and "Needs TLC" houses as a side job to make some extra money all because people have seen some of my urbex photos.




wranglerroadhead 


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Safari Kay

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Re: Urbex translating into career
< Reply # 6 on 3/27/2014 11:06 PM >
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Isn't photography career an oxymoron? Don't get me wrong, I love photography and think its a pretty legit career choice if you make it big. I have yet to meet a photographer that makes their loving solely doing photography though. I guess its more of a hobby you can sometimes get paid for in your free time and on weekends.

True story though, for a while I worked security at a university as a student and part of our job was building and security checks on foot shifts. Going through tunnels wasn't in the job description per se but being apt at non-destructively entering buildings definitely set me apart on the job. After we got done "infiltrating" and exploring the building for ourselves (to make sure there were no intruders, of course) we either secured where we entered or called it in to maintenance. The few times we set off a door alarm or encountered someone we just had to radio into the dispatcher or show an ID. Perhaps you could find a security job that does contracts so you wouldn't be stuck guarding one spot all day. Then you would get to meet all sorts of urbex folks wandering around and show them all the good stuff.




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Radical_Ed 


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Re: Urbex translating into career
< Reply # 7 on 3/27/2014 11:42 PM >
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WTF are all of you people talking about?
*
Easy, bro. Go to school and be an abatement/demolition estimator. You get to tour everything that's coming down. You'll be one of the last humans to do a comprehensive, fully legal tour. You can bring your gear, you get paid to take photos, you get to peek in every corner, every closet, every room, every stairway. You get to do this while deducing the costs to clean it all up. You get to do follow-up tours. You get 100% unfettered, full access to everything and all the time you need to document it. You get to show your photography to the customer, the guy paying you thousands of dollars to do this. You also get full access to the original blueprints, building plans, architectural specifics and full history. You get it all, and you get paid, and you get to travel the country.
What more can you ask for? You don't even have to do any actual labor. You even get to do basements, steam tunnels, drains, attics, crawlspaces, every fucking thing. You'll be the only professional explorer getting rich instead of arrested.




"Are you happy now with all the choices you've made?" "Are there times in life when you know you should've stayed?"
"Will you compromise and then realize the price is too much to pay?" "Winners and losers... which one will you be today?"
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crows 


Location: Eastern Iowa
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Il est interdit de faire smashy smash

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Re: Urbex translating into career
< Reply # 8 on 3/28/2014 12:46 AM >
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Strong compulsion to high-five Radical Ed. Man, -I- kinda want to do that now.




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Adv.Pack 


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Adventure Pack

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Re: Urbex translating into career
< Reply # 9 on 3/28/2014 2:05 AM >
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Be careful though. Once it becomes work, it won't be as fun.




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Elwood_Blues 


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Re: Urbex translating into career
< Reply # 10 on 3/28/2014 2:28 AM >
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Posted by wranglerroadhead
Isn't photography career an oxymoron? Don't get me wrong, I love photography and think its a pretty legit career choice if you make it big. I have yet to meet a photographer that makes their loving solely doing photography though. I guess its more of a hobby you can sometimes get paid for in your free time and on weekends.



You couldn't be more correct. It's a hard field to make a living at.. I've gone in and out of it several times.. But once you are hooked that's it.. You will keep going back no matter how poor it makes you.. lol




Aleksandar 


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your darkest shadow, my oldest friend; the world's become ashes, this is the end.

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Re: Urbex translating into career
< Reply # 11 on 3/28/2014 4:24 AM >
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Posted by philbegas
Working for a security consulting company, and then people would hire you to try to sneak onto their property so you could test the effectiveness of their motion sensors, alarms, cameras, etc.


hi, i'm afraid that UE doesn't really have that many transferable skills for security consulting.

what you're referring to (or at least, the thing that someone would get paid to do) is usually an expensive and highly technical service done in the context of protecting a high value asset, facility or organization. a 'red team' or penetration role player attempts to identify vulnerabilities across physical, process, system, personnel, and other security dimensions. this type of service is almost always contracted by an organization with complex, layered security needs, and involves something valued they want isolated from a threat.

the type of security that UE hobbyists are accustomed to is generally not in the same ballpark. in the case of strict abandonment, if any security measures are present at all they tend to be simple: access restriction or blockade, and maybe an inexpensive human presence for basic deterrence. for active sites hobbyists are likely to reach only an area immediately adjoining public access & usually behind a only single layer of physical security or access control. these areas are almost certainly not proximate to assets that are being specifically secured, and therefore are not representative of the type of security measures paid consultants deal with.

tldr; paid consultants get paid because they deal with robust, layered security isolating high value targets from specific threats. UE hobbyists don't encounter or bypass security of the type that a paid consultant would.




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Steed 


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Re: Urbex translating into career
< Reply # 12 on 3/28/2014 7:30 AM >
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Posted by Adv.Pack
Be careful though. Once it becomes work, it won't be as fun.


Words I live by.

That said, my UE experience has given me a lot of very relevant skills and awarenesses for my career. It's given me a strong grasp of local history and tourism, as well as an understanding of local attitudes and sensitivities.




kenfagerdotcom 


Location: Madison, WI
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American Urbex... yeah. That was me.

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Re: Urbex translating into career
< Reply # 13 on 3/28/2014 1:32 PM >
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Posted by philbegas
...so I guess my general question to y'all is have you ever been able to apply urbex in your career? And if so, how?


Yes.

One employer recognized that I liked taking photos, being on social media, and sharing with others. He bought a Canon 7D and told me to improve the resources available to the institution. Plain and simple.

That actually turned into a determining factor for a hiring committee later on. The photos of projects I had worked on separated me from the other candidates. They were also aware of my urbex work, social media presence, and other personal interest things I had done.

So how do urbex skills apply?

Maybe not directly, but I do work in a field where content, technology, and how people learn with those things. The tips and tricks I've learned along the way come in handy when consulting.

TL;DR: Urbex teaches you things that are relatable and useful in other areas.




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crows 


Location: Eastern Iowa
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Il est interdit de faire smashy smash

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Re: Urbex translating into career
< Reply # 14 on 3/28/2014 1:57 PM >
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Seriously though, now that I have actual time to post. I'd quote, but there are a lot of various valuable statements and responses through them throughout this thread. There's no (decent) photography in my life (just look at any of my threads here and you'll seeeee ~) but there's other visual art shit (the driving around looking at weird shit in the countryside started out as ostensibly gathering setting and resource material for a comic). Mostly though, I'm a writer, and a musician, and I hope nobody feels that anyone's comments about how difficult it is to have a 'photography career' are belittling in any way. Photography, like any creative career (and, increasingly, maybe ANY career, good lord) is really difficult and can be extremely inconsistent with regard to making a living. Which is to say, getting that ugly little thing called a paycheck on a regular enough basis to pay your bills and eat.

I think urban exploration by itself is a pretty personal thing, a thing that only you really get anything out of. It's a subject, more than a thing that by its nature produces something that can be consumed by someone who may or may not be willing to pay money for it. Therefor, if you choose to go a creative route trying to work your passion into something that enables you to take it off the back burner, there's going to be a secondary art, craft, or skill involved. What else do you like to do? Take photos? Write, or create content for websites? Film making? You could involve the subject you're interested in in a lot of different things, and the key to whatever the other thing is, the art part of things, is to do it, keep doing it, learn as much as you can, and get good enough that people start to take notice of you when you put yourself out there (and keep putting yourself out there). Find ways to make the skills you are developing useful to your employers, even if the job is TOTALLY NOT RELATED. Talk yourself up to people (I've just been offered some tech writing work from a regular at one of my jobs, partly because we've run into each other elsewhere so much when he was working on grants and I was working on a novel). Basically, do everything you can to keep space in your life for doing things you actually enjoy and have control over, then focus those things on the subjects that interest you (urban exploration, scuba diving, whatever), so that your time doesn't get gobbled up by that kind of job that expects you don't do anything else with your life.

Last, there's a good point above about making it into work taking the fun out of it. Might not be this way for you, but it's something to think about. When you're excited about something it's easy to feel like you really want to do this all the time no matter what, but when you're not required to do something, it's easy to overlook all the times when you'd really rather not be doing it. If you manage to make something pay your bills, chances are there are going to be a lot of mornings when you wake up with something on your agenda that you're really not excited about, and The Thing has to continue to be worth it, else you'll get more out of it and not burn out if you just leave it as a hobby. There's absolutely nothing wrong with hobbies.




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Radical Fred 


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Re: Urbex translating into career
< Reply # 15 on 3/28/2014 4:03 PM >
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Just steal copper. You get to ue and make money from it!




Skich 


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Re: Urbex translating into career
< Reply # 16 on 3/28/2014 7:22 PM >
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Posted by Radical_Ed
WTF are all of you people talking about?
*
Easy, bro. Go to school and be an abatement/demolition estimator..


This. abatement foreman do very well and don't do a thing.




philbegas 


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Re: Urbex translating into career
< Reply # 17 on 3/28/2014 7:39 PM >
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+1 to Radical Ed
I should have mentioned I don't care that much about photography, so professional photography would not suit me.
Being an abatement foreman actually sounds really interesting, do you go to a technical college of some kind for that or do you go for some kind of engineering degree or what?



[last edit 3/28/2014 7:40 PM by philbegas - edited 1 times]

wranglerroadhead 


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Safari Kay

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Re: Urbex translating into career
< Reply # 18 on 3/28/2014 11:32 PM >
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Posted by Radical Fred
Just steal copper. You get to ue and make money from it!


Well, that's one way to go




"It's nothing, only the smellz."
Radical_Ed 


Location: Philadelphia, PA, USA
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"You work your life away and what do they give? You're only killing yourself to live!"

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Re: Urbex translating into career
< Reply # 19 on 3/29/2014 12:42 AM >
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Posted by philbegas

Being an abatement foreman actually sounds really interesting, do you go to a technical college of some kind for that or do you go for some kind of engineering degree or what?


Here's a few links, boss.

http://www.foh.hhs...ning/asbestos2.asp

http://www.proenvt....com/asbestos.html

http://www.otssafe...stos-training/cpzy

http://www.vault.c...t-technicians.aspx

http://www.asbesto...icplace_school.htm

There should be schools in your state that focus on this as well. Do a search and check it out.





"Are you happy now with all the choices you've made?" "Are there times in life when you know you should've stayed?"
"Will you compromise and then realize the price is too much to pay?" "Winners and losers... which one will you be today?"
***Social Distortion***
UER Forum > UE Main > Urbex translating into career (Viewed 13250 times)
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