When Should I Start a Photography Business?

[Cameron]

This is an excellent question and one that many of us have asked ourselves over the years. Going into business for yourself is an exciting proposition. It means that you’ll be your own boss, find your own customers and call your own shots. The only problem with all that freedom is the risk that comes along with it. What I’ll share with you today has more to do with when you shouldn’t go into business for yourself than when you should. Any old Joe can tell you when to start a business. “Now! Do it now! Hey, you won’t find out until you try, right? Big risk equals big reward.” I’ve really heard it all. Everyone wants to build their own business doing this or that. The primary issue they face though is inexperience. And that inexperience can sink the entire ship.

I’ll give you the punch line up front and then I’ll explain my own experience down below.

The only time you should go into business for yourself is when you’re working a side hustle and that side hustle is making you more money than you’re making at your full time job. I know, that’s tough to hear because that means you’ve actually got to be working two jobs at once. I’ll tell you the hard truth about the whole thing; starting a business is an 18 hour a day ordeal. It’s not easy and you can easily lose your enthusiasm at around 11pm or when you’re working all Sunday as opposed to going to the ball game with your friends. Business owners work all day and all night. It’s not as glamorous as people make it seem.

I’ll give you an out here. I’ll offer up another scenario when you might want to consider starting your own photography business. Well, this one wouldn’t exactly be starting your own business, but rather taking over an existing one. Let’s say you currently work as a photography assistant for an individual who is a professional full-time photographer. You’ve been this person’s assistant for about 10 years. You know the entire business, all the way down to the accounting, marketing and talking to any attorneys you may need to talk to for whatever reason. Your boss engages in steady gigs, such as wedding photography, high school senior photo shoots, and couples shots. This same boss is planning to retire in a year or two and has offered to let you buy him out. He’ll finance the arrangement so there won’t be any huge sums of money leaving your pocket and entering his. And finally, your boss is running a highly profitable and smoothly operating enterprise. I’ll give you this. Buy the business from your boss. You’ve got the experience, the talent and the financing. Just do it.

Otherwise, work your regular day job during the day and work your small business job at night and on the weekends. Forget about recreational time with friends and family. Build your photography business and when you reach the point of bringing in more money from your business than you’re currently making at your day job, you might want to jump ship. Just remember, you’ll immediately need to pay for your own health care, retirement, and taxes. These are big bills, so don’t discount them. Even though photography doesn’t have much overhead, relatively speaking, the behind the scenes cost can be substantial.

When I quit my full time normal job to go into business for myself about 15 years ago, I had arranged things in such a way as to pay all of my income tax from my traditional paycheck. I was making about a dollar a week there, take home. It was a nice setup because I didn’t need to concern myself with making any estimated tax payments for the business. I was also making approximately twice as much with my side business as I was making at work. Those years that I built my business were used to learn about business itself as well as to get out some of the unexpected kinks. I learned that accountants like to charge a lot of money and a lot of odds and ends caused me to spend on things I had never considered. I also learned that being in business for myself was a huge risk. Anything could happen. I had no organization behind me to absorb catastrophe. I countered that risk by saving my money. And when I say saving, I mean saving. I saved a lot of money through those years and that money gave me the flexibility to make business decisions in an educated manner, rather than one where I would have been under duress. People rarely make good decisions when they’re under duress.

Here’s the deal. When you operate a small business, yes, you don’t have to work for a company any longer. You do need to work for clients though. Instead of one manager telling you what to do, dozens of customers do. You need to please them. You need to be a friendly, charming, and charismatic people person. You need to know how to sell. And photograph. And post-process. And manage. And market. And think. And work, work, work. Say goodbye to watching TV and playing football. I’m serious about this. You’ll be working during those times. It’s tough being in business for yourself, so that’s why I’m making the suggestions I’m making. Actually, a very good idea would be to interview those who are already in the field to get a feel of what they encounter on a daily basis. Ask them what they love and what they hate about their photography business. I’m sure they’ll tell you.

If you do decide to make the leap, please let me know your story down below. I love small business and would enjoy chatting about it.

 

[Cameron]

What’s a “Pro” Photographer? Do You Need to be in Business?​

Back when I was in elementary school, we used to have to pick teams to play certain games during gym class. I remember getting all excited when it came time to pick those teams. We were all excited. We’d say, “Pick Mary. She’s a professional!” Or, “We need to get Jim on our team. He plays professionally!” Back then, the word professional meant really, really good. If we said that someone played professionally, we simply meant that they would whoop the pants off the other team.

It took a while for me to realize what professional actually meant. Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean really good. What it actually means is this:

– relating to or connected with a profession.
– engaged in a specified activity as one’s main paid occupation rather than as a pastime.

The root word of professional is profession.

– a paid occupation, especially one that involves prolonged training and a formal qualification.

So while there are many folks out there on the internet who claim that once you become exceptionally proficient at photography, you somehow become a pro. They’re wrong. You don’t become a pro photographer until you make it your primary occupation and until you start getting paid for your work. I know, this is difficult to write because the word pro has such positive connotations to it. We all want to be pros. The thing is, if we’re not getting paid, we’re not professional, no matter how we look at things.

So, I guess the question remains, what are we if we’re not pros? What are those really awesome photographers we see online who are taking all of these amazing shots? Well, if they’re just learning about photography and taking great shots to post online for fun or admiration, they’re what we call amateurs. In some cases, really, really good amateurs. It’s sort of like what Mr. Wonderful says in the TV show Shark Tank. “If you’re not making any money in your business, it’s called a hobby.” Tough words to hear.

I know what you’re thinking right now. You’re thinking that you still want to become a pro photographer. I’m hear to tell you that you can absolutely do that and you don’t even need to be an expert at taking photos. All you need to do is find someplace or some way to sell your photos, preferably online. You can sell stock images or print your pictures and sell them on Etsy or Ebay. You can do all sorts of things and once you begin bringing in enough money to quit your day job, you’ll have become a pro. You can even create a small business at that point and treat yourself with the respect you deserve. After all, if your photos are good enough to sell, they’re good enough to earn you some respect as well.

 

[Cameron]

A Good Idea For Learning Photography​

Learning about photography can be tricky. There’s definitely a curve to it. At the beginning, you don’t know a thing other than to set the camera to Auto, point and click. This is true for any type of camera. It really doesn’t matter what it is. If you know nothing about photography, you know nothing. The goal is to learn.

Aperture controls how much light makes its way though the lens to the camera’s sensor. Shutter speed does the same thing, but in a different way. While the aperture of a lens is the hole in which the light passes and which can grow larger or shrink smaller, shutter speed controls how long the sensor is exposed to the light. Think of it like this; if you squint one of your eyes to let only a bit of light through to your eyeball, that’s aperture. If you have your eyes opened as wide as they’ll go and blink, that blinking is the shutter. Your eyelid is the shutter. So, if you think about it, if you have a wide aperture and a fast shutter speed, that’s pretty equivalent to having a small aperture and a slow shutter speed. The interesting thing about photography stems from the effects of having a particularly sized aperture or a particularly set shutter speed.

When it comes to ISO, that’s merely how sensitive the camera’s sensor is to light. Low ISO values are less sensitive than high ISO values are. Low ISO values don’t introduce much grain (noise) to an image while high ISO values do. The ISO in a camera can act as a go-between for photographers when they’re trying to get the perfect shot. Adjusting the ISO to a particular setting can help out when a scene calls for a specific aperture size or shutter speed.

Since not many of us know the perfect settings for any shot, it’s helpful to learn about photography as much as possible and to experiment in the field quite a bit. Using the Aperture Priority and Shutter Priority and even full Manual mode settings will help you learn about the inner workings of photography much more than using Auto mode. After all, Auto mode requires no thinking on the part of the photographer.

If you aren’t well versed in camera settings, there’s a way to work around that deficiency. When viewing a scene and gathering ideas for how you’d like the camera to capture it, you can take advantage of one or more of the Scene Modes available on your DSLR camera. Scene modes target specific styles of photography, so if you’re on the side of a mountain and you’d like to take a beautiful landscape photo using full Manual mode, you can switch over to the Landscape scene mode first, meter the camera and then record the settings the camera would use. This isn’t cheating, it’s learning. If you’re on a sports field and would like to take a sharp photo of someone playing on the field and have no idea what you’d set in Manual mode, head over to the Sports mode, meter and record those settings. Doing this is a good first step for the shots you’d like to take. You can then set your recorded values in Manual mode. If any adjustments are required as you shoot, you can easily make them and continue on your way.

Using the Scene modes that are built into your camera for a launching point for Manual mode is a great idea. Doing this will get you used to what each style of photograph calls for and you’ll be on your own, without the help from any scene mode, in no time.

Do you have any beginning photography tips that you’d like to share? If so, please add them below. Also, if you have any questions regarding this post, please let me know below as well. Thanks!

 

[Cameron]

How to Manage a Photography Work/Life Balance​

For this post, I’ll focus on we amateur photographers. If you’re a professional, you’ve likely got the work/life balance thing figured out. Most likely, there’s very little life and lots and lots of work. Whatever the case, you’ve been in the photography scene long enough to know how to get by. Who I’d like to focus on today are all the folks out there who love to take tons of photos and then go home and edit them and blog about them. Perhaps even share them on social media. Whether those who don’t take photos know this or not, the entire process takes a a huge amount of time and can truly interfere with other aspects of life. The question is, how can we balance the two?

Okay, here’s my advice. What I’d like to do is separate out the various activities that make up the world of photography. First is the actual taking of the photos. Since we’re amateurs, we’re probably engaging in street photography, some close-ups, landscape and other types that don’t require us to carve out specific times of the day to capture those images. Most of us usually have our cameras on us and to be honest, it’s not the taking of the photos that stresses us out. It’s everything else. I mean, how many times have you found hundreds of photos that haven’t been processed on your camera? My memory card is usually full of stuff I haven’t yet gotten around to editing, so really, it’s not the “photography” itself that’s getting in the way of the rest of my life.

When it comes to post-processing, printing, marketing, posting, blogging about, and everything else that’s slightly more mundane than being outside enjoying time with our cameras, we’ll need to schedule some time every day or a few days a week to sit down and work our images. It’s really all about diligence and making the process a part of every day. It doesn’t need to be a large part of the day, but it does need to be part of it. Even 15 minutes per day is good. Make that a goal. Or perhaps a number of photos processed, posted, or blogged about.

Working on editing and posting photos is just like anything else in life. It’s like practicing guitar or learning Algebra. You simply need to dedicate some time to it and do it regularly. It ain’t going to do itself, so let’s make it work.

Response: Great advice. Since I am a beginner I can relate everything that you have said. You were talking about photo taking timing and stuff. Can you please explain how do professional photographers choose time and wait for the perfect moment. What time is it actually?

Response: I think what I was trying to get to in this post was that consistency is more important than the amount of time spent on something sometimes. For example, instead of going out and taking photos for eight hours straight, once per week, try to get out there and take photos for only 15 minutes or a half our every single day. The same is true for post-processing, marketing, and everything else that you have to do. From my experience, when I try to cram everything into just one day every so often, I burn out and lose interests in the hobby. I find that if I spread the tasks out over smaller periods of time, I stick with it and enjoy myself a lot more. But really, the difference between professional photographers and hobbyists is that the pro had all day and all night to photograph and edit their images. The hobbyist only had a few hours per day, so the hobbyist should spend those hours wisely.