5 Things I’ve Done to Improve my Photography Business | Photographers create Podcast
Summary
In this episode, the host shares five things that have helped her photography business throughout the years. She emphasizes the importance of learning from mistakes and shares information about upcoming workshops and online courses. The five key themes discussed are: hiring a mentor, following one's gut, getting outside of one's comfort zone, having other creative outlets, and taking the emotion out of the business. These strategies have helped the host improve her work, build consistency, connect with clients, and find fulfillment in her photography business.
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Hey everyone, welcome to the Photographers Create Podcast. It's me again, flying solo. Today I am talking about the opposite of what I talked about last week, five things that have helped my photography business throughout the years. This is a fun one, I really am excited to talk about this one after last week's which felt a little, oh, but you know, it's important to share those things that went wrong versus.
It's important to share those things that went wrong so we can learn from our mistakes. It's not failure, it's learning. So today we're gonna talk about the positive things. Before I do that, let's talk about the analog artist workshop and film soup online course. I've talked about these a lot. The analog artist workshop is April 27th to 28th. It's Saturday and Sunday in North County, San Diego. I will be there, Alison Jacobs will be there. We'll be teaching you.
all things film. So if you are ready to learn analog film or up your analog film game, this is the workshop for you. It's going to be low pressure, super fun, hands on learning all things film. Starting from the very beginning of metering and your camera and film stocks all the way to creative techniques and even developing. If you are into that, we will also be doing film soup. So if you are wanting to incorporate film into your client workflow and become a hybrid photographer or
straight on film, this is the workshop for you. You're gonna leave with feeling very confident about your work and being able to provide consistency with your clients' images. The other thing is Film Soup, which I just talked about, analog artist workshop, is now an online course. It is a 30 minute video course, but in digestible bite -size pieces. It's not a whole sit down and watch it for 30 minutes.
This is a great way to start with film soup if you are nervous about taking something that costs you maybe $15 and you're going to have to spend 20 plus dollars to get it developed and put it in a bunch of ingredients and hope it turns out. That's scary and I get it. So if you do this online course, I pinky promise that that that your images will turn out. You will not be ruining anything. It comes with the video, all the videos, and then also comes with an 18 page PDF.
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with what ingredients to use. There's really skies the limit with that though and what they do to your film. Multiple, multiple recipes and I even have included some bonus of souping black and white film and medium format film. Yes, you can soup medium format film. So all of that is on my website. I'll be linking everything in the show notes. So if you're interested in that, head to the show notes, okay?
Let's get to talking about the five things that have helped my photography business. The first thing is hiring a mentor. It is expensive to hire a mentor a lot of the time and I get it. Why spend all that money when you don't really have that much money in the beginning anyway? Having a mentor is the key. They can see your potential and see the journey, the way for you to get through to that potential.
faster than you can do yourself. It's also wonderful to have the support to have the person to be able to ask the questions, someone to bounce ideas off of. Mentorship is the way to go and I have done multiple mentorships with Brooke Schultz, Jan Palmer and recently with Fiona Margo. Every single person was worth the money for me and have helped me along the way and I am so thankful for these amazing women.
who are willing to share their knowledge with me and other people. So if you have a pain point in your business or your creativity, find a mentor that is going to be able to help you through that and help you bust through that glass ceiling that you are hitting at the moment. Mentorship, mentorship, mentorship. I cannot say that enough. Find a mentor. The second one is following my gut. Now this isn't really like a business -y thing.
But as creatives, we all are basing things off of emotion a lot of the time. And in life, if you've been here for a while, you know I'm a little woo -woo -wee. So I feel like this, you know, working with creativity and the universe and all these things that are very flowing that we don't really realize a lot of the time. We listen to all these outside sources. It's so loud. It's so loud. You should be doing this. You should be...
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should be doing this and this and this and this and so and so is doing this and it's working for them so it should work for me. That's not the way this works. When I started listening to my gut on certain things is when I finally got to a place where I was super happy with my work and my business. So here, I'm gonna tell you a little story. So before COVID, it feels like it's so weird we have this before and after COVID thing now in our lives.
But before COVID, I specifically remember where Thanksgiving dinner, I was hanging out with my best friend and her parents and my best friend's dad loves to take pictures. And we were talking about it and whatever. And he was asking me what I was up to lately. And I said, well, I've just been really wanting to learn analog film. And he's like, why? Why would you do that? That's how he started in photography is because so long ago, that's all there was.
And he's like, oh, digital is so much better. It's so much easier. And it makes these beautiful images, which it absolutely does. And he was like, don't do analog film. It's just a waste of time. And I had other people question me on it. This is before I even started. I mean, I had taken pictures back in the day of my oldest, because that's all there was before digital photography. Digital photography came along pretty quickly after that. But when he was really little, I have a ton of pictures of him running away from me because he was a very, very busy child.
and film is slower and it was just, I get it, it wasn't great. It just was not great because I didn't go to school for photography so I didn't know what I was doing. But I had other people tell me, don't do it, don't do it. But something inside of me wanted to do it, it needed to do it. So I got, I started taking courses and I, when I was in the middle of one of my courses, I just got this like overwhelming spiritual feeling. I know that is so weird.
that I was in the right place. Like I even started crying. Like this is it. This is what I've been looking for. This is what's been missing from my work. And it was, it absolutely was. It wasn't the best business move because I had to start all over again with everything. I had to get new cameras. I had to get, you know, light meter and learn film and it was expensive and I messed up a ton. And it just wasn't the, you know, smartest thing financially.
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But for my creativity and my soul and heart, it was just overflowing with joy. It makes me so happy to work with film and I needed to follow my gut with that. And now I shoot with film only for my family and my clients. And is it easier? No, a lot of times it can be a lot harder, but that's what I need to do. And when I do take those pictures that way, I am so much happier with the outcome. All right.
The third thing for what's been helping my business the most, oh, let me backtrack. Because I started shooting film and I was happier with my work, then my consistency was amazing and I have been able to be consistent for many years this way now and that has helped my business being consistent. If you've listened to my previous podcast, not being consistent is what's gonna crush you in your business. So being consistent is the key. All right, number three.
getting outside of my comfort zone on social media and other marketing, like showing my face, writing personal emails, introducing myself to people as a photographer. I mean, stuff that you would never do. As women, we are taught not to brag about ourselves. We are taught not to be outgoing as much and pushy as much. And I don't even like that word pushy. We just aren't taught to go after what we want. And men would...
that's part of their identity is what they do. But as women, we're like, well, I'm a mom. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're a photographer who also is a mother and has also many other things. So being able to talk about yourself and what you do has been the biggest thing for me by far in my business and my confidence. So getting online, talking on stories,
I was talking about emails. So in my emails, I write something personal about my life, sharing those personal things to create connection. And it also makes me happy. Like when I had started doing this more and more about being comfortable and getting outside of my comfort zone on social media has actually made me happy and has been more fulfilling because I'm connecting with more people. More people are connecting with.
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the things through my email, I'll have people respond and it has nothing to do with photography, but they needed some support in some way with that problem that I was also having. And I love doing that. Part of the reason why I'm a photographer and especially a family photographer is because I love connections between people and relationships. So that has been very fulfilling for me. Another thing about getting outside of my comfort zone is trying new things.
Going to educational experiences that I was nervous to do, I was really nervous to go to Jan Palmer's thing. It made no sense to go. It was her creative path workshop. It was in the spring of last year and it was in North County, like in Northern California. It was really hard for me to get there and it was hard. I was like, I don't know if I should do this. And it was absolutely worth every single second that I was there. So push yourself.
Push yourself out of that comfort zone. There's no way you can grow unless you are feeling uncomfortable. I think Sting said that or David Bowie. I have to find that quote somewhere. But there's no way that you can grow unless you're uncomfortable. So if you are comfortable right now, you're not gonna grow. So find someplace that you can be uncomfortable and push yourself. Push yourself a little bit, my friend, and it will be worth it. All right, the fourth thing is have other creative outlets.
Photography is in everything and especially if you've been shooting for a long time and you have this clientele and this the workflow down and it can kind of get monotonous it can start to feel really yucky or it can also just help your photography in a lot of other ways. So I also love to I shoot my family on vacation. That is one of my ways to get outside of it. I don't
show hardly any of it. Maybe like 10 % of what I shoot for my family when we're on vacations and doing fun things outside in the city, I don't share. That's just for me. That's personally for me. The other thing I do, I'm a big knitter. I'm a total old lady. I learned to knit at 19 when I first got really sick and couldn't really do much as they were trying to figure things out. And I learned to knit for my Nana and my Nana has passed away and I have this connection with her and I love.
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creating through fiber arts. And I actually had a friend of mine, Liz Glenn, said, she's like, I can totally see in your work that you knit and you do fiber arts because it has a texture to it. And I was like, oh my gosh, I didn't even realize that. So your other creative outlets can boost and affect your photography, which isn't a bad thing, it's a good thing. Something else I do is I love to garden. I have an indoor jungle. Look, there's some of my jungle right there behind me. If you are on YouTube, you can see that. And journaling, I love to journal.
That is something I will never share with the world, but it's something I do for myself and it makes me happy. So whatever your creative outlets are, lean in a little bit outside of photography, lean into those creative outlets because doing that has made me feel more rejuvenated when I come back to my photography business. It has influenced my photography work. And when I push myself outside of my comfort zone and share doing these other things online,
through my social media and other marketing avenues, it connects with other people. So it's a win -win all around. And it's fun. We all need to have some fun, right? The last thing is taking the emotion out of my business. This is so hard. We all, being artists, there is emotional connection to our work.
and it is so hard to remove the emotion from that. So for instance, you deliver a gallery and you don't hear back from a client ever. And you don't, you're like, oh my gosh, do they not like it? And you're like freaking out that you did something wrong. It's like, should I reach out to them and see if they're like, maybe they hated it. I need to do a reshoot or you like start spiraling. It's not helpful at all for your business. You have no idea what that person is actually thinking.
Maybe they're just not people who give feedback. Maybe they're super busy. They probably loved him, but they're not going to say anything because when do we all say how much we love everything to that person's business? You know, we can all leave reviews, but who does that? Not very many people do that unless you're angry, but removing the emotion from it. So like when you post something on social media and it doesn't get a great response or a great view, you send out an email list.
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email and you get crickets you don't hear anything back all the time we are genuinely giving a piece of ourselves because all of this is creation it's not just photography we are creators in a lot of different areas when you own your own business so if you remove the emotion out of it and try to make it more transactional which sounds terrible
But it's true because that's what businesses are. They're transactional. A person hires you, they give you money, you give them pictures back. It's a transaction. So if you kind of remove the emotion out of it, you'll spend less time in your head, it'll be less stressful, and you're able to do your things within your business that you need to create and post and do without it being such an energy suck, such a drain on yourself.
removing the emotion of it. And then when you get someone who does say, this was amazing, I loved it, you can bask in that and love on that. But removing the emotion from it, that has been a huge thing to help my business. It's helped my productivity immensely and has helped me get more clients actually. So those are my five things for my business. I hope that you can take this and find a way for you, maybe some of these things you need to add into your business.
or in your personal life to be able to make things better for yourself and just love your business a little more and have it be a little bit more successful. All right, everyone, thank you so much for being here. If you would leave me a review, I would be so appreciative. Wherever you get your podcast, Apple podcasts would be great. Anywhere would be awesome. If you would leave me a quick review, even if you just did the stars, I would be so appreciative. That would help my little podcasts get out and be in front of more photographers and hopefully help them like I have helped you.
Alright everyone, thank you so much and have a wonderful, wonderful day. Bye!
