today we're going to talk about how to become a professional photographer this
is a deep video i am not going to gloss over
anything i'm going to lay it all out on the table but in a short amount of time
as possible
welcome or welcome back if you haven't already please do press the subscribe
button and click the bell icon the bell icon i'll help you out because it gives
you a notification every single time i upload a video i upload a video every
week and sometimes if i feel like it today i'm going to
talk to you about a very big subject that's going to probably
annoy some people within the field and i'm
gonna just do it because it needs to be done
this is gonna be paraphrased because i usually run a full
weekend two-day workshop on this and i can't condense that down into 15
minutes because that would be stupid but we're gonna do a quick
overview i guess the first question really is what is a professional
photographer and the definition of a professional photographer
really does vary depending on who you ask the
generally accepted definition is somebody who earns either
100 of their income or 50 of their income
from photography that is the definition therefore if you make 100 pounds a month
and 50 of that came from photographs technically you can go around calling
yourself a professional photographer now i'm pretty sure by my tone and
general demeanor that you will notice that i am not completely
on board with this definition because i think it is too
vague i think it really does not show the
level of skill and time and effort it takes to become an actual professional
photographer and i think personally that actually
being a professional photographer should come back to business skill as
well because you can be an amazing photographer and run a really
bad photography business and i think that's a very common
situation without being mean of course so
i guess my version of a professional photographer is slightly different and
i guess part of that comes from whether you would be accepted into a
professional photography organization of which some of them do have quite
stringent guidelines for example you have to do photography full-time
you have to have business insurance you have to have a
professional website and all those other things and again that's a good
benchmark but again it doesn't cover it all so
in my opinion a professional photographer is somebody who is
incredibly good at taking photographs with a camera and
they have to know how to use their equipment
completely that means that they need to be able to use it in most situations
with confidence barely even thinking almost like when you learn to drive a
car at first it's awful and you have no idea
what you're doing and within a few months time it becomes
completely second nature it's not that straightforward for
photography but it is similar and the second part of it is that you can
consistently produce work that is of an incredibly high
technical standard and also is completely different from
anything that the public could do themselves
unfortunately the second half of that the bit that the public can do
themselves continually goes upwards because of smartphone
technology i only have whatever iphone this is
and i can take pretty damn good pictures on it people
use phone apps now to edit their pictures so
you have to create value in your photography and that
also counts to creating a successful photography business so if you are not
overrun with bookings if you do not have the interest and you
are already a professional photographer by some definition
then it's probably because your work is something that the public could probably
get very close to themselves so bear that in mind
so then the next question is how to become a professional photographer and
if you don't already know becoming a professional photographer is
starting a business and also throwing yourself into the wolves at the
same time it is not for the faint of heart it is
incredibly lonely it is isolating and it is
difficult it is hard hard work you are going to be spending
hours hours doing work that very quickly you may lose interest in so
just bear that in mind taking it from experience and also
speaking to hundreds of you over the years it's important to
also remember that you need to start somewhere so don't jump
straight into i'm gonna run a business because
chances are you've probably never run a business before because you really need
to think about these things very very carefully do not just quit
your job and start a photography business that is
not going to end well tough love here guys please listen i'm not trying to be
mean i'm not trying to rain on your parade i'm just trying to be honest
so you need to make sure that you have got your technical skill that you've got
your camera skill that you have the right equipment for the job
and you are fully mentally prepared for what is going to come ahead
if you don't have those things watch videos on my youtube channel and
actually put them into practice you want to have your editing at a
standard where people can't do that themselves
it is no longer a viable business option to take pictures and basically sell them
straight out of camera that doesn't work anymore
it's not going to provide you with a sustainable income so don't do it you
have to put extra effort and extra time into things
and lenses like the one that i mentioned
last week which i will link above lenses like that will produce images
that nobody can create themselves other than photographers with that lens
and there are different lenses that fall into this category like the 200mm
f2 like some of the 85s like the 135 1.8
and obviously like the 105 1.4 you have to have the equipment that
backs it up you don't need to have the newest camera body you don't need to
shoot mirrorless you don't need to have all the fancy
things but you do need a good lens the next thing you need to do
obviously is you need to get business insurance you need to as an absolute
minimum have public liability insurance that's the first
thing you need to have secondly you're going to want to have camera insurance
because that is vital and the costs are now starting to ramp up
a little bit added on top of your adobe subscription
which is also an expense and if you have any employees at
all you're going to need employer liability insurance
so you have to have your business insurances in place and be very clear to
know what is and isn't covered the next step after
you've got all of those sort of ground work done you need to build a
portfolio and that portfolio should show only the best of your work but also be
work that you could quite easily reproduce on every session you should
not in your portfolio have more than one really image of every dog
and ideally you should use a variety of locations
a good rule of thumb is a minimum of 10 different subjects in 10 different
locations and if you can do that and have a consistent
body of work as it's called then that will help you
to get clients it's important at this stage that you
have a style so if you do not have a style
you need to go ahead and watch the style interviews which is on our youtube
channel with some incredible photographers and
that will help to guide you in a direction to find your
own style because it's not something that i will teach you at all
it can help guide you there but i'm not going to tell you what your style is
because it's so personal and it's another reason why i don't like to teach
people how to do exactly what i do because then we are all just becoming
the same photographer at the end of the day and
that's not going to help anybody it doesn't help your clients it doesn't
help the industry and it doesn't help yourself
also at this point stop using presets um unless they offer very very quick little
editing things like a sharpened preset for example if you
create your own actions awesome if you use other people's
actions full action packs stop because it's not actually teaching
you how to edit it's teaching you how to shortcut your
way to an end result but in the process you will clip
highlights you will lose shadows you will over sharpen you will add noise
you will add fringing you will do loads of bad things that you
really want to be avoiding so stop using them now
the next step is to have a website if you do not have a website and don't know
how to build a website you really might want to pay someone
else to build your website i would not recommend paying me to build your
website because to be honest with you if you're an
absolute startup and you don't have a big budget
i'm probably not going to be able to meet your needs but there are other
places out there first rule of thumb do not use wix
second rule of thumb try squarespace if you are up for a big challenge and
probably a headache use wordpress i personally am a wordpress developer so
i am at home on wordpress but if you aren't it can be quite confusing and
can result in a ugly site so use squarespace
as your first point of call at this point you then need to get
very very clear on your costs this is what we go through
in the ips workshops and also in business workshops
we go through in detail codb col cogs which is cost of doing business
cost of living and cost of goods sold you need to have spreadsheets with
everything detailed everything even the pizza that you get on a friday
night that needs to be that'll be in your cost of living but
that needs to be in there once you have your figures
all that you can then begin to create future projections
and also create a price list with very accurate
profit margins which is vital to running a successful
business if you don't know that you are working blind and you also need to track
your time how long does it take you to edit how
long does it take you to shoot how does it take to get there
how long does it teach you everything else and the final thing is that you
have to be doing in-person sales session if
you use galleries you might as well just kind of stop now
i'm not saying that it never works because it
does sometimes work for certain things like events or mini sessions
yes however if you are not using in-person sales sessions
and you are shooting portrait sessions you are leaving a serious amount of
dollar on the table and that's not forcing someone that's not forcing a
customer to buy something that is just the truth of the matter how
am i supposed to explain to a client the how that looks on their wall if
they've never seen it before how am i going to expect them to spend
500 pound on a 30 by 40 of this if they've never seen it before
oh yeah it's got a frame and the print is off of the back
it's no one's gonna do that you have to show them what you've got and you have
to have it in person and remember the old adage
show big sell big after you've got everything
else done in the big list that we've already gone through so far you kind of
also need a brand if you've not covered the brand part you might want to look at
my other business stuff to do whilst in lockdown even if we are not in lockdown
it is still very very important but that video is
probably something that's definitely worth
looking at in terms of everything else that you need to get
and it also includes marketing i'm not going to cover marketing today
at the end of the day you do need to market your business at this point
now that you've got everything ready you can go out into the local community and
start to market your work there are many ways of doing this
it's going to be completely unique to your business to your target market to
your local area and to your price list as to
where you go next so do not buy a one size fits all kind of
thing because it's very very very bespoke
in terms of who you are marketing to and how you should market
obviously you need a very good brand to be able to market you also need to have
that brand on the website and also on your price list and other
stuff so that is really important and finally
the final step in the whole thing to become a professional photographer is to
make more than 50 of your income from photography and once
you've done that congratulations you are now a professional photographer
three top tips for being a professional photographer is number one do not
give that much of a crap about what the local photographers are doing
in terms of your direct competition because ideally you should have a
completely different style and a different business proposition for
people and therefore you actually aren't competing for the same clients at all
number two remember that if you are competing you're complete competing
against your clients budget you're not competing against
other competitors most of the time most of the time you're
competing against the kid's new iphone or
the holiday to france not the photographer up the road so just bear in
mind that you are actually wanting to bring your customers in rather than beat
your local competition and the third top tip for being a
professional photographer is do not stay there alone you guys know
i'm very open about mental health and you guys know as well that in the
community the mental health situation is not good i've got a survey
on that video coming shortly from the initial survey results it's
actually shocking and we will cover that so it's really
important to look at your mental health and if it gets
too much is not shameful to admit that maybe this is not the right career path
for you like i've said it is very very difficult
most people come in try burn out leave that's the general
process so if you do end up being in the profession
and you actually think this is fine i can handle it then you are one of the
few not one of the many that's one of the
other reasons why you really shouldn't worry about the local competition or a
new photographer coming in because the chances are
they're not going to be there for long in the nicest possible way there are
ways you can help your business and if you haven't
already just get in touch and i will see what i can do to help you out
i will be offering and i do offer through my other business anyway
business and marketing coaching advice which includes for photographers as well
as other people and also things like help on in-person
sales sessions pricing all of that kind of thing is is stuff
that i offer and talk through with people on a daily basis so
if you get stuck please give me a shout and if you haven't already please press
the subscribe button and click the bell icon
i'm really sorry if this was quite a morbid
video um i just needed to cover it off and
to be fair it's actually a really deep topic so to make it
light-hearted and fun is nearly impossible
but if you stuck with us to this point then you deserve a medal please come
find me on instagram i would love to hear from you and i would love to see
you over there um yeah that's kind of it i'll see you
again soon.