Praça Nova York
Sion, Belo Horizonte
R. Patagônia - Sion, Belo Horizonte - MG, Brazil
Minas Gerais, Brazil
I have been working as a photographer in the photography business for more years than I care to remember. To give you some idea I first camera was a Nikon F2 which is now considered a classic. There was no Photoshop or LightRoom or Instagram or even anything like email or the Internet. Most photographers whom I have worked with over the years have neither made a huge amount of money or lost a huge amount of money. They have always just been in the middle. The two biggest changes which came along were definitely digital photography and the Internet. Both of these changed the business of photography forever.
Maybe you want to work as a full-time photographer and maybe you don’t. Perhaps you just want to earn a little bit of extra income to pay for your hobby which let us face it is quite an expensive one. Or maybe you want to supplement your existing income or business and make your life a little bit more comfortable.
What I would like to do is share with you “trade secrets”. Actually, secrets which are hardly secrets and more like common sense or at least open secrets in how to be successful in your chosen niche in photography.
Problem number one being too broad
In the good old days, many photographers were generalists and not specialists. In other words, they did a little bit of everything whether that be product photography, wedding photography, fashion photography or portrait photography. If they wanted to keep the doors of their photography business open in a pretty much had to do a little bit of everything in order to stay viable.
These days of course things are completely different.The whole business of photography has changed. Just about everybody and anyone has a smartphone with which they love to snap photos especially at weddings or special occasions. This poses quite a big problem because the actual art or physical act of taking a photo which used to be so complicated in the past has now got ridiculously easy. This means that people really are not paying you to take a photo they are actually paying you for a service which you provide. This on the face of it sounds ludicrous or painfully obvious but when you are a photographer and you are competing and a very competitive market what do you have to separate yourself from your competitors? The fact that you use the Nikon and they use a Canon or you use a Hasselblad and they use and Pentax? These facts may be important for a photographer but they are irrelevant to marketing your business.