While reading one of the many photography related blogs I read I ran across an article titled "And you call yourself a photographer". It was a great read and at the bottom it linked several other really great blog posts related to the same subject. I throughly enjoyed them all but this is one of my favorites
What makes a photographer professional? It really explains my feelings on the whole subject well.
For as long as I can remember I was the girl with the camera in front of her face. I spent a good chunk of my allowance on 126 film and flash cubes. I have boxes and boxes of photographs. I will be forever grateful for those. There are some great photographs in there! Eventually I upgraded to a 35mm camera, then to the advantex system, then to my first digital camera. I stopped printing the pictures at that point because without the cost of film I took a CRAZY amount of photographs! Eventually my totally awesome husband bought me my first DSLR, a Canon XTi. For the first few years I just left it on auto and enjoyed taking pictures but I knew I wanted more. I wanted to do this for a living.
This is where the learning comes in. Hours upon hours on the internet pouring over photography blogs learning everything I could. Money spent on classes and webinars to learn more. Doing shoots for free to practice. Then I opened my own business out of my home. I did things cheap, I sold the digital copies (and my rights to the photos) on the cheap. Everything you do when you are first starting out. And you know what that is ok but then as I started to get more interest I knew I had to do this right. I opened an actual studio. I got my DBA. I got a federal tax ID. Spent lots of money upgrading my equipment and software and even more money on more webinars, seminars, and classes becoming the best photographer I can be. I now feel I am able to call myself a professional photographer and not have other professionals look at my work and wonder what I am thinking.
So what is the point of the blog post? Well I have been doing some research and there will be some changes coming. Please don't run and hide! :) I am just restructuring my business. Doing things right. Putting myself out there as a professional photographer. Making all of the precious time I spend away from my family on photo shoots, editing, classes, webinars, seminars, etc worth it. Of course there is always more learning to do. I will never say that I am the best and I can quit learning now. I do feel comfortable though that I am giving my customers quality portraits and that my time and talent is worth something. I throughly believe in the statement that you get what you pay for! There will be those who feel my pricing is too high and I am ok with that because for the 1 or 2 people who think that there will be 3 or 4 who see the value in my work.
Just for laughs here is where I came from and this is where I am now. I think some improvement has been made and that my work is worth more now than then. Don't you? :)
Newborn picture of my niece Brooklynn. The color - well wow it looks REALLY bad! Babies are supposed to be a red/grey color right? The lighting is horrible in this photograph. Directly from above. The blanket/background, well wrinkles are in style right? :)
That is ok. Just make it black and white. That will fix it right? This black and white is horrible. No contrast, no depth, just muddy. Wow, this is more embarrassing than I thought it would be. ;)
And what I do now...
After a lot of hard work, late nights, and many, many classes here I am. A professional photographer. I've come a long way baby and man am I proud of it!!!
