For our third installment for photographers we will address the fear of failure and  getting started.

I’m sure you’ve noticed by know I’m a horrible writer, seriously.  But just like with photography, if I keep doing it, I will get better.  That is why I push forward and continue with my ramblings and bad grammar.  My family always makes fun of me because of it and I honestly proofread these posts and have my husband proofread them.  I still make mistakes.  But I figure, that’s ok, I’m not perfect and I do make mistakes but I try and learn from them.  The same goes for photography.  I think as a society we have this fear of failure.  We must succeed at everything we do, the first time around.  Reality tells us that is not true.  If you fail at something, don’t quit, as that is the worst thing you can do.  Analyze why you failed and apply what you learned to the next time you go out and shoot.  We are our own worst critiques so use that inner voice and strive to get better with every photograph you take.  I can tell you that when I was in college going through the photography program, I had to re-shoot every one of my assignments because I failed at something.  But I learned from it and when I did my reshoot, I didn’t make the same mistakes. So please know that failure is not a bad thing and it leads to growth and actually makes you a better photographer.

So how did we get into wedding and portrait photography, honestly it just happened.  I had friends, my brother’s friends, friends of friends, and friend’s exgirlfriend’s brother’s fiance’s contact me to photograph their wedding.  Haha did that last one even make sense, it is very much true though.  They all knew I had a degree in photography so they felt I had the knowledge to photograph their wedding.  In reality, I had no idea what I was doing when it came to wedding photography as it is a completely different ballgame than any other time of photography.  I knew nothing of working with flash and I was shooting with the first model of the Canon Rebel.  I did charge, maybe not very much, but  I did charge because I wanted to put a value on the service I was doing.  Things just kinda snowballed from there and before I knew it I was running a wedding photography business and loving it.

I do want to point out though that because I had studied photography in school I knew the technical side of photography and had a solid foundation with that.  If you are not comfortable with ISO, Aperture, and Shutter Speeds and how to control each one to get the picture you want, I suggest taking classes.  Community Colleges have really good programs and you can learn a great deal there.  Plus the classes are only $100 and you get a professor to teach you for 3 months and help you one on one.

So now comes the business side of things, and how to legally set up a business.  I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on this part because I most certainly am not.  I know you need to get a DBA from the county clerks office, set up a tax id number, get set-up to pay sales tax etc.  Each state and each county is different though and my advice would be to talk to a photographer in your area or go up and chat with someone at the county clerks office.  They can help you much more than I can.  Also read what it says on the county clerk’s website that can give you a lot of valuable information.

Since this post is getting pretty long, I will end with a list of other things you need to help you get started.  I’m sure this will leave more questions, so just leave a comment or go to our FB page and leave questions under our discussion tab (or just click here to go there directly)

– You’ll need a website, just google photographer’s template website and you can easily find several of them.

– A logo. That can be really simply or really complex. It depends what you want.  We wend the very simply route and just used K & S to create our logo. You can see our logo with the K & S in the picture below.

– Start branding yourself.  Pick a few words that describe your images and then show images that fit those words.  You will attract the type of clients you want.  It has done wonders for our business.

So until next week, I leave you with practice, practice, practice as that is the only way to get better.