Start Your Photography Business

1. Welcome to Class: welcome to this course on starting your own photography business. My name is Philip Dinner, and I am so excited to present this class with my good friend Will Carnahan, who is a photography business owner who has run very successful businesses in the past. And this course has really meant for you to get started and toe show you the step by step process to start your own business. Our goal is by the end of this course, you will have a business up and running. You'll know all the steps that you need, whether it's the formation of a business and all of the technical and official stuff that you need to get started to advice on how to actually get started as a business, how to get your first clients how to set up your business website, what prices to charge, what equipment you need to get started and all kinds of advice like that. This is a class for photographers who already know how to shoot photos. This is not a class where we're going to be teaching you. How did be a photographer how to take great photos? This is really for people who are a little bit more advanced and really want it. Take it to the next level. We have other classes for beginners on how toe take amazing, beautiful photos If you're interested, the main components of this course include basic lessons where will will walk you through each step of starting a business, Give you tips and advice on that topic At the end of each section, Will and I will be getting together to have a more one on one conversation on a going through a case study of his own personal business that he's starting right now from scratch so it will be really exciting toe walk through and give you real world examples of how to put into practice. All of the tips and advice will is giving you and see that with real world examples, and we've also included a downloadable worksheet. This is a really big, complete guide that will help you as we go through each step, so that's going to be in the next lesson. Make sure you download it printed out if you can, and really use it as a step by step guide. It will help you feel accomplished as you check off each box, and it includes links and helpful things like that that will help you throughout this course, as always with all of our courses. We know that they're not going to be perfect when we launched them, and we depend on students like you to give us advice to make it better. So if there's anything in this course as you go through it that you think we missed or didn't cover enough or was confusing, just let us know. We will be happy to add things to change things, depending on your feedback. As you go through this course to If you have any questions about anything, you can post them to the course. And we also encourage you to join the photography and friends Facebook community, which is a great place where you could get help from other photographers and instructors like us will include a link to that in the next lessons as well. Thank you so much again for joining were so happy to have you here, and I'm gonna pass it back to will 2. Why Do You Want to Start a Photography Business?: So let's talk about why you're starting the photography business for a lot of people. It could be just making money on the side. It could be doing a full time business. Ah, the big thing is that you're able to really find your creativity and turn it into money. Now, this is going to take time. Often, I've seen it take about a year to really be going. And if you want to make it a full time gig, I would give it more than a year. Ah, lot of times you're gonna have to jobs at the same time while you're starting your photography business or if you're right out of school, you might want to start thinking about starting at while you're in school. Either way, photography like this can turn into a full time business, or it can be a side business. So decide what type of photography you want to do and how you're going to practically do that while maintaining income at the same time. Because as you start with your photography is, you're not going to be making a full time amount of money to really live off of. To begin with, I would say, usually give it a full year before you're making a good amount of money. Um on. That's even at working at it consistently, day by day, a thing to consider about photography. And I used to think about this a lot when I was actually ah, lot younger was photography kind of starts out as a hobby. It's something that you like doing. It's creative. It's fun. It's like painting or drawing or any other art form dancing. So when you start to turn it into a business, it becomes a little bit of a different thing. So really, take your time to think about how turning your hobby and you're creative and something you love into a business because it does get stressful, and you do start to add in the idea of money, technical things. Dealing with other people on dis could be really great. It could be really awesome that you've turned your creativity, and it's something that makes money and your hobby. It something makes money, but for some it can be a little difficult, and sometimes it can take away from the hobby and the love for it. So, really, take your time to think about that and see, Ah, you know, be aware that when you start your business that that could be a thing on and keep an eye on it and keep it in mind because you don't want it to, like, stress you out and take away from it because it's just gonna make the business harder to do if you really do love it. And you really do see that it's turning yourself into a, ah, good business, it's It's a it's a new world. It's gonna be so beautiful and so wonderful that you're able to do something that you love every day. Um, and honestly, like for me, I've started as a business, and I've turned video and photo and teaching all into these sort of business aspects of my life, and I would say that 80 to 90% of it I still just love. But there is, like, a 10 to 20% of just, you know, business emailing accounting. You know, thinking long term that is not my favorite thing to do. But it does lead toe having ah, job that I love to do way more often than not. So, uh, really make sure you take that into consideration before you get going, or at least have it in the back of your mind because you can start doing this. You can always change your career at any time. But just, you know, be thinking about all that being said. Photography is a good business. It is going to always be needed, especially with the advent of social media were a very visual culture across the world. Businesses need it. Other businesses need other websites. Need a advertising needs it. Photography is not really going away in any aspect, Um, and if you can teach yourself to be on that professional level, you'll have, ah, step above most other people who just have their iPhones shooting. The other thing is that photography can sort of be based anywhere around the world, so you don't actually have to be dependent on a location to be being a photographer. You know, you could be a wedding or ah, portrait photographer in any location. Be a travel photographer. So really, you can start this business from anywhere in the world, um, versus having an industry in one single spot where you have to live so this really opens anyone up to anywhere, or if you decide to move somewhere or you need to move for a partner in another career, or you need to move for family or you just need to move to a lower income place or higher income place. Photography exists everywhere. You just have to adapt to the market that you're moving to, and we'll get into that. So keeping all this in mind, we're about to venture into really starting a photography business. You want to make sure that you kind of have an ethos about why you're doing this. It'll make everything else easier. And it will make getting to the hard stuff even easier, so that when you have the good stuff, the fun photography side of it and the collecting the money side of it ah, lot better. So try and keep all this kind of in the back of your mind as an eat those in a philosophy and you'll short to be successful in everything else, as long as you take the steps necessary to do everything right 3. What Kind of Photography Business Do You Want to Start?: So let's talk about what kind of photography business you want to start. Often, in my experience, it has helped to focus on one specific type of photography. As you start out, you will get asked to do all these other different types of photography. But to help you get going and to help you target audiences and start making money faster, you should try toe really hone in on one specific thing. I've sort of narrative down to three different, bigger categories that we can kind of talk about throughout this class. So let's talk about those. The 1st 1 is portrait and headshot photography. Now this focuses on shooting people for headshots, for business profiles for Internet stuff. Ah, lot of actors need head shots. Ah, lot of people getting into business need pictures for their linked in profile stuff like that. And this is actually what I'm doing right now. So we'll focus on that in our case. Studies for Portrait's and headshots that also includes shooting families, you know, graduation photos, Mother's Day, maternity, all that sort of stuff really falls into this category. Number two event and wedding photography. Now I have been shooting weddings for over 12 years, and I actually have separate websites for my weddings and events and my portrait and headshots photography. Now, um, I do this because wedding and events is a definitely a different style than doing setting up portrait of headshots. It's way more date based, and it's way more journalistic sort of photography based, but also includes headshots and portrait's while you're shooting weddings. So we'll talk about that because it's a little bit of a different way to set things up. And steaks are a little bit higher because you're capturing moments versus setting a moment up, so we'll talk about that in a Zara's Weddings and Events goes. Number three is fine art photography. Now I call this fine art photography because it's a little bit more art based, and this is for people who are trying to sell their prints, sell their portrait's. Do you stock photography again? You're not dealing with clients as much when you're shooting the photo. You're dealing with clients after you printed the photo or posted the photo. Oh, so it's a little bit different than setting up a headshot or setting up a date for a wedding. So we'll talk a little bit more about fine art stuff. I actually haven't done a whole lot of it, but I have a lot of friends that have, and I know the tips and tricks to really get going with that and where to start selling your prints. So there are other different types of photography, and there's a different ways that you could make money with your photography, such as being a journalistic photographer in college. I worked for my newspaper, and I used to just go out and shoot photos for the newspaper. There's product photography on there's print ad photography. Now, a lot of these air more arm or commercial client based um, and it takes a little bit of time to get established. These air a little bit harder to just start as your own home business, so we're not gonna be focusing on that as much. But you can definitely go get a job at a newspaper or go to events and shoot and try and sell those to a newspaper. We won't be covering that, or you can really start shooting products and going to companies and telling them that you want to shoot like their new toy that's coming out or the new jewelry that they're shooting . But again, that takes a little bit of a different motion that starting your own business and dealing with clients. It's more advertising for bigger companies and requires a little bit of a different aspect of what we're talking about today. There are a few things to consider when you're starting your photography company as faras picking sort of what category you're gonna be shooting. Um, often we're gonna be doing all of it because you want toe work and you want to make money. There are things to take into consideration, though, especially where you are. I'm based in Los Angeles and being in Los Angeles. The wedding industry and the headshot industry is totally saturated. In fact, the photography industry is totally saturated. So I've really focused on actor head shots because I know that there are plentiful actors in Los Angeles and in Hollywood looking for headshots. Um, I've really kind of stepped away from the weddings in Los Angeles because there are just so many wedding photographers. So when you're starting your business, think about where you are, What country, what city what region you're in. There are a lot of destination places. There's a place out here in California. Call Palm Springs, where most of the photographers out there are wedding photographers because, ah, lot of weddings come out there. And so it's a really good idea to think about where you are and where situated what's needed in that area. To maybe think about considering where you want to push your photography in. Another thing to consider, especially starting out, is what your personal network is. If you're at the age where all your friends were getting married and engaged, maybe you should lean into engagement and wedding photos. If you're at the age where a lot of your friends are having babies, maybe you should lead in a maternity photos. Newborn photos If you're at the age where a lot of your friends are graduating from high school or they have kids graduating from high school, maybe you lean into those sort of sections as faras portrait's go. So really think about your personal network because that's how you're going to get your first clients, and that's how you're gonna get your feet off the ground and then you can start of start toe like design and mold your own photography business from that. So really, take all of these in the consideration, because this will really inform everything from this time out. If you're a portrait photographer, a headshot photographer, that's what your website's gonna start to look like. That's how you're gonna advertise yourself. If you're a wedding photographer, that's what your website's gonna look like. And that's how you're gonna advertise yourselves. This is very important to start considering and make a decision about what type of photography or and what's have a business you're gonna dio. So get on that worksheet and it's the first thing you're gonna check off and decide what kind of photography business are you? 4. Important Personal Note from Instructor Will: So before we get too deep into this course, I want to take a step back and give you some truth. Look, a photography business from sort of my personal experience. Um, it's not necessarily for the faint of heart. This is not gonna happen overnight. This is something that you have to be ready to dedicate some time to. Um, when you start a photography business, when you start any business, you're not only the craft, you know, only the cook, the restaurant, you know, owner, the photographer, the baker. You are the business owner. You're the account. You're the advertising. You are everything. So this is going to take a lot of work on a lot of dedication if you want it to be super successful. And not only that, it's gonna take consistency and patience. Um, I know a lot of people who have tried to start photography and get going right after school or sort of change careers or doing at the same time as a full job. And they just don't have the patience for it. It is going to take time and consistency. You have to keep up with it. You have to keep on your account, and you have to keep meeting clients. You have to keep on your instagram. You have to keep updating your website. You have to maintain a good idea of what it takes to shoot a wedding for 14 hours a day, or deal with clients who bail on you at the last minute and you lose out on two hours of work. It's not for the faint of heart. It definitely takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of patients, so keep that in mind as you begin this, but also keeping in mind to know that you're not, You know it's not easy. And if you fail or you take you take, you take a moment to get through a certain phase of this. It's OK. It's hard. It is not easy, Um, and if you want to be successful, you just got to keep going and keep at it. But know that you got a long road ahead of you, but it's so worth it, and it's gonna be so good. So just keep it up. I just wanted to give you that personal note. In addition, it is physical. If you're shooting weddings and events on your holding that big giant DSLR. I might give you a tip to think about using near lis cameras, because using those all day, we'll start to really take a toll on your body. Um, you know, running around doing photos is a little bit of a physical act, so make sure to keep that in mind, too. Is a long term sort of idea about what you want to do and what kind of photography you want to be. The big thing to take away is that it is worth everything and with all your blood and sweat . But just remember, it's gonna be hard. It's going to be fun. 5. Case Study: Starting a Photography Business: Hey, welcome to the first will call them case studies of this course. These are lessons videos where Will and I are just going to have a more casual conversation basically going over everything that we covered in this section of the course and in these case studies, it's really about giving more details. Mawr examples using specifically will see photography as the example in this course. But we're also going to talk about our past project businesses. We've run and we'll see where it goes. But these are gonna be a little bit more casual longer, and this might not be your style of lessons. So, to be completely honest, feel free to skip these, because the main book of the steps to starting a business are going to be in the other lessons. But I think these will add a lot of color and help kind of expand your knowledge a little bit more. Yeah, basically, I just want to take what we said and show you how I've applied it to my own business or pass presences. Yes. Sounds Okay. Okay. So in this first section of the course, we'll course we welcomed everyone, but he talks about why you're start. Why? Why even have a photography business? We talked about what kind of business there are. And also you just talked about. Like I personally like how hard it can be to start a business. And you can't have to consider that. So with your company will see photo, I guess. Talk about first. Why? Why even did you decide to start another? Qatar becomes because you've had 50 tired the companies in the past. You still do photography on the side. And why started anyone, I guess. Well, to be honest, uh, Phil, I did have a winning photography business that I started about 10 11 years ago when I was 20. And I learned a lot from that. And this probably all of everything that I'm talking about now. I learned from that. It actually we were shooting for, like, 56 years. But my business partner, Time decided to move away and chase another career. So it's kind of lost without that. In the meantime, you know, I'm a freelance video cinematographer, and I teach These are my two things that I do. And I was doing photography on the side, but I hadn't haven't really like pushed it. It's always been sort of like, Sure, just pay me like there's no like business structure to it. Yeah, and recently I've taken sort of if you talk about the let the section that we just did I took sort of a pulse of, like what? I want to do what I'm capable of doing. I wanted to take my photography and turn it into a business and basically make it Ah, side moneymaker now being in L. A. I could do that with weddings. I could do that with modeling Portrait's. Or I could do that with headshots on due to me and my network was a lot of actors that I know. Actors always eat headshots the wedding game I've been in before, but it's so sporadic, and although you get paid more, you don't have as much control over it. Eso based on market based on what I think I can afford, based on my network headshot photography seemed like perfect for me to make some side money . Um, and it also like, as far as like, running it goes would be easy, right, because I just need to take photos of my friends to start off with. I have some old head shots I've taken. It's easy to start on Instagram that way. Hashtags are super easy again. I have studios that I can rent from around the sort of l A area so just made sense for me to go in that direction. So you have the equipment. You had the background. That's the other thing. Is already had everything. Yeah, and so the startup costs was low for me. Service constant low. And because I have other jobs like I don't have to dedicate. But on a time I feel like I got back into wedding photography, like really full force full time. It would be a lot more like taking meetings, like setting up more websites. Maybe getting on some, like, you know, just doing a lot more that I just don't have time. Yeah, I mean, I know you talked about with your other companies, you hade, while so far like a much bigger, um presence online with, like, yelp and all those other, which will cover later in the course on setting all that stuff up, which is important as you grow your business. But just to get started. Uh, it seems like the headshot ideas, like, really simple. So, you know, one thing you talked about in the section was how it's better to pick and choose kind of one style of photography to get started, and I completely agree with that. And I think that's great advice. But I also think some some of the students probably are just like feeling it out, trying to figure out how they can make money from the skill. And they might not know what they're going, what direction they want to go in. And I think that's something that you should understand that, like I think, for most photographers, the first way that they actually make money is just the fact that they have the skills of Qatar for and then, like friends of theirs or family will ask them to do. X y Z kind of Harvey like, Hey, can you take photos at my party at graduation? Can you take photos of me for, you know, family photos? I'm having a kid or whatever, so I feel like is you're just starting out. You don't really know what you want to do. It's okay to kind of feel it out. But maybe as you more solidify your business, that's when you kind of pick and choose a specific style photography. And I think as you go on, you start to see a trend and what people are asking. Yeah, yeah. You'll start to gravitate soldered something naturally. Yeah, and we talk about this more in the class. But, like, you know, if you're at a certain age, a lot of friends or graduating from high school, Graduated from college, having babies, getting married, Yeah, you know, starting business profile. So you know you'll fall into it as you go on. Important thing is to start shooting on, sort of see where that's gonna take. Yeah, and yeah, you never know what it's gonna be This'll classes really dedicated to starting your own business. But as we mentioned earlier to, there's lots of ways to make money as a photographer in tow, even the first time that I made money as a photographer because my backgrounds mostly video production. But when I was working at a college in their media department, it was kind of a pseudo video and ended up being a photography was the school photographer because I knew how to use a camera on by. That was kind of cool because it helped me earn, learn more skills, get more comfortable shooting events. Shooting at that is working with people. And in turn, later on, even though I don't have my own photography business, I have, you know, my video production business, online business and a lot of it's very similar in terms of the structure, marketing and things like that. I still have friends Family asking, Teoh take photos as use local school tohave Yeah, yeah. Anyway, school while great little chat. Anything else wanted Ad Teoh This case study about we'll see no, is just the beginning with the class, There's lots of that We're gonna go And I just said, Like, you know, there's a lot that I once I committed to it. I like, you know, fully committed. And we're gonna get more into this about, you know, instagram my portfolio. What I use like my equipment, my structure, my contracts, made deals like all this stuff we're going to get into. But just having the idea to start a business, get excited about it, make the commitment to do it is such a huge step. So if you're already at that point, and you probably are if you made it this far, uh, you know you're in there, you're going in the right direction. Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Well, we'll see in the next lesson. 6. Introduction to this Section: welcome to this new section of the course. This is on all of the business basics that you have to take care of before you actually start shooting clients doing projects and making money. So these are a lot of the questions you probably have about starting a business. We're going to be answering them. This is a very action packed practical section. If you go through it and you actually take action, which we encourage you to do, make sure you have your worksheet out in your are filling it out, checking those boxes off. If you do all of that by the end of this section, you're gonna be way ahead of most other photographers who are trying to start their own business. So, yeah, I'm really excited to pass it back to Will. Who's gonna be walking you through all of this great stuff and again we'll see you in the case study at the end of the section 7. Choose Your Business Name: Okay, so let's talk about choosing your business name. This is very exciting. This is one of my favorite parts of starting a business is coming up with a name on how you're gonna move forward with your photography business. Why do we do this? This is what defines you, and this is what's gonna move you forward, and it's gonna inform a lot of things. Get inform on how you present yourself, your website, your instagram, how people pay you all sorts of things. So it's very important that you really take a step back and consider what your business name is gonna be. So let's talk about types of names. First, you're gonna think about choosing your name as your business. So my name is William Carnahan, usually to first last name and photography. So William Carnahan photography, The really nice thing about that is that it really encompasses all sorts of photography. So no matter what category you decide to start shooting, you could really slip into either of them. And it doesn't matter what you know. The title is that's not wedding photography. Your portrait photography. It's your name photography. So William Carnahan photography or fill Epner Photography works really well. Or you could come up with a name that really kind of encapsulates what you're doing. I had a friend who was a maternity photo photographer and he created his name as the baby bump or baby bump photography. And that was the way he wanted to present himself. And he was really focused on just that. As photographer. You'd also come up with something else like Carnahan Creative. That's my last name with something interesting that can kinda encompass more things. If I decide to, you know, start selling, I don't know, but paintings Carnahan creative would work as a company. The next thing to do is make sure that it's available. So by doing a simple Google search, you can search. I would say, for example, search Carnahan creative or search William Carnahan photography or search video school online. And lots of things will come up and you can kind of see, engage, does my name or the name that I'm thinking about compete with anyone in my area, or is there already a website that exists? Is there someone that is already using it to create own business? Because when people start to search your name. You don't want to be the person that's on the third or fourth page. You want to be as far up as you can. You also may want to just search for the website directly. Go to something like Go daddy dot com, where you can type in the actual name of the website that you're thinking of. So I would go in and I would type win carnahan photography dot com and I would see that it doesn't exist or someone may have bought it If my name is John smith photography dot com, I'm sure someone owns that on, and there may not be anything there, but it would be hard to get that domain for your website. Another thing to Dio would be to look at your social account searching. So go to Facebook, search for businesses that have that name that you're thinking about. Go to Instagram, start typing in your name so I would do William Carneal photography on instagram and see if that pops up. Um or, you know, really start to search. Twitter starts a search instagram star search. Facebook starts to search all sorts of social media because that also might be taken already. And you don't want to start off with the names, start dealing with business paperwork and then find that you can't even start your instagram with that same name. Ideally, you're gonna have the same name across all of your crowns and your email address. It will just make things so much easier and seamless with getting yourself out there talking to clients receiving payments. Communication. It's just the easiest thing you can dio. And finally, a really good way to find out about your business name is to, uh, search the registered business for your city, county or state. Ah, and see if that name for that business is already registered again. A more popular name like John Smith, Jane Smith. Those things are gonna probably be taken already. So you want to take a look before you start to really commit to a name getting business cards, all that stuff. Just track to see if another businesses registered under that name, and you can do this by going on to Google and just typing in business name. Search for your state. Are your country depending on where you are and then finding a website where you can then type in that business. So why do we consider all these things were gonna dive deeper into permitting tax laws, all sorts of things in the next lesson. But it's important to think about because when people start to communicate with you, people start to give you payments. You need to know what exactly for them Teoh call you? I mean, you want to know who's writing the check, how they're registering you on Venmo how they're communicating with you when they can't find your email address. All these things are very important when considering a name. If you come up with a very long name, it might be difficult every time you want someone to pay you or write out a check or something like that. So think about that when you're really coming up with a name. A thing that I've dealt with in the past is that my name was so long or we actually have a video production company called Will Call Cinematic. And now my name on my ideology is will at will call cinematic dot com and it's just such a mouthful. Tell the people or to write down every time. So it's something to really consider when you're starting your business. So get out your work sheets, right, your business name down or what you're thinking about Maybe right to down so that you have something to fall back on if it's already chosen. Because in the next lesson, we're gonna be talking about, uh, tax laws, bank accounts, permits business license. And sometimes when you get into that, you're gonna need to make a split decision on what you want your business name to be, so be prepared and be ready for the next lesson. 8. Choose Your Business Structure: So let's talk about making your business official. Now, this is a lot of stuff that a lot of people are interested in, and we want to get you a smudge information and as much advice as we possibly can, everybody's situation is gonna be different. Per your city, your state, your province, your country, your region. So we're gonna give us much advice and re sources as we can to help you figure out how to make your business official like business official like official business where you live. And again you are capable of starting to shoot and make money without doing any of this. But I wouldn't recommend it because this is this is something that's gonna protect you legally, it's gonna help you with your accounting. It's gonna make things very straightforward. And it's gonna make sure that you're doing everything right legally for your sort of region , country, state or city. And I just wanted to pop in here really quickly and add that when I started my own business . I know this is so confusing when you're starting out, and to do it yourself can be can be really confusing. So my best advice is Teoh heater advice and really find an accountant in your local area that knows the laws and knows the steps and has helped other businesses get formed because they can really help you work through this process. I found a friend who had started a business, and he referred me to his accountant and it was the best decision to kind of outsource this process and get the help so that I knew, um and could trust that everything was done the right way. So I just wanted to pop in here and and really say it might be best to after you go through this lesson in this course toe, actually go out there and find an accountant who could help you. And of course, that's gonna be beneficial in the long run for someone who can help you with taxes and accounting and stuff like that, too. Thanks, Phil. All right, let's get going. There's a lot of steps. Eso we video. The first step is choosing a business structure. So business structure. Now we make this course available worldwide and a lot of people are joining it, so we want to make it available to everyone which is why we don't go into specifics about each region. So for my region, the different business structures are sole proprietorship. That means you can use your own name and it's just you, Ah, partnership on LLC or a corporation in a sole proprietorship. You can get going right away. Now that's just you as a single person doing a business. William Carnahan Photography. There's not a lot you have to do to get going, and you can use your own name. And people could just pay you with your gnome name without the photography on the end. The pro of a sole proprietorship is that you get going right away. You can use your name to really just carry you further without doing a lot of the paperwork . But the liability is there. Us. A sole proprietor are fully solely responsible for everything that you do as a business and entity, which is why you would choose one of the other things for a little bit more legal protection. A partnership is a business with more than one person. Typically, this is basically like to sole proprietors kind of coming together. My original wedding photography business that I started when I was 19 I was a partnership and it was just two photographers. Typically, most of people are watching this class or not gonna be in a partnership. You're gonna be running your own single photography business. But just so you know, now, again like sole proprietorship in this case, anyone in the partnership is legally responsible for your actions. Your counting, your money, your business. It's just the two of you as individuals, an LLC or a limited liability company is a way of creating your business as its own in entity in my region. And Elsie is issued an E i N number. So basically has its own tax i d. Versus a personal tax I D. So this is really the easiest way to start a sort of company structured business outside of sole proprietorships. By starting your own entity, the LLC is now liable for pretty much everything. It's liable for its own accounting, its own responsibility, and it's a way of sort of separating you as a person from the company. In case the company gets in trouble, the company will be at risk and responsibility versus you as a person, a corporation is similar to an LSE and that is a separate entity than the person you are as a soap brighter. It also has some tax benefits in certain regions that you're independent where you are. So it might be another step or different step that you take from Anel. See, it's a little bit more complicated to set up, um, and requires a little bit more work on the back end. But depending on the region, this could be a benefit for you. Or, you know, just being a sole proprietor or else he might be benefit you again. All this depends on where you are in the world when it comes down to choosing your business structure. The LLC and the corporation that are available to us in my region are what protect you as, ah, business. Basically, they are responsible versus you. If for some reason you were to get sued, the business would get sued and not yourself. So you can sort of separate that. So because of that, we recommend actually starting a business structure as a business. Whether that's an LLC or corporation again, this is dependent on where you are and what you can start, Um, and what you're capable of doing in certain states and regions, LLCs and corporations may cost extra money. They may benefit you are not benefit you for taxes, depending on where you are. So the big thing for us is the protection. The legal protection that you have is better served in a corporation or actually official business with its own sort of I d and an entity. Again, I cannot recommend this enough. You need to talk to a lawyer, an accountant that's in your region and know your laws to decide what you want to get set up as another good tip is to find other photographers, sit down with them and see what they're structured as, and see if you can get their advice. This is all very general advice on how what we do works for us, but it's very different for where you are 9. Register Your Business Name: So now you've decided what you do. You need to actually register your business. Now, this requires a lot of different paperwork. I'm not gonna lie in my region. I used a company to do that on, and this is also really good step to be talking about talking to an accountant to help them register your business officially. So generally you, your accountant or the website that you hire will have to go to your city, your county or your state, your depending on your region and fill out some paperwork to apply for your business and entity. This will also include in most regions you're gonna have to pay a fee and start to register your fictitious name in a public space because it's announcing that you are a business out to the world. That sort of a law, at least in our region, it might be different where you live, but be prepared for that and that will take some time. So in order to get started with this, if you have no where to look, go to the Internet and search how to file a db a in your city. So for us Ah, how to file a db A in Los Angeles. Um, that's the easiest and fastest way to get to. You should be directed to your cities website, where it will give you more information. And actually, you can download the pdf to start getting to work on those. I think it would be super helpful to go to an accountant or a website like LegalZoom. It'll help you really kind of get going. You pay a little bit extra, but you know that everything's kind of taken care of. Once you've done this, check off that box on your work. She, um it depends on where you are, but sometimes it's going. Take anywhere up from a week to a month, the three months depending on your city and your state. So be patient. There's a lot of other things that you can start working on to start your business and get going. But again, this is very important. If you want to be official business and be protected 10. Get Your Federal Tax ID: so federal and state tax I DS. Now, this is an I d given to you. Also known as an E i n or an employee identification number given to you by in our example by the United States federal government. It allows you to pay business taxes with that specific tax i d versus your social Security number again. This is another example of us separating you as a person and the business as an entity. Um, I also use my e i N number or my business tax I d to pay other people because you're gonna If you end up hiring assistance, are gonna firing a second shooter and you start paying them a certain amount of money in your region, you'll have to issue them or tax documents. And so everything will be done under the federal I of that number versus your Social Security number. So your new business will have a federal and state tax i D. And that's the number that you're going to use to not only pay taxes, but you also need that to set up a bank account for your business. A bank will not open Ah, separate business account if you're a business without a tax idea. So basically, think about it as a Social Security number for your business, your business zone person, and has its own Social Security number. It's called a federal tax I D. And usually this is issued to you. Once all your paperwork has gone through and you've been approved, the mail it to you. You can also go to the IRS website in the United States, and you can look up how to apply for that for free, um, again, very different in every city, state, in region across the world. For the United States. We will include a link in our description on the worksheet for you to get to that. 11. Get Your Business License: so the next step is to look into a business license. Now, this is different than registering your business and whatnot. This is you license to do business in your region in your city or your county, your state where I live in my city as an LLC, I needed to get a business license from my city specifically. Now that comes with another application. Another fee. And I re upped that every year in my city. Even though I'm working out of my home, I still need a business license. Now, this is also something you're gonna need. If you have your own studio or your own space, you'll need some sort of business license, at least in the United States and every different city. Now go to your city's website, go to your regions website and look into what you need to do as far as business license goes. Generally, it will just be filling out a form and paying a fee, and they'll issue a licence sometimes will ask you a couple questions about having employees having chemicals, other things for a photography business. It's very easy and very simple. Just fill out the form and you should be good to go. All right, let's take action. Get out your work sheets and go to Google. Go somewhere. Search for business. License your city business. License your region. Check it off your worksheet on. Let's keep going. 12. Get Your Business Bank Account: All right, We get to talk about money a little bit. So the best thing to do and we're gonna talk more about money structure later. But you need to start a bank account for your business. I highly, highly, highly, highly recommend. You have a separate business accounting bank account on when you talk to your tax person. This will make everything easier when you go through taxes. When you go through payments when you go through hiring people, it will just make everything much easier when you separate it from your personal money. So in order to do that, you need to go to a bank, set up a business checking account and savings account. Hopefully, but order to do that, you need to have done everything else that we've talked about already. The bank account is gonna ask for your business license. They're gonna ask for your federal I D or E i N number. If you're a sole proprietor, they're gonna ask if you've done a fictitious name, they're gonna need all that stuff for you to start a bank account. So you'll have to wait till all your paperwork's in until you get all your Yeah, your numbers to get all that information so that when you go in, you'll have everything ready to go. It will all physically be there. It'll make it much easier to start that bank account, um, and will make your life way easy down the line as we get going. So I know this takes a lot of time before you get all that stuff in, but will be well worth it. And you'll be often running as an official business when an official bank account on and it's gonna make everything so much easier and exciting. Another benefit of having a bank account is it'll make it easier. When people are paying, you could hook it up to Venmo PayPal, and when people write checks to you, they can write your business name versus your name and going into your personal account. It really is the best way to separate everything. It will also allow you to pay for equipment or have money going in and out of an actual account so that you can track all your business expenses. All your money coming in and out all your invoices, all that stuff. It will just make things everything. Uh, it'll just make things so much easier to track and function. So for now, go to a bank that you trust and get started. This is gonna be really great, because sometimes starting a business account with certain banks will add on cool personal stuff or make you qualify for certain credit cards and stuff. But get going, take action and check that off your worksheet. 13. Register Your Online Accounts - Domain Name & Social Media: So we're gonna dive deeper into websites and social media Instagram's. But for now, we want to make sure you're set up with it. So I'm sure you've already looked up your business name and made sure that was free on Instagram or on the World Wide Web so you could start a website. Now it's time to make sure you sign up. If you haven't already sign up for Instagram. Sign up for Twitter. Sign up for your business on Facebook. Get your website going, your websites very important because it's gonna allow you to have an email address. Now, you may already have like a Gmail or in iCloud or, you know, whatever may well account. But the thing with your website is, it will allow you to have your own email address at your business name. So we will at Will Carnahan, for target here, will at will see photography. Now, with some businesses, you may not want to start a website. You may not want to pay for it, so you could start a Gmail account or you could start another account like, for example, with will see photography. I have will dot c dot photo at gmail dot com. It allows me to separate all my business stuff from my personal stuff again. It makes it look a little bit more professional, but the website email is going to make you look way more professional. Will at will see photo dot com or whatever your website is. So get going. Uh, this is going to allow you to help communication and really get going with starting a business. So just to clarify, buying a domain name is different than hosting and building out your website. We recommend you go through websites similar to go daddy dot com to buy the domain name because you want it to be clean now, later on, we can go through companies like Ah, squarespace or Wicks or WordPress, where you take the domain that you've purchased and you apply it to a place where you could host it and create and build your beautiful website. There are also other photography sites, like Zen Folio on site similar to that where you can have a location if you pay for it, but it will have a Zen folio or the name of it attached. If you don't have your own domain name. So I want you to start by buying a domain name if that's where you're gonna go. Uh, now and we'll worry about building out and hosting and putting all your pretty photos on later. If you want to skip to that right away, there's another section on how to build out your building, your website, and you can skip ahead to that now. But in the meantime, get that domain name yet that instagram handle get going. 14. Branding Your Business: Now that you have all your social media accounts, your website, you're officially set up. It's time to create a visual identity, how you look and how you present yourself, and that's called branding. So by branding your business, we mean coming up with sort of a style that you can stay consistent with. You have so many platforms that you're gonna be pushing yourself out on. There's your website. There's business cards. There's Instagram. Ah, you never know. You might go to a trade show, but deciding on how you want to present yourself as faras ah, visual way as faras graphics as faras colors, fonts, themes. You want to start to decide that now, so that when you go to build your website, you go to build your instagram, you go to make your business card. Everything is consistent. Everything flows and you're able to really present yourself in one business manner. Not to say you need something specific or look, but everyone kind of looks different when I was there on style. But start thinking about graphics. Do I want to have a graphic in my profile picture dough? I wanna have a logo that I print on stuff. Maybe it becomes a logo watermark for your headshots that you're doing. You want to think about your color schemes. You know, maybe you're shooting weddings and you want things to be bright and light. Maybe you're shooting portrait, so you want to be more dark and fine art. And so that is how you present yourself. Maybe your fun is more cursive writing and elegant that you might use for your weddings. Or it's more print Addy or more college looking if you're doing more graduation photos, Um, just think about your overall theme that you're going to use as a brand, and we'll get more into that and how to apply it to all the different aspects of what you're doing. Advertising wise website wise instagram eyes. But keep it in mind some of the stuff you may be able to just do on your own. If you feel like you want to start getting into graphic design and you feel creative enough and you want to keep going, you can. You can also outsources toe other artists who are more, you know, apt to making graphics and fonts and building out stuff, and we'll include some resource is for that in the worksheet below. I don't know if it's below, but it's around. So in the case study at the end of this section, we're going to go over examples of, you know, your branding and how we brand with different businesses on what to do, as far as that goes. 15. Set Your Prices: So this is one of the most popular questions we get all the time about setting your prices for your business, and this is gonna change per your region, per what type of photography you're doing, what your experience level is, what you're doing. But it's definitely something that's very important. And it's a base place to start not only how you're dealing with clients, but how your structuring, how you grow as a photographer and as a business. It's also gonna inform how you put money back into your business. So setting prices is very important. And it is one of the baseline things to get going with your photography business. So let's get into it. So to start with, what kind of photo business are you starting? The thing we have to recognize to help you figure out what your first set prices are going to be, is where to start based on what you're shooting now, a wedding or an event we're gonna talk about typically charging per hour ahead shot or a portrait. We're gonna talk about shooting per photo or poorer. Sit down session. As faras fine art and printing goes, we're gonna talk about selling your print, how much that is worth it to you and again that leads back to what is worth it to you now, throughout some prices for you and what we charge, and especially in the case study, will d dive deep into that. And this is something I really want to help you figure out what prices air good for you to start off with. What is your our worth and where you located now, based on where you're located, we might need to see what other photographers air charging in your region Photographer in Los Angeles or Hollywood, where we are, is going to charge actually a lot mawr than a photographer would in a smaller town in another place or another country. So let's start to look up different photographers in your region and maybe get some quotes , maybe see what their estimates are online. Not a lot of photographers post their prices online, so you may need to request a quote. But getting an idea of what photographers air charging for the type of photography that you're doing in your region is a really good place to start. For example, I know that most headshot photographers that are medium range in L A charge About $600 a session plus makeup. Now, if I'm just starting out, I'm probably not gonna be able to charge that much yet because I don't have a name out there. I haven't reached that point yet. Eso I may start at 200 just to get going. Now, if I was a really experienced photographer and I've been doing it for a long time in my region in Los Angeles, they're charging up to $1200 a session. So the only way I can figure that out is by discovering what photographers air charging in my region again, That's gonna be different all over the world. So I can't throw the exact price for you to start at. But look that up. And I would usually start at around 50 to 60% less than a medium range photographer to start. The next thing to take into consideration for a session would be What is your time worth? You. How much is an hour worth to you to charge? Now, if you're thinking about, say, minimum wage where you live, you can kind of target your hourly rate at minimum wage, but chances are you're not gonna want to do that. So a good place to start anywhere around the world is double the minimum wage. So whatever the minimum wages, you can look it up online. Wherever your region is. Double that, that's what you're our is worth to you. And you can round it to like, ah, really like round numbers, like $20 an hour, $30 an hour, $50 an hour. Now, apply that to both the time it takes you to edit the time it takes you to meet with a client the time it takes you to shoot a wedding, and then that's where you can start to base your price. Say you go shoot a wedding for six hours. The ah, the minimum wage and your town is $15 an hour. You will double that at 30. Right? So now I'm gonna go shoot a wedding for six hours or 10 hours. We're gonna apply the hourly rate to our $30 an hour. That's your rate for the wedding. Now you can ADM or to that when you talk about editing and post, how long does it take you to add it. Ah, photo. How long does it take you to edit 200 photos? Now find out how much time that takes and apply your hourly rate to that. And now add that to your wedding rate. So an example for this would be the minimum wage. $15 an hour. Double that sort. $30 an hour. We're going to shoot a wedding for 10 hours. So it's 10 hours times 30. That's $300 that you're charging for that wedding. Now I'm gonna say it takes me two hours to edit. Ah, 100 photos. They do it really fast. So that's $60 on top of your 300. That's $360 now for shooting a wedding and editing your wedding. Now you can apply in meeting with the client beforehand. That may take an hour. You can apply doing contracts and stuff like that, depending on how you want to go. Now, in my mind, $360 issue a 10 hour wedding is not a lot because I charge a little bit more. I'm at the point now in my career, and I've been shooting for about 10 plus years, 10 12 years where I charge about 150 to $200 an hour to shoot a wedding. Now that's a little bit more average for Los Angeles. Ah, and I think a little bit better than $30 an hour. Um, it's really just you really just kind of find a way to gauge that based on the photographers around you and what your hour is worth to you. And I think as you grow as you become a better photographer, more experienced photographer, you'll be able to keep up in that every year and get to a point where you're charging a lot more also when you're doing post and on the side to so also taking account the style of photography and what is more sort of precious Or what's more, you know, more work to you. Ah, wedding. Maybe a lot more work than going out to the beach and shooting a couple or going out and shooting a family session so that hourly rate for the wedding might beam or to you than the hourly rate for you shooting a family portrait. And so take that into consideration when you're trying to figure out how much to charge per hour. Another thing to think about is, ah, again amusing example. But shooting in Los Angeles actors who have headshots or business folk who have headshots are much more important and have a much more bigger investment in it, so I can charge a higher hourly rate for them. Then I worked for a graduation photo who may not be able to afford something like that or they're not using them. For for them to gain money, I would usually charge about 100 to 150 to shoot a graduation photo versus a head shot where you know, I would charge closer to 600 or between four and 600 because I know that that's a little bit more time. As Faras uh, preciseness goes for a business aspect where they're gonna take that investment and make more money versus ah, nice family graduation portrait. They're gonna put on their mantle in their home. So you have to kind of take that into consideration as faras creating your hourly rate. But again, really good way to start is creating an hourly rate for yourself and deciding how much of our is worth to you. Now, I know that I keep mentioning an hourly rate. Now, that's not meant for you to put how much that you charge an hour on your website or tell people how much you charge an hour. This is just to help you figure out how much to charge. As far as your packages and stuff go on your website say you're charging $100 an hour and you want to set up a wedding package for 10 hours. You wouldn't put that you are $100. Now, you would put that this wedding package is $1000. Because I know in my head that it's gonna take me 10 hour. It's gonna I'm gonna charge $100 an hour for a 10 hour wedding. So this is just to help you figure out across the board how much you want to charge. You don't have to put your hourly rate, so I know I charge $100 an hour. It's gonna take me two hours to edit photos. Eso When I put up that I wanna edit for two hours. Ah, 100 photos. I'm going to say that it's gonna cost you $200 but I would never say that it's an hourly rate again. The hourly rate is just to help you figure out how much you charge for an extended period of time. So generally, also as either headshot photographers or event wedding photographers, you'll have bonus options. That means like extra prints, prints in general engagement sessions, extra shooters, stuff like that. And again I tend to use for shooters. I tend to use the hourly rate. All should have a second shooter on for me that shoots at a low, early hourly rate because not as much pressure is on for them. So I calculate how much a second shooter would want. Need to shoot for that wedding might be less than I do, and I would apply that hourly rate to him and add that on as far as Prince go, it depends on how you're delivering your prints to your client. We're going to talk more about printing, and I'll talk more about prices in printing when we get to that. But a lot of time you will set a certain number of digital images like, say, 200 for a wedding or five for a headshot session on. Then you'll start to add up from there and usually again, I add it to the amount of time it takes me to and it those and that I applied to my original, you know, hourly rate that I want to charge for my personal hourly rate. So you're not only paying yourself, but you're running a business, and you need to be able to put money back into your business to pay for all the essentials you to pay for your website hosting you to pay for your equipment. You may want a new lens in a couple months, so you need to start thinking about saving money and putting money into the business for you to spend. Your also gonna need to potentially pay for taxes depending on your region is, and so what I do is a rule of thumb. I very minimum. Every time I get a paid from a client, 15% of that goes right back into the savings account or the business. Now, if you want to start saving more, I would up that to 2025% even 30% because some of that is gonna have to go to taxes. Usually when clients are paying you, you know, taxes were being taken out, So you're gonna have to think about that as a sole proprietor and l c. You'll have to start paying quarterly yearly taxes for that. So putting money aside for each paycheck is really important. Now, take a step backwards and we go back to our hourly rate, maybe add 15% or 20 or 30% to that hourly rates so that you know you're making that much more on top of it. And that again is gonna depend on what photographers air charging in your region. So you can see how all of this is very complicated and very complex based on where you are . This is a little bit more of a guide for you to figure out what the big important thing is that you're paying yourself and you're paying your business because you will not be able to sustain that form very long unless you are getting money in and out. So you're starting out your business. You're figuring out how much you want to charge. You may be shooting for free for friends. Balancing out Hey, can you shoot this real quick for free? There's a big question. As faras discounting goes, I promote discounting when you're starting in the 1st 3 to 6 months of shooting photography . If you have friends that are asking, you, do this or friends or ask you she weddings, you're just starting out. Tell them your price. Tell them your $100 an hour price. Show them an invoice for that. And if you want to help them out discount, show the discount, but show how much you're worth because you're worth a certain amount. If you start just shooting for free, you're telling them you're only gonna charge him 50 bucks an hour or whatever. They're going to start taking advantage that later they may recommend you to someone that was like it was only this much. But if you have proof and you show them, this is how much I'm worth and I'm discounting you 60%. 90% 50% 10% whatever. Because you're my friend, you'll be able to see that discount, and you'll be able to still be able to advertise how much you're worth as a photographer, you could do this over time, and I still do this as my prices have increased and I charged 152 $103.300 dollars an hour . If I'm shooting a wedding for a friend, I will still show them the invoice of how much I'm worth, even if it's got a 90% discount on it. So you can only do that for so long if you want to keep raising your prices. But just make sure that people know how much you're worth. So I know this is a lot of information for you to take in and creating your own prices. But in the worksheet, we're gonna include a formula free to figure out your hourly rate and how much you would charge for a sit down session and a package session for a wedding. I'm also gonna talk more about this in the case study with Phil a little bit more casually because this is so complicated. In addition, I'm going to go ahead and share my current price sheets for my really high end photography company, my old starting out, a wedding photography company and my new headshot company so you can see what I'm charging in my area and how I structure it all. This is meant for you to kind of figure it out for yourself. And this is part of running your own business. But this is as much information as I can give to you to kind of set your own prices and be successful yourself. 16. The Photography Gear You Need to Start a Business: All right, let's talk about some fun photography stuff we actually want to talk about. What year do you need to start your business now? You don't need the most expensive, most up to date gear to get going. Eventually, you may want that if it's your personal preference, but you really just need some basic stuff to start your business with photography. So let's talk about different gear packages you may want based on different styles of photography. First off, let's talk about wedding photography now for wedding photography kind of depends on your style, but all you really need to really just the base starting level is one camera, a medium range lands and a flash. Now you can get away with a lot with a small wedding with just that sort of package. Um, I like to have dual cameras, and I have to like to have a long lens, like a 72 200 type of lens and a medium wide range zoom lens. Something like the 24 to 70 sort of hero lends now. Usually I do that because I like stepping back at weddings and having a really long lens and not being in the way. But then when you do big formal photos, you want to be able to get wide enough to do those. So that's kind of the next level. That full wedding package would be. Two cameras, portrait lens, dual flashes, long lens, medium lens, maybe a really fast light lens, like a 1.2 or I'm planning to do at night during the dances. But again, you could really get away with shooting a wedding event with a medium range, even a kit lens. Uh, it may just be a little harder than getting all the other gear. We'll talk more about this in the case study, and I'll show you some examples of some stuff. Portrait photography. You really, really. This is like the base stuff that you need would just be a portrait lead something like a 50 millimeter and 85 millimeter, maybe even just a 35 millimeter, something that's really nice to shoot portrait's and head shots. Now I use an 85 millimeter to shoot. My portrait's in my head shots, and it's all I use. I literally is one lens to shoot headshots, and that has served me really well on those air, not super expensive to get very basic stuff. Headshots. Now headshots stay a little different than Portrait's portrait. You can kind of do in the dark and do with really cool, interesting light. Head shots are very all evenly lit, so you may need some sort of source of light. Now that could come free like natural light, like a big giant window if you're renting a studio or you can have a flash with the diffusion, or you can have video light setups. But typically you could just use nice, big natural light and a lens in a camera again, back to the 85 back to the nice 50 back to the portrait lens for your headshots events. Now events are very similar to a wedding's, a little less, Ah, formal, less set up shots. It's really just kind of just running around grabbing stuff. And again, you can get away with the medium to long range zoom and a camera, something like a 24 to 70. I've done a full event on, but again, something like that helps toe have two cameras, or it helps to have a long lens like a 72 100 and a wide lens like a 24 to 70 even wider if you're doing like a big corporate shot. So it really kind of depends on your event, but you don't need to spend a lot of money. All you have is like a medium range zoom. And ah, that's why you got you can achieve that. And then you just keep putting that money back in your company. Eventually get the nicer lens of Maybe that second camera in the case study will be looking specifically what I'm using right now. Currently, which has changed over time over the last 10 to 15 years. We're gonna take a look at what I take out on a wedding event. Shoot, and we're gonna take a look at what I would take out on my head shot portrait session. 17. Case Study: Business Basics: Hey, welcome back to another case study. This is the case study for the photography business. Basic Second, really big epic. Second that you just got through. So I hope you enjoy that. A lot of, like, practical step by stuff. Stuff that we know that as you go through the course, a lot of people are just gonna watch through all the lessons and aren't gonna take action until maybe the end of the cores or whatever. But if you do take the time to actually stop and do each step that that's what we want and we're gonna be going over examples. But hopefully especially after at the end of the section, you take a pause and you start doing doing these things. So we're gonna gonna go through this. You've already done it with your business, but we're just gonna use we'll see photo as an example. So, just going back through the steps, the 1st 1 was choosing a business name. Um, And you talked about having your different businesses in the past, I guess. And you talked about not using well, Cardin because the long name. But I guess why we'll see compared toa coming up with another one or what was that? There's a There's a couple reasons for me, and this is very specific to me. I created already for a lot of my cinematography and my stuff before a doing business as name as sort of a sole proprietor called Carnahan creative. So I'm William Carnahan as doing business as Carnahan. Creative, we'll see, is just sort of the brand. Yeah, so I'm still William Carnahan, and that still is Justin abbreviations. We'll see. But it also goes into hell. Cool. Yeah, it also goes in tandem with my and you guys may know Sam Shimizu. He and I have a video production company called Will Call Cinematic. So there's a lot of there's a lot of obliteration going on here. This is a brand across my entire income platform. In addition to that, I got on instagram and I can do not like I went through every militarization off of William Carnahan or, uh, you know, Carney and creative or like see, And there's a lot of similar things and I found an opening for Will Underscore. See underscore Photo on. That's my instagram handle, and it is so short and I love it, and I can say it real quick. We'll underscore CNN's crew. Yeah, and I know that people are gonna be tagging me a lot. People know it's gonna be me by my name. So they're calling me. You know, when they start to type, it will started typing will and hopefully other than will call in my normal instagram. William Carnahan will see FOTO Co. So, yeah, that was a big driver for me on. And I think it looks nice and short. Yeah, I like that. Yeah. I mean, for my for my business, which is video school online it. I was looking for something that again, this isn't a photography business, but business business. I was looking for something that more defined what the business waas and actually started as be teaching video production. That's why did video school online thought it was kind of catchy, Or at least it explained what it waas. The domain name was available, but then it kind of works because it expanded. Expanding to just teaching video video. Yeah, I still want just video school dot com. I have asked the owner so many times because he doesn't have anything on it. But that's time. He's just sitting on it for years. Yeah, he, uh, he asked for $84,000. He's gonna wait. So you have a campus? Yeah. That video school dot com. That would be awesome. Right. But, um, the idea behind just getting the web domain or the instagram name with social media name that you want, you know, you're gonna live with it for a while. Yeah, all your paperwork's gonna be down Everything. So it's good to have something you like. And that's why the end of the day, I think for most photographers, it's probably best just to pick your name. Yeah, hunt, because you'll probably stick with it. I guess the only thing is, if your name is taken, the websites taken because, as we talked about, it's good to have, like, the same name or user name for all social media platforms. But you could also get creative. If it's, you could still call your business will see photo If we'll see photo dot com was taken. And you could just have your website be your name Will Carnahan or whatever. Or you could I could do fill Evan or photography or Philemon Or photo or fill? Evan er, photographer, you could kind of everyday by Philip inner dot com. I get really creative If you really wanted to keep that name. Yeah, but in terms of choosing a name, that's gonna be the actual name on the business itself, which, you know, going through the next steps. That's when you have to be a little bit more specific on what you wanna stick with for the long run. So the next I guess step was all these more kind of official things. We talked, He talked about business structure. So talk about your experience with, I guess, business structure and what you've done in the past. Sure, what will see photo is now. So, um, going back to my old company? I just want to use this as an example. Teoh is called me new to photography, and we'll look at a price sheet later that I found for us to take a look at. But that was a partnership. And that was me and another photographer and we formed a partnership. So we both have liability. We did not get any i n number or anything like that was just the two of us. And so everything was done under our social Security numbers, which is a little, you know, sketchy. When you're charging 3 to $5000 a wedding, it's a lot of money going through. You guys that's gonna end up being taxed. It was easy to dissolve because it was just the two of us, and we just stopped. Um, And then we just closed our bank accounts and stuff like that. We'll see photo. I wanted part of it also is the name was that I wanted to maintain the sole proprietorship This So basically, I am William Carnahan, sole proprietor. And then I filed a db A as a sole proprietor under Carnahan Creative eso that Carnahan creative could achieve and get yaya number. And this is so specific. Teoh California and Los Angeles. Yeah, and where and where we are. And Carney and creative for me personally is sort of an umbrella for all the freelance work that I do as a video guy, as a cinematographer, as a photographer, as a teacher. Yeah, All of my business kind of goes through that we'll be so confusing. Toe have like separately. I am a little businesses, and so it's better just to have it all under that one umbrella. That's my DB A umbrella. Got it. And so we'll see. For you is more of the brand name, which makes sense, and that's totally doable. But if you're just starting out, I think it makes sense. Toe. Do the db A as your as your just your name? Yeah, but you know, if you want more protection, like my video fresh company and your original video production company we filed and I'll see and paid in California $800 a year to have coverage again. That's not We've done wedding videos behind that, but it was worth it. It's a little bit more money, and it was structured like a jealousy, which is just more protection for you. And that makes you know that always made me nervous about, uh, yeah, protecting but again going back to doing the the DB Air. Getting that separate ei and it really helped with creating a new business checking account . Yeah, and so you know, we'll talk more about getting your bank accounts and all that accounting fixed up like that is a really big reason talk. So do that. Yeah. So, um, speaking of doing a db a I'm realizing as I'm doing a search were just coming from California. And this is what you should do if you don't know how to do this is just go to Google and say file and D b A in your state. I did that for New York just for kicks and giggles and db a does come up. But it also they also use the term certificate of assumed name, which I've never heard of there. Right, So that's a different state by state. Yeah, so I guess is a state by state thing that you have that they might be called something else in your country. But it could be called fictitious business name or just business name register a business name. That's what I do. Look for us. Yeah, yeah, a bunch of different terms. So I mean, pretty self explanatory. The federal and state I d. That's just something you apply again. We mentioned will include links to in the U. S. The I. R s website, where you can do that in terms of a business license. I know for me I have to do it in my local city. Every year it comes up and I have to pay the fee. There was a little form, but pretty simple line was pretty easy. Yeah, I think in my city of Redondo Beach, I just went down a city hall. I think that maybe Goto, like the fire department, get a signature, which is, like, next talk funny because they wanted to make sure it wasn't like having employees. And they're like, Oh, you're just a photographer. Yeah, they're like, yeah, whatever. Like, I think they just want to make sure you're not, like, you know, making chemicals and doing crazy stuff. And then I renew it every year, and it's like 100 and 10 bucks. Although I wonder if you're doing like, a dark room. Well, I think they ask questions about the Are you using chemicals? Are you hiring people? How many employees? Well, in a lot of places, they won't want you increasing traffic if you're working out of your home or having clients . And so, um, yeah, that's all. Something that you'll have to figure out. But if you're just working by yourself. It should be pretty easy in terms of bank accounts. I think you covered it pretty much, but yeah, I mean, it's the same thing. I once I got my eye and I was able to start a separate business account under that name. So it was undermined. Normal name? Yeah. It's all hooked up into the same banking system, all my personal stuff. But that was important to me because, you know, we'll get into this more. But like when you start having expenses and income and tracking all that you want to separate your personal stuff from, you know, your photography stuff. Yeah, and that just makes things so much easier. Yeah, in the in the long run. Yeah. I mean, the other thing that is important with the business account, aside from just keeping everything separate, which is so important, we talk about it later in the course with taxes and accounting, with saving a sort of percentage for for all of that stuff. But there are some other perks that you might get with a business account. I think I have, like, a premium personal checking account and a safety deposit box. Now it's nice what's in it. You don't keep your gold, my team, my TV, a certificate and you're probably getting a lot of advertisements for business loans. Things like, um cool one thing that the next thing, which So that's all kind of like the business. He cast stuff, but a couple other things were getting your online accounts set up, so this is more just like setting it up. You talked about registering your domain name for it. Um, and I just wanted to clarify there that some of the most popular places you can do that are go daddy dot com name cheap dot com. There are also a lot of other platforms again will cover them later on for building out your website like Zen Folio Squarespace. You can purchase a domain name from those websites. Typically, um, it'll it'll be an option, but in general you can also just purchase it through, Go Daddy and then have that domain name point to the website that's hosted on squarespace or resentfully or whatever. So if you're if you just want to get started and you don't want to pay for a bunch of hosting options, just doing a 10 20 bucks a year. Kind of deal with Go Daddy is good. One thing I will add to that is whenever you register a domain name, they always ask you if you want to pay for privacy protection, which I would say is definitely good, because whenever you register a domain name, you have to have your name address, and that will become public information. And if anyone does, look up, search for the website that can see who owns it. So if you pay, it's good toe. You gotta pay an extra 10 15 bucks a year to have that actually be private, which I think it's good because not only is it good for just her privacy protection, but I think you get more like Appetite Ticket. It's public information, um, social media accounts. You know, Instagram Facebook. Those are a couple of meat of the main ones. Are you doing anything with? You know, this changes all across time. What's popular? But I mean Twitter. I started a new instagram because I again this goes back to how much time or no time I have on. So as of now, we'll see photo is just strictly on Instagram and the Zen Folio site. Yeah, so it's, uh, it's It's where I get most of my clients through. And it's my free advertisement because I don't want a spend too much time and money on pushing out other places. Yeah, I'm just literally focused on Instagram, but that's like a personal the guy spend way too much time on instagram. Yeah, but I think that's also a good tip is that sometimes it's easy just to pick one platform, focus on it and grow it very. While it's good to have accounts on all these other places, it can get to be a lot of work. But there also are ways to automate a lot of it, where you can automatically share Instagram post to Twitter or Facebook or wherever and depending on the different accounts that there is a different audience. Maybe there's a little bit of on older, more mature audience on Facebook compared it instagram or things like that that you might want to consider. I guess the tip here is, since this is just about getting your account set up is we want you to go out there, sign up for the account on probably all these platforms just so that your name is taken in case you do you want to use it at a later date. So, um yeah, I would definitely say Instagram Facebook. And while you're at it, why not Twitter and Pinterest? Even interest is that kind of becoming a more popular 12 And I used to use that with wedding photography. Yeah, I would build outboards and help and work with the bride and groom, toe bride and bridegroom. Grumman's build out like, yeah, sure was for wedding for newborn food photography. That's a lot. I mean, people aren't Pinterest looking up that stuff. All right, let's talk a little bit about branding, which you covered, but we didn't dive too deep into it. So in terms of branding, I think of things like your graphics. This could be your logos or just general graphics you're creating for social media. You talked about colors, font choices with a graphic or logo has us Have you created something like that I have in the past? Not for We'll see photo Our first photography company, me new to photography way, had a color scheme. It was yellow, white and I think light blue on so all and you'll see we'll bring up those price sheets. I think I email them to you. We'll bring those up and show you the color scheme went across their price sheets one across our our business cards and one across. We did a couple of trade shows for wedding. You know, business, business. See things. And that really informed the entire look. And it had that entire feeling, Um and so I haven't really gotten into that. We'll see photo yet, I think because I'm dealing with a lot of professional clients versus the wedding stuff, I'm dealing with more random public clients. Yes, it's a little bit more forward facing advertising. I think we'll see you eventually get there. But I need to kind of start building up the momentum. Yeah, and I mean sometimes, like if it's just yourself, I think a lot of people get excited about creating like a logo, but just using, yeah, just using like your image across all your profile. Isles is good. I think the main tip I would give us just keep it. It's good to think about your branding, so that's consistent. Across all your platforms because but don't kill yourself. We don't kill yourself, but but it's good. It's good. Like when someone's looking at your Facebook and then going to your website, and it looks the same houses, same styles, style photos, like graphics and everything. It starts to feel a little bit more professional. Yeah, you know, from from, ah, business business aspect video school online has a great logo, and you have a consistent color. And you got hats and get some and will call had stickers. And, you know, you start to develop that as you go, but I don't think it's that important as a photo at the type of photo businesses we're talking about to start. Yeah, for sure. All right, so those that was a little bit about graphics. Um, the next thing you talked a lot about was pricey, which is so important a lot of people are confused about that. Don't know how to do that. So let's actually look at a couple examples that I'm bringing up here. Yeah, and what you're going to be what we're gonna be taking a look at our to price sheets that I've created for actually two different wedding cos I'm not creating them for We'll see right now because it's all very word of mouth. And I again I'm dealing with professionals. Like I just talked to them, um, with wedding stuff. I've had two different waiting companies. Uh, the older one media to photography is, uh, sort of dead now, but it's getting Yeah, it's good, because this is what maybe is a little bit more beginner. Yeah, not beginner, but like it's I mean, obviously, it's a clear kind of. So on on my price sheet that I would present to people is, you know, our logo. Our website are sort of like style, a few our favorite photos at the time and guided. We only shot like four weddings before. I think we made this pricey, but what we did was we broke it down by three different packages where the lowest package was 3200 because we had two photographers, always and an assistant. So always we have three people on set or at your wedding. That's eso. That's for 3200 for three people is like pretty good, and then it comes with six hours. You got all digital images and the online gallery. Now, from there are center two packages we made pretty close to pricing with each other. It just changes as faras like they get what they Yeah. And so those were so on. Then our biggest package was 4800 which was basically as much as we could possibly think of . Yeah, this is this change, though. This is one of our first ones on Ben. We added the engagement session and an ala carte to add on to that sort of stuff. So this is like a really based thing for two photographers. An assistant? Yeah. I think you could probably cut each one in half if you took a photographer away. Yeah, I just had an assistant. What's the one thing we didn't talk about? But it was the importance of having tiered pricing and having multiple options. I mean, I know a bit about that, and like, basically finally people towards mostly getting that mid tier. There's gonna be some people going crazy with that height here often, but the difference in price and when you get with the low tier versus the mid tier, it just makes them want to get that. It makes it permits here. Yet we actually it's super funny, because back today we structured this off of at the time I Max, in the way that the four levels of Max work, they have a low tier and they had a really high tier. And then the two center tears were so close in price, uh, and so it kind of gave them the option for adding or not adding stuff on. But you wanna, you know, expand enough that you can get the price range of people in the audience that are potentially ordering you. But you also want to like you, like, steer them towards a really reasonable price that you really want to be working towards, which will allow you to buy more progress. No, that yeah, sort of stuff. So that's where that sort of the menu to start a system came from. And I think it's good to have, like, all this information other I remember from my first video wedding video business. I had a price list, but it was a lot more confusing, I would say, because I had a lot more options a lot. All the current things, though. And I think at the end of the day, it's a good idea. Just to be simple with keeping it simple is very helpful that people who are looking at a lot of these time they just want to know your price. No, you offer move onto the next because they don't know like E. I mean, like, in this you don't say like three shooters per package. But you will tell them that, right? And they if it says two shooters, one shooter, three shooter in the different packages as a lay person, they might be like, Well, do we need to? Shooters are doing the three shooters. What's the difference? And, you know, you have to explain that to them and for our business. We decided we're not gonna shoot a wedding without two shooters and an assistant. Yeah, I was just the way it was gonna be. Yeah, cool on. And if you look at this one so I haven't talked about this company. Yeah, yeah. Elizabeth Cruise weddings, isa partnership. I have with, ah, fine art photographer. And she does a lot of modeling stuff like she's very popular, gets paid a lot of money. And so we've gotten enquiries about really high end weddings because she's a little famous on Instagram. And so we kind of teamed up. We used our middle names. So her mom was it? Yeah. So, Elizabeth, cruise weddings. We got on squarespace. We bought a domain and we just put a price list together and put it up. They are tears. Here are 4000 6000 8000. And you know, if I just shot one of those in a year that Yeah, but again, this is two shooters where she'll be editing and I will be running the business aspect of it because we both have such different styles. And we'll take a look at the Elizabeth Cruz wedding website later because it's way more high end looking and way more simple. And when we're fine are looking OK, so that's sort of the tears there again. We're trying to drive you to the center cost here, but obviously like these air for very high end weddings. Yeah, so it's It's a little different, but again, we're trying to be simple. This is what you get, get, get. And this is I mean, it's simple because What they get is pretty much the same, except for the total hours that you're covering them. And that's again, we're going back to, like, what are out. What? Our hourly worthless. Yeah, so that's where the hours come in. They don't see that it's per hour how much we figured it out. But yeah, they see a general asked One thing that I think as we're looking through these prices and talking about them is I think a lot of people starting out are gonna be like charging $4000 for a wedding. That's crazy. Where I lived that so much as a new guitar about so much, and I think we don't want you to get out there and feel like, Well, you have to church 4000 Prices are very high. Yeah, and that's based on experience, location, all all that. I think for people just starting out, it's probably much more likely that they're going to be charging, you know, for $500 for a wedding. If that to get started, maybe doing a couple for free. If it's friends and family just to build up your portfolio, um, thes prices, they increase over time. Yeah, I think When I first started 12 years ago ish, our tears were more like 611 115 100. And that was with one photographer. And so and that was like Plenty at the time. But now we'll talk more about scaling up. And that was 12 years ago. I've been shooting for a long time, and so has the other two photographers. And those air both partners shipped jewel photographers. A lot of you guys are just a single photographer and you don't. And you could cut all that at least in half. Probably more for your starting out prices. Yeah, but I will say you can pump you your prices pretty quickly again. I didn't wedding video, but basically the same idea. I remember my 1st 1 It was a friend of a friend. 1st 1 never done it before. I charge $250 that was way too low. But it was my first wedding. Got on my portfolio. Less pressure for sure. But I mean, by my 4th 5th wedding, I was charging to $3000 just because, as you build up your portfolio, if you if you have a portfolio. And if it's good, obviously, um then you can charge, you know, the standard price or whatever. Whatever is that they don't know that you shot Juan versus 20 or 100 so long as you look up the market where other photographers were doing. Yeah, emulate. But of course, we don't condone faking it till you make it and using someone up. Some people I've seen those other like stock photos or other people's photos in their portfolio and website, and that's something that I would definitely stay away from. All right, So the next topic was actually your photo gear. We're gonna stop this case study. We're gonna do a completely separate video on that because I know we're gonna dive a little bit deep into that on. Do you think people are gonna be really interested? So we'll see you in that next video where we talk about equipment 18. Case Study: Will's Equipment: If you get a couple of charters in the room and you want to talk about equipment, I don't know when they're gonna get out of it. And so we'll try to keep this key studies short. But I know this is what everyone loves talking about, and it is a question that we got a lot of because we surveyed our audience about you know what they want to learn in this class. And a lot of people were asking about what equipment do I need Should I upgrade? You know, muralist deals alarm all these things and a lot of these questions we answer in the photography in France community, which we've mentioned before. The tarty in France dot com takes you to the community, and you could ask those questions and then of the day are our motto has always been She was what you have, and really, you can take amazing photos with any camera, and it doesn't matter what brand it doesn't matter will hit muralist first. DSLR necessarily. Of course, there's some cameras that have some benefits to to them versus others, but you can really start a business with pretty much any young any camera. Their minimum. Yeah. Really? So this is what you brought today? My base set up. OK, so this is for wedding, for headshots, for what I can with this. What's in front of you right now. I can do anything assed. Far as I'm concerned, I am missing a really long lens. That's Ah, you know the equivalent to 72 200 that I would take on a wedding. But this is the base of everything. And I have more equipment that I carry, but I don't know to start, I've moved to mere lis cameras. I used to be on the SL ours but from you when I shoot weddings and when I travel, this is so light and small. This is my walk around lens. This is the basic thing I carry with me every day. It's a Fuji x you to There is a huge XY three that's out. There was a huge x t one that's a predecessor. And when you watch those, there might be a 47 by the time he watches. But the thing about is not what brand it is. The fact is that it's small. It's lightweight. It's meaningless. It's quiet during weddings, in certain in certain situations. And when you're shooting a wedding for, you know, 6 to 8 hours your back be killing you, like issue with my giant deal. Solares. Yeah. So kind of you. It's which are kind of So this is basically the equivalent to a 24 to 70. You see how instantly that camera got a lot bigger? Yeah. This is the mid range the mid range zoom that I would take on a wedding. And it would be my may or event. And this would be sort of my main, uh, shooter. Yeah. And that's all you need to get a lot done with just this lens in this camera. Yeah. Um, if you want to take the next step up, I get a vertical grip. That's battery power. But also as, like, our part in terms of first. Yeah, I could do my first months. I cannot hold it like this now for when I do my headshot sessions. Yeah, I started doing Yeah, like that. So you know, again, that's another level up. Also, it just it looks cleaner. It gives me a nice good grip on it. and and I can really hold it. It looks a little bit more professional of people are spending a lot of money on you. But again, that's sort of a personal preference. Yeah. Normally, when I'm shooting a wedding, my full kit is this guy with flash and what ones it is the 16. 50 16. 52.8 million. Jim, It's like the equivalent of the 24 to 70 for Canon. This will be my kick ass main shooter on a wedding. Yeah, and I would even turn this up and put the Gary Fong diffuser on it. Yeah, and so now this thing is way started with Let's have something else to be. Oh, so so this is like, the main shooter that I would run around at a wedding or an event with, um this is a Nikon flash on the Fuji camera. Which works? Yeah. Used to be an icon. I didn't want to buy any food you flash yet? Because I hate flashes. Yeah, well, I was just gonna say you mentioned in the lesson earlier that your main kit for wedding photography would include a flash, and I would agree because you don't know. Yeah, when you're inside, there's a lot of tears. You're not gonna be wanting to use this unless it's your style for, like, the couple's section portrait session of them necessarily. But if you're in a low life situation at the reception, sometimes you just lash. Yeah, so and so also, what I'm in a wedding is I have my really cool dual camera hardness. Yep. Very well. Um, I honestly get a lot of compliments on this thing, but the main the main focus of this is so that it looks professional, which makes that hold fast. Hold fast. Yeah. And you know, you can wear normal. You can wear a normal a normal harness, or like a normal thing. But if you're running two cameras, this looks really nice. And it kind of looks like you just have suspenders on. Yeah, and you're a wedding guest, and basically, you plug this into the bottom of the camera and a hang sound like this, and I can whip it up. That's cool. I get compliments on it because I look like a wedding guests. I don't see my cameras when I walk up to them, and it relaxes a lot of people. And so I'm able to kind of candidly bring my camera and take a photo on. And I think that's a really big benefit, too. Shooting weddings is like looking like a professional looking, like, you know, you belong there and like, you blend in because that's my style. Shoot. Yeah. So that would be my normal regular have two cameras. 24 70 on one side, 7200 on the other side. Shaped like this. Um, and that's an eight hour deal for me. Yeah. Um, so yeah, but did you bring, like, why do you ever find yourself bringing, like, an extreme wider and not for weddings? I think some people have a style of doing that. Um, Anthony uses really wide lenses, but, uh, 16 on here is more like 25 30 30 ish. Um, and that's been plenty for me. Usually. Yeah, I would like to get, like, a wider lens at some point, but I think you know, 16 24. It's probably the widest leading event. Usually, depending unless you're taking a giant photo of 800 people, which I have done. And this was not enough Then I proceeded to quickly think of my feet and take two or three photos all at once, so you will find yourself in a situation. I mean, in terms of other equipment. I mean backup batteries, like backup batteries, tons of backup batteries. Sometimes we'll even throw in an older cameras. A back of cameras toe have talked about horror stories across different courses. Live streams we've done. But we off that or a story where our main camera stops working or whatever. And you know, the bride's about to walk down the aisle and you wish you had a second camera. So then you gotta go talk to the video guys about giving you It's not. It's not necessary because a lot of people just don't have the budget. But maybe it's something you rat. Yep. I mean, you could get a lot of of the lower end models of cameras. Borrow lenses dot com. You can rent from a lot of those DSLR zehr less than 50 bucks a week, less than $100 a week on def. You can build that into your pricing. It might be worth, or if you know, if you do upgrade your camera and you're taking that next level. And you don't end up getting rid of or selling your old camera. Yeah, just get in your car. You put in your bag, have it ready to go to Tokyo. That's kind of the same place. Keep in your back. Keep it close by. You know, it's could really benefit. I mean, are literally ask a friend. That's why the barley get community of photographers around you is so important. I mean, people borrow your other. You have the X t. One idea. I borrow people while all the time wanting to shoot foodie I was of arguments. Is all the time, too? Yeah, so that's that's awesome Trying. Think there's anything else? I'm sure. Really? It a lot of questions on equipment. Well, this is my Well, this is my set up. That's wedding. Yeah. Yeah, that was winning. This is my base set up for portrait photography. This is on Fuji. It's a 56 1.2. So this is more like an 85 90 sort of set up. And this is what I shoot Portrait's with, um, again. It's just the body in the sleds and I used natural light. But I do when I am sure. Borders, I do. I have this vertical group on here. Unless I'm traveling. Yeah, like all the time. And so now this has become my main photography head shot camera. Yeah, I've taken all everything you see on my instagram has been taken with this exact set up in my hand. Um, and you know, sometimes you can knock the heads. Sometimes it gets even smaller, so you can see it's like a very simple sort of set up. I think at the end of the day, we talked about it early. This isn't a class where we're teaching you how toe be a guitar or take great photos. But I will add in there that, like so much of taking great photo, is everything else. It's the composition. It's the people. It's the lighting, the background. It's the location. All of that that's gonna really makes a photo Great. No matter what camera you're using, totally. So if you do have questions about gear, I would recommend that you head over to photography and friends dot com, join the community and ask it there because we can help you out. Other photographers can help you out. You can also posted the course, Um, as well, but yeah, I think that pretty much covers it. Cool to see what you use. Pretty simple. Also, as I say, it's simple. It's something that you've built up retires has been invested a lot of money. This is this set up that you're seeing right now. I've probably built over three years. Yeah. Yeah. This is not something I just went out and bought. Yeah, three years. And after doing version, other cameras for a long time. Yeah. And also, uh, every business and everything I've shot put more money back into my gear. Yeah. This is not just going out and buying stuff like you have to work up to it. Yeah, start with what you have and yeah, you can, you know, great with it. All right. See you later. Seeing the next lesson 19. Introduction to this Section: welcome to this new section in the chorus. By now, if you've actually taken action and done all of the steps that will laid out in the last section, you are so far already in starting your own photography business. One of the next and most important things that you're probably wondering is, how do you actually get your first client? How do you start making money with your business? And that's what will is gonna be covering throughout this section So well is going to be giving you some great practical tips on how you find your first clients how you charge for your first clients. So really, by the end of this section, and you should know exactly what you need to do to get out there, and if you start putting it into practice, I'm sure you'll find your first client suit. 20. You Need to Prove Yourself: So to start getting your first paid clients, you need to sort of show that you're capable of shooting the for the clients that you're gonna get. So in order to do that, you already need content of examples of photos that you shot to put on instagram to show to people to get you hired. So how do you get that stuff? Well, a lot of times chance. Or maybe you shot a wedding in the past. Maybe you shot your friend or your partner out there To USA's examples. The big thing is to get examples to show people to get paid. Now, if that means taking out your friends and going to shoot headshots of the reports of them, even if they don't need them, you see, you're gonna need them for your work advance. Or maybe you're going to a wedding for a friend and you need to take a couple of wedding shots. You can take your camera long, And even though you're a guest, just take some photos and ask them if you can use them for your website. The big thing here is that you need examples of work to get work, so it's time for you to take action with this. Take a break from the class if you haven't already and see about getting those photos together. Go look through your old libraries of photos. Try and start to see how what what photos you can use. That'll show your style of photo that will get you more work. If you don't have those, get out there and start shooting Your friends, your family, your partners go to events, start shooting some events really take action and get that content that you need to start getting clients. Without that content, you're just not going to be able to have someone give you their hard earned money to shoot for you. 21. The Best Place to Find Your First Clients: So now you have your content. You have your examples. You ready to show people what you have? How do you get your first clients to expand that content? Start practicing, start making money. Who do you go to first? I go to the fruit. People that are closest to me. First, that's my family and friends. Now I'm not going to charge them an arm and a leg. I'm not gonna like. Tell them that the only thousands of dollars to start shooting them, But I will see if they need shots. Family is a good place to start as faras weddings go assed faras engagements go. Maybe there's a newborn. You can go talk Teoh. Maybe they need a new ah profile photo for their, you know, for their website or for their business that they're running. This is a really good place because you know them. There's an open dialogue that you can start shooting with your friends and your family. Your friends and friends of friends are really the next step, and that may include getting to them through social media, something like putting a post on Facebook and say, Hey, starting photography business out willing and ready to give discounts. Or we'll shoot for cheap stuff like that. And usually friends of friends will start re posting that now. Cool aspect of this, too, is if you even get a couple of friends to pay you even like 50 bucks to shoot a photo or a head shot or, you know, an engagement session. They'll then post that on Instagram or on Facebook, and that will lead to potentially another client. So it's really about getting a snowball. Going with your friends and family is kind of the core part of starting it. You shoot for them, they expand their network, they expand their in our thanks for an hour and soon. Once you're past your family and friends, you're into paying clients that you don't know new people. You're out in the public, and that's really how you kind of get it going. And that's really how the business structure works is it starts toe work as word of mouth. You shoot for someone, someone asked All that photo looks great. Who did that like, Oh, well, point you back to this person. And so that's kind of how it works. But you have to start with the people that you already know and the people that they know, and that's how you really get going. So using your inner circle is really what I've seen as the most successful way to start. Eventually you'll be on Yelp. You'll be on Google search. You'll be out there in the world. You be going to trade shows. You'll be meeting new people. You'll be on instagram. But in order to get to the point, you need to create more and more content you to start somewhere that you already have a connection with. Now I already have connection with friends. I already have connection with friends of friends, and that's really the best and easiest way that I've seen work as like a quick and successful way to get going. 22. What to Charge for Your First Clients: so getting content is important and there's sort of this fine line that you're gonna have to walk between shooting for free shooting. Ah, for ah, small pay and then shooting for discounts. It's a It's a fine line that you started have to feel out with your friends and family. Uh, what I started doing was I started shooting for free at a very young age. I was able to work my way up, but it takes time again. This goes back to the whole patience and hard work over a year long thing. You're not going to get someone to pay you 500 to $1000 right away. You need to work your way up to that, so you have to decide how you're going to do that. A lot of times, I we'll shoot for family and, you know, secondary family on that for free. Always for sure, my next really close Franklin Group. I will always shoot for free or just be like you know, this is how much I would normally charge. Whatever you can afford is fine, which is like a really good way to show your friends and family that you are worth something, but you're okay with shooting it for free. But you know, if they can 30 some cash. That's also helpful. Um, when you start to meet people that you don't know is really where you want to start really charging people for sure, you can start a charged family and friends to if you like. But when you start to meet people that are 123 friendships away, that's when you should really start charging. And if you get into the habit of not charging, charging way too deep of a discount or charging yet, nothing, that word of mouth will spread. And you don't want that to happen because you'll start to get into a hole of not being paid to do what your job is. Ah, and a lot of people sort of perceived Photography is sort of sometimes not a job if you're not fully invested into it, and so will try and snake you out of not paying. And that's kind of a bummer, because it is a full time job. It is a skill you have spent money on classes on education, on equipment to get to this point, so you're worth it. You are worth, and it's worth you charging money because you have invested your time, energy and your own money into it, and that's what they're paying for. So just keep that in mind that sometimes people may view photography as maybe not so much something I want to pay for it cause you know their uncle or their kid or someone who's a hobbyist could be doing it. But they're investing in you, and you should feel comfortable charging people for that investment. But again, it's a little bit of a fine line that you started. Have toe workout yourself as you continue to go on and you'll learn as you go. Trust me, you will pick this up very quickly. Just start low. Next person charged a little more. Next first, charge Whitmore or every year, change your prices and stuff. Then we'll get more into that. In the case. Study 23. Important Note About Shooting Wisely: So this is another thing to consider. When you get your first client or you get your first shoot, you should treat it like a riel riel client because if you start building bad practices now , they'll extend into the future. So by treating Israel, shoot, I mean, do this as if you were getting paid, because you want to treat your clients the same way across the board and you want to start off with good practices. Shoot the way you want to shoot us, Faras style goes, and make sure you treat them well. Edit the way you want to edit and process that the way you want a process that means communicating with them well, working well with him Now, even if it's a free shoot, delivering on time editing to your timetable and then also making sure that they're happy and they're enjoying their photos as well as asking them to promote you are asking them to help with other clients. Practicing this workflow. Practicing how to deal with clients for free is another really good way to sort of set you up for success in the future. The reason being if you're shooting someone for free. The stakes are a little bit low, and you could make a little bit more mistakes. Or at least it's a little bit more allowable. You don't want Teoh, but it will help because they're not paying a ton of money yet. All your mistakes out now, figure out how you want to deal with your workflow now, so that when you're charging a lot more money in a month or two, you'll be prepared and ready to go. 24. Case Study: Getting Your First Clients: Welcome to the new case study this one. We are wrapping up the section on getting your first paying client getting your first client. So first, let's just dive into with will see photo. Who is your first paying client man with will see photo. It actually didn't happen till my second session. So the way everyone will see photos that I block out a whole day and I try and get as much people in was one day. So the first day I went out and reached out to friends of friends, actors, of friends, of Friends, of friends. I was like, Hey, and starting a new headshot business. You want to come in for like an hour and 1/2 and I can shoot your headshot for free. So the first day I had five people a shot headshots for for free, eso right off about at five brand new headshots with three different looks on each headshots. So that's 15 photos that I acquired just for free, cause I put money into So the next one of those people went out, posted those photos, you know, word of mouth. And then I had three people on that next session without were fully paying clients that several ready to go? Yeah, so it only took, like, two sessions to do that. Now, that's also again because I already have experience. And I've been doing this for a while. Yeah, and you know, we'll take a look at my instagram later. But I started the instagram with older headshots that I've taken like years ago when they still look tangled up like, pretty professionally. But that's the best way I got my first clients. So literally I want to, like, break down. So the first ones that you're building after portfolio with for free like, did you post on instagram that you've female call text? How you How would I find the people? Yeah, um I I asked a few friends if they knew anyone that needed headshots again. That's my That's my network. Yeah, I know a lot of actors, you know, a lot of actors. Yeah, actors. And then So Okay, So you did those then for the next one again, Like how? What did you post on instagram and messaged people are so this time. So this time I post on instagram with the new photos like I think I post like six on I put down, have a next have another session looking for people. I think I got 11 person randomly hit me up. I gave up my prices. I said, Okay, book the time. The other two people I had just sent emails or text to my friends and they went ahead and said, Hey, my buddies shooting headshots. Caesar's prices Are you interested? And they just hit me up. That's so cool. And I mean, that's really how I do it. I mean, I like you talked about in the lesson. Your first clients coming from friends, families, acquaintances It really you got to get out there and ask you, Will you tell people that you have a business and a lot of people are You are thinking, Oh, yeah, I'll do that. I'll talk to my family, But get out there and do that like put together an email sending you in evil blast to your friends family, and you just never know who's gonna be wanting wanting photos or what whatever it is. And they could be using them for anything and for our wedding business that we had started . We shot my cousin's wedding for free. They were like, Would you be down? They knew we were decent photographers. Yeah, we were nervous as all heck. But, man, we got so much content from that one wedding that we should I think that priceless that we looked at earlier had two shots from it. And it's like that, but those it looks like multiple weddings cause we shop in so many different ways. Yeah, so you know, you never know He needs them. And you should just go for especially with your family. And I'll say my first paid photography gig, which again, I don't have a photography business, But if you know the skills, people are gonna end up asking you to do Photography was a friend who were having a baby and they wanted a maternity session. And so I was like, Yeah, sure, actually, before that, I took holiday photos. Yeah, a lot of Christmas photos for people actually was probably my first paid Oh, gosh, Way back when different. Yeah, we actually posted in the photography and friends community asking how some of our students got the first paying client, which is exciting because we've got hurt a lot from to fund story took our glasses and not that is all s but part of it. They used our skills. We've taught them and they've got their own first gig. So I just want to share a couple of these stories. Um What? I won't name names because I didn't ask for permission. Teoh name. But the ideas are great. So one posted on Facebook marketplace. Didn't even think of outside idea. Just Facebook has the marketplace section. You probably seen people trying to sell shoes or cars on on that, but just posted just right there. Yes. Says they It was a wedding to with about 50. Yes. So I'm not sure, actually, how they did it. Someone was asking for a wedding photographer or if they they were posted like that's still a good spot to look, though. I mean, you know, Facebook, Facebook marketplace, like a lot of people are going to see that. And you never know who's willing to take a risk on a beginning photographer, especially if the price is right. Eso it does look like she actually posted an ad on Facebook marketplace, which is pretty cool the other Got another story. He made a a mug with a picture of a bird on it, and that was just for his wife's birthday. But then, uh, client saw that and Oscar a canvas of ah bird photo. So we just made a pretty Candice Bergen sold it. Yeah, yeah, it's on asset. Another says there, Brother, um, got them a job. So again, just telling people another, says Facebook Neighborhood Group. Although there's a lot of groups on Facebook, especially in your community, even next door dot com is a great big good spot. A starting out for target. Be anyone need shots for 50 bucks? Yeah, I've seen that actually, on next door in my local neighborhood. Um, just posted set. Yeah, Sidley posted saying they're launching their website, Um, Or someone posted someone else posted asking, saying they're asserting website and then you'd candids of her working. So she responded. And that's awesome. Uh, let's see. One other person says they worked for a realist State magazine and one of the real tourists saw their work and wanted to do photography for all their listings, which say, That's awesome on. And let's see, she's a project manager at one of our contractors. She loved the pictures I had of my son is my profile pictures and asked if I would take pictures of her grand baby do This is like this is like the beauty of, like, modern technology, social media. I feel like the consistency here is that there's no set path, but that in order to get more working to get out there, get working, get up, get shooting post stuff, you know, interactive people and even like you know you're seeing there there are gonna be some people who are like I don't have friends or family that are interested. I don't talk to my friends and family. Don't talk my family, doctor friends. There are ways to get clients without that, to posting to the marketplaces. We didn't even mention like Craigslist. But like posting to Craigslist or any of these other photography boards, places like that. We'll talk a little bit more about this later on when we talk about expanding your online presence and using places like the not or wedding wire. If you're a wedding photographer to post a profile but catches getting out there and putting your work out there. People are going to see it. Definitely end up hiring. Sure, that's the best way. That's the only way. Awesome. Thanks. So much thing we covered. Well, we'll see you in the next. 25. Introduction to this Section: welcome to this new section of the course, all about putting up your own photography business website in this section, we really are going to go through all the steps necessary to get a website up and running not only the technical aspect, but also what it means to put together a website that works for a photography business. What you need on the website. Building out your portfolio, looking from the customer's perspective and seeing what their flow is through your website to make sure it's easy for them to actually connect with you. Contact. You see what they want and hopefully hire you as a photographer. We'll be showing you a lot of inspiration throughout this section that we personally like. Of course, if you have a different style, it's important for you to put in place your own branding in your own style. So keep that in mind as you go through this section and as you actually start to implement these tips and tricks and build out your own website. But really, by the end of this section, you should have a website up and running that will make your photography business look awesome to share with the world 26. The Best Website Platforms for Photographers: So why do we have websites? While a lot of it has to do with being basically the front of your store or the way to contact the outside world? We have social media. We have all these other aspects of your Facebook and all these things. But having a website is really ownership by you and it's your front. Facing is the first front facing thing you have to your client whether that be them finding you, Uh, I'm hiring you, them finding out who you are and what you're about said they feel comfortable. They trust you for them to hire you. The website is also for you to be able to control what you share. You're gonna be able to control your business. As far as the types of photography you dio how people can contact you. Your pricing. Maybe basically, your entire branding is based off of your website. So a part of doing this is picking a platform on how to do this. Now there are basically two different ways to build a website as its own. And there's another way of using a photo centric website. So let's start with fully constructing a website Now you confuse a company like Squarespace or Wicks, where you can kind of plug in play you picket template that a lot of other photographers use. This is very good and very easy for someone who doesn't want to go into the depths of coding and building out different ways of like constructing their site. If you want to do that, you need to use something like WordPress, or you can actually learn HTML and actually build your own website. Between these two, I would honestly go with the plug and play. Squarespace, Wix sort of style of website squarespace I know costs a little bit of money wicks. You confined different sort of levels of how much you want to pay. As faras tears and templates like that. These sites also construct ways that will build your mobile site. When someone's looking on a phone or a tablet vs your actual desktop, you can really it's really easy for you to implement portfolios. They have different styles of portfolios. You can show it will compress and change your photos to really fit and run well on a website Ah, website that looks professionally made, and that's kind of the big deal about a website to is that you're able to present a professional looking front like you've taken time, money and effort into what you're doing. One quick option is that Wicks will offer you, Ah, site for free. They'll show advertisements and stuff for them. But if you want to start right away, Wicks is the way to get started. You could eventually pay to make those go away. So photography century websites are websites like Zen Folio, SmugMug 500 picks. And these websites and platforms were actually created for photographers specifically. And that means that a lot of their templates on a lot of ways you build their website is meant for photography. Also, they allow access for clients or sharing photos or hosting. Your photos were actually even printing through their website. Now you could do several different tiers on all these different websites. Usually there's a free tier where there's advertisements, you can't do much. Also, your website you are l is your name of your company slash zen folio or slash smugmug or something like that. And as you pay, you get things opened up for you. So we'll talk more about this in the case study, but I personally use in Folio and I pay for the top tier, which means that I can apply my own u R L with my own name that I bought from Go Daddy. And now I have access to everything that they provide. And for me, a lot of that has to do with having clients be able to access their photos and their galleries with a password. I could decide to put on watermarks through the site. I can also lock downloadable links or unlocked Annable links. I can create online galleries for my clients and great links to Pinterest. There's a 1,000,000 things you can dio that are already built into the hosting. Um, a lot of people end up using this as a way for client access, but then they'll use WordPress or squarespace as their front facing website so you can have a marriage between the two, or you could just use one of the other. The goal. This is to just get you started. We want you to get your website up and running because that's how you're going to start to get clients. Now, if that's a free option for you to get going. Now take it and go for it. Unless you're ready to spend some money and start building it. It's very easy to transfer hosts in different websites, and it's also very easy just to rebuild your site. Once you've created one, you're going to see what works for you. What doesn't work for you? As you start to shoot more clients, you're gonna have more content to put on your websites. And then also you'll start to see how you're gonna share photos with your clients, which will get more into later. Do you like just downloading or sending them a thumb drive, or do you want a site that will allow them to come in and have a password and stuff like that? The big thing is to just get going and get started. 27. What You Need to Put on Your Website: So what needs to be on your website now? The structure of building it out can kind of depend on how you want your style to be. We'll go through some more examples during our case study, but here are the most important things that you need to get on your site to get going. A portfolio that's actually probably the most important thing. If you don't have anything else other than contacting you, A portfolio is huge because your new clients are gonna want to see what you're capable of and what you're gonna do for that. Now, if you're just focusing on one style of photography, like we said weddings or events or head shots, that will be the only thing that's on there. But if you're doing multiple, different parts of, like, just weddings and different types of events, maybe you're gonna wanna have to two or three different tabs of the type of photography that you're doing again. If you remember back at the beginning of the course, I said to start out, you should probably focus on one thing. It'll get your business going faster and you'll get to start to be making money a little bit quicker, as well as reaching your audience faster if you have a variety of things that would actually work as fast. But this is where you would put in just your portfolio or different types of portfolios. The next thing you're gonna want is in about me or contact page, and you can either marry these pages together or separate them, depending on your style of, ah, website. But the about me part is a little important. I think a lot more for weddings, mostly because you want your couple or you want the people that you're shooting for, to see who you are. You're going to spend a lot of time with them. And even with head shots and stuff, it's important because people who are hiring and being and putting themselves in a vulnerable position, vulnerable position by being shot with a camera want to know who it is behind the camera. They want to know who is capturing them physically, and I think in about me page with a picture, a short blur, but who you are, what you do, showing some personality goes a long way and sometimes I know it's a little awkward to promote yourself on have a self portrait on their shoot photo. But I've found that candid photos worked really great for that. Maybe have another friend who is a photographer do it for you. But those air really a really good way to connect with the people that you're about to meet and higher as far as the contact page goes. Clearly this is very important because they need to get in touch with you. Hire you. So having your email address on there or actually with some sites, Squarespace actually is a really cool, built in contact form that you can customize on. You'll be ableto put in like what the date of their wedding is, or what kind of headshots airports are looking for with a little message and automatically send it to you so they don't have toe Copy and paste your email address and put it somewhere else. They just right in your website on their phone, and that's really important. And that's kind of nice. When it's its own page as a contact page. Just click on it, type it into send and we'll go right to you. And there are other app, so we can talk about later that will start in action item to keep you on task. We'll talk more about that later so the social media links can be done several different ways. I know a lot of photographers that put them at the header in the footer of their actual home page. They have a separate tab for it or they have it on the contact page on. This is where someone could click instantly and get to instagram, Twitter, Facebook, anything that you really gotten connected with the social media. I know a lot of other photographers to actually include a Pinterest board, which is really cool because then you could go on Pinterest in Crete. General looks for a lot of different people, so this might be helpful for you to get access to your social media very quickly. A lot of people nowadays are using their phones and their tablets toe look through contacts and websites. So is a very quick and fast way to get it, and I think it's very important. So for the about me section in our worksheet, you're going to be able to type out a little bit about you that way. When you're ready to start your website, you can just copy and paste. So is a few extras that you can put on your website that you may or may not want, and it may depend on your level of shooting photography. The first thing is testimonials. Thes can actually be hooked up to yelp or Google, or you might pull them from yell for Google, depending on how far you go or you can ask for quotes from your clients, and you can actually kind of build out in a creative way how they are on your website. Or you can create links for those and sometimes a really nice um, sometimes they're gonna be a little bit too much. They might take away from the rest of your site, But I've known a lot of people that have actually liked using those pricing versus no pricing. This is, ah, feel like a kind of a debate with a lot of different photographers, and I think it depends on what you're shooting. I've seen people actually list out all their packages on their website, so people can see them immediately. But that kind of Mary's you into a lot of prices on, but also already is putting you at a disadvantage when you're competing with someone else. Now, if I was looking for a wedding photographer, a headshot photographer, and I had two different photographers that I liked, one had pricing one, didn't I probably get in touch with the one without the pricing and start a conversation where I can talk to someone cause I don't need to talk to the pricing one because they already have the prices on what if this versus cheaper? What if they're not cheaper, but they're better quality? The point of not having the pricing on is to get the conversation moving and get you kind of in the room or your foot in the door with your client. So that's always been my school of that. On the other end, Some people put pricing starts at a certain price, get in touch for more prices, so that's kind of like a nice way to kind of ward off maybe someone who's looking for something super cheap. Um, so that's also a really good way to like, kind of start the conversation. I think the most important thing is to get people talking to you without giving away too much information right off the bat. A lot of what ways that I did when I had my wedding photography was that I have a price sheet ready to go. Someone email that me and ask me for prices. I would just send it off, start a conversation, asked when we can talk again for the next inquiry and sign them up when you get really advanced and you start moving. I know a lot of photographers that start putting their availability calendar on their site Now. This at this point means you are full time full blown in photography mode. And a lot of this has to do more with events and weddings because you start booking weddings out sometimes six months to a year, US a. Two years, an advanced. And if you're really popular and you live in a really densely wedding photography area, this may help because it will start to award off people who see that you're already booked and I will cut down on your immense amount of emails because you're so good and so popular that it will help a lot, and that's a little bit harder to structure, like you really have to dive into how to build that on your website. But it looks it makes you look really professional. Makes you look like you're really booked up and people are booking you and you're working a lot, and it just it just makes you look like you're doing it and you're worth the money. Also, something you can start is a block. Now I know a lot of photographers were just getting started actually talking about how they shoot the events that they go to, what equipment they use, They talk about how to work with their clients, were weddings for head shots. And that will get you a lot of notice on Google and stuff like that. And so that's something to think about putting on your website to also keep people updated with what you're doing. It's free advertising, and you could start creating a mail list through again. It kind of depends on your style and what you're willing to put into. As far as work goes, we're just starting out. If this is a part time thing, you may not want to spend too much time on your Blawg because you have a lot of other things to do. But if you can carve out some time, I think it's really helpful at the cool thing about the Blawg is that you can create a block post for every shoot that you dio and that creates this share. A bill page that both your clients and friends of clients can then share, helps generate word of mouth and starts building out free advertisement for you to get a job in the future. Start building out your website, create a space for your portfolio, create your about me page, Write something about me, create your contact page, have your social media links up and ready to go. Now that you have all that together, we're gonna talk mawr about your actual portfolio and how to spice it up and make it really great. 28. Tips for Designing the Perfect Portfolio: So let's talk about your portfolio specifically again. This kind of depends on what type of photography you're doing and how much diversity you are doing. As far a style goes, um, again, I want to go back to talking about having a single sort of thing, the single sort of type of photography that you're doing. If you're just shooting weddings, let's focus on just showing weddings. If you're doing head shots, let's just focus on doing head shots. I think if you end up doing multiple, different types of photography, you're gonna need a portfolio soda for each one. It gets a little jumbled together when there's too many different styles in one sort of category from a wedding photographer, and I'm looking for you as a wedding photographer and all of a sudden and actor headshot or corporate headshot comes up, that might be a little off putting when you're trying to hire a photographer or when I'm looking for a head shot or a corporate shot and a really pretty photo of some rings comes up that's gonna throw me off a little bit, trying to hire you as a portrait photographer, so you're gonna want to separate those. That's my advice as much as you possibly can, even if that means a whole another website, something to think about. Let's start off with the specific portfolio, like weddings, So I want to show a range of style. I want to be able to show everything that I can do. A Sfar Aziz. My style goes Now. This doesn't have to be like, totally crazy. Different because you are a single photographer. But, you know, having a black and white photo having a de saturated photo, having something that's different, that can kind of pertain towards someone who's looking for a specific style and know that you can accomplish maybe one or two things is really helpful and diverse as you get better . As you get more popular Z hone in your style, you'll be able to condense and sort of become one single sort of look, and they will hire you for your specific look. Another thing to take into consideration is doing close ups and whites. I know a lot of photographers who actually just show shots of brides all the time. This close up shots of rides, it's important to throw like a nice big wide in their ah couple shot a nice, detailed shot or two. You want to show diversity because a wedding is something that is, Ah, a big range of things that you can kind of. I need to show that you could do everything. Now, with headshots and portrait's, you may want to show a different range of people, right? So there's all sorts of people in this world you want to show different skin tones you want to show may potentially different hairstyles, different sexes. Male, female. You just want to be able to know that you can cover all those ranges because you don't know who is looking at your website and who might hire you if you stick toe one specific. Ah, hairstyle, sex, skin color. It may be off putting Teoh someone else, and you may get less work from it. Sometimes very little will go a long way. I think when you're picking out your photos, you should really make sure to pick the ones that you really, really love and really represent You. You don't need to pick every single photo that you've ever taken and put it on your portfolio. Could be good, but trying to hone down to the ones that really, really great and don't feel like you need to really, really show every single style of photo, just do the ones that you think you're gonna get you the job. So in the case study, we're gonna be looking at different examples of different websites and portfolios by different types of photographers, including myself. I have a few and also a different styles of, uh, structures of websites. 29. Case Study: Looking at Photography Websites: welcome to this case study, and I hope you've enjoyed this section so far on websites. Now it's time to actually dive in and look at some examples, which I think everyone's probably waiting for. So we're gonna look at a few business websites, photo websites of yours and people. You know, um, starting with will see fit our So I see this. You're looking this now, and it looks like you basically put into practice everything that you talked about in the lessons right Yet, So it's very simple, actually. Uh, if you're looking at the 1st 6 up here that you're seeing five out of the six were all shot on that very first free day. Um, and a couple of them are my friends, and so I'm really just starting to collect. These were all done in the 1st 2 days of of starting this business. Um, I used my favorite ones up top, and these are examples of photos that I can take four people, which in my mind or what people are looking for trying to do a lot of diversity here. There's color. There's black and white. There's red here, there's dark hair. There's me up, Male. There's female. Uh, you know, I'm trying to find some work Different skin tones, different backgrounds for colors. Just making it available on different for people to sort of look at while at the same time keeping this very simple. I only have, ah, contact page and about me. The problem is not done yet, but you can click on it. You could see a system of, I think work in progress. This is self portrait I took on the first day just for fun. Um, I'm using Zen Folio for this. This is a Zen folio built page without a domain name. So right now this is just we'll see photo slash Zen folio. So it's kind of dirty right now. Eventually, I'm gonna buy a domain name I just haven't gotten around to because I'm advertising through Instagram. I don't need to send people my website yet unless their clients and I've created through Zen Folio a client access page now and you can see right now you can't see the photos. But if you were say you were you know David Tripler, you would click on that and you'd be asked for his pastor No, he knows that password so he can get to his photos. You know, it's past very often. Top of my head. It's So now we're able to see things were the ones I've edited for how cool you can select them. You can download him. If you go back. You can see his proofs that are unedited, and you can see there's a lot here. And if you were, you know, if you were David right now, you could basically, if you hover the mouse over one of them, you can select heart and create a favorites Playlists. Basically, Yeah. Send them to me. So s so you can just run through all his proofs right now. And these are all ended unedited raw with this camera on this set up. Okay, um and so this is how I've structured my website. It's ah, it's a website that bleeds in the client access because that's what I need for, you know, myself. Yeah. I mean, it's nice, that's all there. And I think people really would appreciate having that client access either photos right on it. And I think my clientele, with whom I'm dealing with a lot of professionals, and they're used to this sort of situation. Yeah, weddings. They're a little different, you know, events little different. You could probably get away with the Dropbox and send a wire photos. Yeah, but I have to interact with these guys as far as like them picking their photos and then uploading and having access to the Yeah. So you're contact page? Yeah. I just wanted them to be able to send me an email. Yep. And get in touch with me is a couple of things that they would go, but I don't want to have to copy and paste, Um, a an email address that summer floating on my side. The one thing I don't have on my site yet, which is a big no, no up social media links. Yeah. Um, again, I don't have instagram, and I'm just building this getting there, but it will. It will be there eventually. Yeah, it's cool because, you know, you're kind of building this business you've done in the past with other businesses. That's why you have the experience. But as you're really this new business, we can get to see it through this course unfold. So let's go ahead and look at, um, someone else. They're one of the other. Look at Elizabeth Cruz. You mentioned this earlier, and another case study. So? So Elizabeth Cruz is again my high end wedding photography that I have with another artist . She is a you know, She's like, Look at this first shot with the girl. She's like high end model photography. Yeah, thes photos are me, actually, yeah, but they're edited in a little bit of a higher class. Sort of. I definitely could tell because I've seen before. Edit? Yeah, different tones color. And you can see that. Like, we're sort of presenting them in a sort of a different manner. This is like a slide show again. Fine art. Yeah. Way of presenting things. Yep. And you know when you're gonna try and charge someone $8000? Yeah, I think you need to have a little bit of a higher class look. And you could see these edits are, like, way different than the's. My actually the same. Um, just all the best photos I take. Yeah, Wasn't that with the Fuji? Doesn't good the medium for Mexican journalists. Yeah, jfx Nice. Okay, So you can see that this is, like a different way to present. Like a wedding. Yeah. Versus ah, more classic way which will look at next. Um, and again I don't have We don't have a We decided I don't have a lot on this home page. You look at your photos when you're interested, you can go up to the top right click info. Yeah, and this will lead you to what we're about. There's a sentence about the two of us. There's a photo of the two of us. He can see us and then immediately there's a way to contact us. Way don't have social media is because we're not pushing. You're pushing this company, but it's great because it's it's there. If so on us. Yeah, she actually pointing the clientele because of her network because she's a fashion photographer. She gets a lot more of those clients, and I do. But she had never had any wedding explain actual wedding experience. So I'm sort of the backbones who the business aspect of it, and she's pulling in the clients. And clearly she's amazing. Photographer. Yeah, well, I would say that with this website with the headshot website like the goal is toe like have that customer flow and flow be ableto arrive at your website, see if it's for them or not were, you know, in marketing. We call this the Aida Funnel a idea, and that's awareness. So they become aware of you, and that's whether it's through word of mouth. They see your on social media so they're aware of Will see photography or we'll see photo and then eyes interest. So they go to your website. They see your photos. They're interested in it because that's what they want. And you're headshots. They definitely have a style. You got those different colored backgrounds. Some people are gonna be into it. Some people aren't. If they're into it, they have that interest. And then that desire build that they want. You know, they actually want. You were your your work. They want to hire you. And the last part of the marketing funnel is a for action. So they take action and they hire you where they take action and it's easy to contact you. And that's on both of these websites. Super easy toe work sewing through that marketing funnel. Now that's a little bit. You know, the loss of philosophical or that's great. Yeah, I understand it's not something that you are probably thinking about as a business right now is a new photographer. But that's how as a business, you should be actually thinking about how you're actually getting clients. So let's go back to this last, uh, website. So this third website is a friend that I have out in Palm Springs, and that's in California, and that's a huge wedding destination. So there's a decent amount of wedding photographers out there, and she's taken a more of a classical look about her Web sites on the front of it. You know her. So in the front of it is, you know, pictures of her a lot of her photos that are being pulled in from her instagram like I just noticed. Like she just posted these on her instagram on DSO. That little strip at the bottom is pulling. I don't know what she's using, but those air pulling in from Instagram. So all she has to do is post Instagram and it'll update without her even thinking about it . Yeah, and then also you have the top the top header follows you down as you go down. Um, and so that's kind of a cool touch. And, you know, she's got purple in their hair's purple. She's her Mel Bell photography is all very, um, Brandon. Yeah, branded. She's got a good head and going on. Yeah, uh, and so you know, you can kind of flow through her website. So she's got whereabouts. Yeah, photos of herself. She's got a really nice brand looking again. She's really good with colors and a lot of this stuff. Looking into Palm Springs is like people are looking for local photographers shoot in that area. And that's where a lot of hurt yeah, kind of photos come. So I really like how she separated it into collections. Eso she does do a lot of different styles of photography. Yeah, because she's in such a small market. She's got to be able to do a lot of different things. Um, and so, yeah, so you can kind of go down and see the different styles. You know, she does boudoir maternity. Well, engagement, family, whatever tool she's using, those is super cool to be able to quickly, you know, go through finally find what she was looking for. If this is what you're interested and you could go right to it where you can see the whole thing, I want to see what she's doing with these shoots. If she has multiple, yeah, looks like she has a lot of the photos from so you can dive into each one and see a sort of collection. There's a lot of photos on her website, and I think I remember talking about it like she wanted people to spend time there. Yeah, and so this gives you so much time. And this is like again, this isn't like a apple log, but it's similar where, you know, after your shoot, your wedding, this wedding, you share this collection with, you know, your client. And it's probably somewhere where they're gonna share with their friends and family. Let's see, she also has its Well, let's do the FAA cues first. That's what they ask questions. That's kind of it. So this is where you can kind of like, uh, you know, really hone in on what people ask you a lot. And I know that she did this because she was just getting constant emails and questions about a lot of stuff. Yeah, so this is like for the person that provides, you know, needs a lot of information. So typically, when someone calls her, they read a book. Yeah, like they have figured everything out. And there's some some people who want to be the salesman and they wanna riel someone in, catch him and then try to sell to them and hook them over the phone or in person. But there's also some people like her who just they don't care about that. And they want people to contact her when they're ready. And that's totally just the way she were school. Clearly, she's just been to being successful well, and and she does what you mentioned earlier in the lesson about like having wet your pricing, starting at a sort of price, and so that will cut out a certain clientele who can't afford that. But for anyone who can that can inquire about, I'm not gonna lie kind of help to get some stuff off the ground here. So if you see going on, she's clearly taking it and ran with it and done a lot better than some other people. So she also has this block. I'm interested to see what this is. Okay, cool. So she has a couple posts, and I'm guessing this is more where she writing a little bit more, maybe. Yeah. Writing about a lot about it and then talked about the actual things. You is a couple that I think she's probably falling back on that. But again, that's a That's a thing of consistency. Like that takes a lot of work. Yeah, that's the downside of todo. So if you have stuff like that, you got to stay on top of it because I think I would be looking at that and being like, Well, she's a posted in a while. But what does that mean? Does that mean? But it really is just so busy. I know she's constantly busy. Yeah. So that's just another thing that stay on top of potentially and just lastly, your contact page got a phone number that there, which is kind of cool, direct from direct email. Her social media, uh, links you absolutely immediately. Yeah, pretty cool. It's great. I think it's a wonderful, beautiful website. I think it's a good example of a different style. And you know where he used to. Yeah, very cool. Well, if you have any questions about, you know, flow on a website, that's great. I think the thing is, we could continue to show you examples, but it's probably a good idea. And you've done this probably before is to search for photographers in your area surgeon. See Qatar for Web sites that you like and just get inspiration from them, but also come up with your own style. And I think these ones are great examples of that coming up with your own style that really sells what you're trying to do with your photography. Yeah, all right, see, in the next lesson. 30. Introduction to this Section: welcome to this new section of the course, all about expanding your online presence. Being a business in the modern world means being online, and you not only need your website, which we talked about in the last section, but we need to be pretty much anywhere where a client can potentially find you. A lot of this has to do with social media, so we'll be giving you tips and tricks on growing your INSTAGRAM account, using Facebook to build a community of followers and grow a business. Also, more specific things that we think are important for allowing people to find you like getting your business actually listed on Google specific to your location, using review sites like Yelp or other ones that are specific to the type of photography your into like wedding photography to get your blip business listed there as well. So this will be a very practical hands on section, so get ready to do a lot of work, and we'll see in the next lesson 31. Use Instagram to Grow Your Business: If you're gonna pick one social media toe, add your presence online, too. Right now. Currently at the timeless filming Instagram is probably the best way to do that. It's free you can promote with money online and also the hashtag and the tag system is epic . It's outta, it's out of this world and a lot of people are on it. There are also tons and millions of different types of photographers on Instagram, which makes sense because the whole medium is completely visual. What I do for my instagram, I have separated into two. I actually have a personal instagram and I have a new work, instagram for my new headshot business, which will get into more later. But the great thing about Instagram is that you're able to interact with other photographers by checking out their stuff, commenting, talking about business, also talking about technical stuff, looking at different styles of photography. You can also learn different hashtags hashtags air so important on Instagram to get you into different windows and paths of finding your style of photography or stuff that's similar. There's been plenty of times that not only in my using instagram to find inspiration and find images that I want to sort of emulating my own work, but also, when you go look at different industries that have to do with what you're doing photography wise. So, for instance, with headshots, I tend to tag L A head shots as one of my instagrams, and I get a ton of likes and comments from other actors who are looking for head shots as well. So it's a really good place to find clients for that. Also, with weddings, there's a lot of different vendors that have to do with weddings like DJs. There's also a lot of different wedding coordinators or different venues that you can tag literally. Every type of business is on instagram, and you're all helping each other at once. A business or a venue could tag you in a photo that you've taken at the event, and it will instantly be able to be shared with everyone that sees who took that photo, how wonderful it is. It also helps that business promote their own business. So there's a lot of give and take on Instagram, and it's all free, which is the best part of it. So a quick tip for Instagram is to use your notes on your phone and write down or type out all the hashtags that you're going to use on our worksheet. We're gonna create a space for you to create a bunch of different hashtags that you would use for your photography business. Typos out and get ready to use that. Also in the case study, we're gonna go over an app that helps you do that. Once you create all those different hashtags, you'll instantly be able to copy and paste quickly to every instagram post will get you the most amount of followers and likes. 32. Use Facebook to Grow Your Business: so Facebook is the other very big social media platform that we could be using. You can create your own business page on Facebook, and this allows you to kind of create sort of a community within your own Facebook to share all these photos. Share your posts and it allows a lot of clients and friends your clients to share everything more easily. It's also another way of generating word of mouth Facebook vs Instagram in this case Facebook. You can do a lot more. You can create an album. You can create a specific post. You can add more detail. You can actually tag probably a few more people. There are different generations at this point that are on Facebook vs Instagram, and so kind of depending on what your social network is. There may be more people on Facebook than Instagram, and you could do a little bit more as faras location posting adding videos doing to Tora is having conversations on Facebook is a little bit easier on top of all this leading back into Instagram. When you create a Facebook business page, you will be able to create an INSTAGRAM business account, which will allow you to have insights into who's looking at your photos. Who your most common followers, what insights and what, uh, what likes you have on certain photos? It's super helpful in Instagram. So for now, go on to Facebook, create your business page, start getting up some of the same photos you're going to use for a portfolio on your website and start posting. 33. Get Your My Google Business Listing: Hey, Phil, back here with a few lessons on some ways that you can expand your online presence. These are all important things that I think you should do as a photography business. This 1st 1 is getting your business listed on Google as a business, and wise is important so that it can show up more prominently in the Google search results as well as on Google maps. Now a lot of people are actually going to be searching for photography companies in their specific location specifically, for example, with weddings. I know for us as we search for a wedding photographer. We were looking for wedding photographers in the area where our wedding was going to be held, and I think that's a very popular thing for people to be doing. When you do that, you end up on a Google search results paid that looks like this. I did this as an example Wedding photographer San Luis Obispo. And here are some companies that popped up at the top of the results. They have reviews which are part of the Google listing, and these are more prominent than any of the other results that pop up heat down below, which include other on my presence. Other, unlike platforms that will cover, like wedding wire, not and yelp. So how do you actually get listed if you search for Google business listening or if you go toe google dot com slash business, there's a way to add a business to Google. So first, this can. It gives a little bit of information about what includes you can create a business profile . It had, it looks going mobile ads you to the maps. So if you want to just click the sign in button and you're literally going to just start with your business name, so what Will would do was would literally be typing will see photo our photography and then go through the steps to creating this account you choose. If you wanted to show up on Google maps or not, you choose the city and state, and then you would have to provide some more information. And that information is what's going to appear on the listings that popped up on Google maps such as ours. Any contact information, you can add photos and things like that, Um, and of course, as I mentioned, people can leave reviews, you can link to your other social media profiles as well. So all that you go through add your information for your own business. But this is a freeway toe. List your website and get it more prominent on Google. One piece of advice, though. If you are choosing a location, I would You do have to put in a specific address. So if you are living in a smaller town, for example, if you lived outside of San Luis Obispo, but you are a wedding photographer in San Luis Obispo, I would highly recommend getting a P o box or, if you have a family member, something where you can use the address of someone inside that city so that your your business shows up in the location where you actually shoot weddings or where you want to shoot. So this is more specific toe wedding. But even if you are doing head shots or graduation type photos or anything like that, you might want to use a more popular location. And in that sense you might be able to get a P o box in that town or in the center of town . If you're living on the outskirts. Cool. So that's the Google business listing. Go ahead and do that. Then we'll see you in the next lesson. 34. Get Your Yelp Business Page: welcome to this new lesson. Another step to expanding your online presence. I want to talk about Yup, because Yelp is probably the most well known review site for any kind of business, and a lot of photographers are on there as well. But not all the photographers and a lot of photographers actually skip setting up a yelp profile. Now, if you're living outside of this country, there might be other websites that are better for your country. But check out any sort of review site that lets businesses and have reviews and set up a profile here. As an example, I looked up photographer in San Luis Obispo again, and you can see that it Let's review the results. Ah, lot of it's based off of reviews, and I'm not sure what the exact algorithm of Yelp is. But the ones with the best reviews the most reviews most recent reviews will start to appear higher and higher in this list, so basically all you have to do set it up. So if you search for Yelp listing a business or if you just go to Bisbee, isay dot yelp, you can go through, and it's similar to how you did it in the Google profile, you can set up your profile and put in photos, information, contact methods. You can even have a request quote option. You can have coupons on Yelp, all kinds of cool stuff. And, as we saw when you search for, um photographers or any business on Google, Yelp is some of the top results, so it carries a lot of weight in the result in the general search results. So let's just go ahead and look at one of these examples to show you how the number one result in San Luis Obispo is doing so. One thing and yelp you can do is you can create a serving area, and so if you do serve multiple areas, you can add that. And that helps your listing appear. If someone searching for a wedding photographer in a close to a nearby town, if you serve that area, it looks like they've gone through and added their own photos up front. And then, of course, clients or customers can add photos as you might have done if you've ever reviewed someone on Yelp. I guess the biggest thing with a yelp, listening and even with a Google listening is to do the extra work. Teoh, get reviews your clients aren't going toe automatically. Go on yelp, find you, search you out and leave a review on their own accord. Of course, we wish that would happen. But as part of your process, when you your workflow working with the client, you definitely want to go and ask them after the fact. If they could leave a review for your business and to post it on Yelp and Google or wherever else you want them to leave a review. So again, pretty simple stuff. It all take you now to do it. So goto biz dot yelp dot com and set up your business profile page. And if you've ever done any past projects, go back to those clients and ask them if they can leave a review, it will help your profile rank higher in the search results. All right, seeing the next lesson 35. Create Profiles on Photographer Review Sites: welcome to this next lesson in expanding your online presence. In this lesson, I want to just briefly mention expanding your horizons to other sorts of review sites, but they might be more specific to your industry. Now. I'm using Wedding as an example, because it's a popular industry, and they have this set up for the wedding industry. Two sites, the knot dot com and wedding wire dot com. These are places that brides and grooms anyone getting married can go, and it helps them plan their wedding. They confine local vendors. They can create a wedding website, registry, all kinds of stuff. But if you go toe the knot dot com, for example, you can just find local wedding photographers. So let's go ahead and again. Site. Look for a sandwich So vis spoke. Now this isn't where I live, but this is if I want to have another wedding with Isabel, renew our vows. Maybe we'd go up to slow. It's a beautiful, beautiful place. So again, just like yelp, just like Google. When you search for wedding photographers, different ones are going toe appear, so you need to create this profile. Some of these are featured I'm not sure exactly what featured means based off of their algorithm. But even on the not not many of these companies have that many reviews. I am sure that most of these results and the ranking of the results are based off of reviews as you go down. There are some lower reviews, but at the top it's a lot of five star reviews, and so you want to make sure that you're asking your clients to leave reviews for you. So just like any of these other places, you're gonna have your about section details, even pricing. So a lot of the stuff that's on your website you can also add here. So definitely add your business here at the location at your about section front that you took from your website and then similarly, wedding wire is basically the same exact website. So if you go on vendors, you look up photography. We will again look up sandwiches. Obisbo. I'm curious to see if they are going to be the same results or not, so it looks like wedding wire. Um, not sure which one's more popular, because I think both of them are pretty pocket popular Seacrest Wedding photography 140 reviews So maybe wedding wires a little bit more popular. I don't see Seacrest and one of the top results here. No. So maybe they have a not profile. Maybe they don't. But that's why it's important to set it up on these sites. So again, this one looks like with wedding where there are pricing prices on their Sorry, I scrolled through that really fast. I'm just want to make sure how you can actually set up your vendor down at the bottom if you click on, learn about wedding wire for business. Some of these things cost, though, on a place like wedding wire or the not um, sometimes there's a free option. If you want to be featured, you might have a paid spot, and that might be something you do later on your your business when you reinvest and you, um, into your business and you want to do that kind of advertising. So now is the time to go out. Set up your profile on those websites if you are a wedding photographer. If you're not a wedding photographer, there are some other sites for general photography that you can set up a profile. One of them is scoop shot dot com. Um, this is a place where people confined professional photographers. And you can again, if you're a photographer, set up a set up a profile here. You just never know when people are going to be using a site like this to find a photographer in their area, and you might as well have a profile ready if someone is all right, see in the next lesson. 36. Find Work on Freelancer Job Sites: welcome to this new lesson in this one. I want to again, we're expanding our online presence, and I just want to talk about a few other platforms you might consider for looking out for jobs. So these air more job boards, but they're also places you can put your profile, and people can actually find you as a freelance photographer. Toe higher upward dot com, freelancer dot com and thumbtack are three popular ones, and you go on here and you can see that it's general freelancers is you can do find people who can do anything from graphic design, Web development, riding, sales, marketing, customer service anything. But if you're here looking for someone to work, you can search for photographers again. There's gonna be search results, and you can find people. Now it looks like it's looking in the greater Los Angeles area where I am looking. So let's again search for San Luis of this bowl and see, And here we got general photographers or people with that photography skill that have their listing on here, and it's gonna be similar on all of these things. The other thing is, you can go out and look for photography jobs that are posted so you can go in their jobs. Look for photography or photographer, and you could see the target print needed for a photo shoot. Van photographer, all kinds of different photography so you can go in there. You can actually submit a proposal and potentially get a job. So again, it just takes probably 10 2030 minutes to set up a profile on all three of these platforms , and you might as well up work dot com freelancer dot com thumbtack, and it will help to have a portfolio. So a lot of these sites, you will be able to create a profile and put some photos and examples, and I've used these sites to hire people. And so I know as someone that's hiring. It's a good idea to have that those examples so I can see the proof of your skill set and much more likely to hire you if you have examples on your your profile. So definitely add a portfolio, or at least a link to your portfolio or your website so people can check it out. I get just another place that you should have a profile, and you can find more work specifically awesome. Thanks so much for watching, and we'll see in the next lesson 37. Use Craigslist to Find Initial Work: welcome to this new lesson in this one. We want to talk about Craigslist. Craigslist is probably a good way if you're just starting out to try to get some initial paying clients. So if you've kind of exhausted your family and friends and friends of friends and you don't see anything working out, you might want to go onto Craigslist and post an ad. I will be honest, though. A lot of the photography services that you'll find on Craigslist are a little bit lower tier, lower quality, lower price. And so that's going to be the clientele that you find on Craigslist that end up finding you . So you want to be aware of that again, is going to be something that you might want to do when you're just getting started out. So I'm on the San Luis Obispo page and you can see if I search for wedding photography that use their odds that photographers have posted. And just looking at here, I can see for 99 as a price point, and that caught my eye. So maybe potentially having prices is good, but then it's also it's tough because you're starting Teoh compete for the lowest price as you have a $275 package again, not the best place to make a full time living as a photographer, but to get build up your portfolio and to get started. Not a bad idea. You can go on. You can see the kinds of things people are opposing. This one's very simple. Just post some examples of the photos that they've done. Let's look at another one affordable for affordable wedding photography. Just one photo and people are on Craigslist looking for wedding photographers. Let's just look up the creek photog for See this person posted that they're a professional portrait photographer, but they don't have any images. Oh, this is this is something could views as unexamined to do better from. And, yeah, some of some of these Aiken tell our people that are giving started out, and that's totally fine. And, um, just from the photos that I see on here already. But again, this one's pretty good, though. Looks pretty good in terms of their quality. Yeah, it looks pretty good. Um, so again, just another place you can You see that it shows them in kind of the most recent, but in the past month or so of listing. So put it on your calendar once a month, Just post an ad on crisis. It's free to Dio. I wouldn't go ahead and start paying for any sort of advertising. You can do that in some, like local news, pip papers and things that might work. But I would definitely recommend using all of the free services first and see if that works for you. And, yeah, just put it on your calendar once a month, started doing it and see if you get any bites. Awesome. Thanks so much, and we'll seen another lesson. 38. Case Study: Expanding Your Online Presence: Welcome to another case study today. In this lesson, we're talking about specifically building out your online presence and specifically instagram. Yeah, because I think Mr Graham is the one social account that we recommend off the Tigers toe have at this day and age. And it's what you're using to promote. Will see photography and also you have your own personal accounts. Um, and we'll be looking at that. Will be also looking at Sam. She's Jones, our good buddy co teacher of a lot of our courses. So, um, I know you gave tips and advice, but I think we should just diving. Yeah, let's let's go straight into well, Steve Darby, because this is your business business, Instagram, and we'll compare it to your personal in a second. But, um, I see here, I'll just say first off off the bat. And what do you think? Well, I think again similar to your website, it's showing what you do. But there's mawr photos on here than on your website, which I think that's what Instagram gives you. It's an opportunity to post more, and that's the benefit is, you know, having hosting more frequently. Um, I also see you have. Ah, you're trying to have, like, some sort of Comey's layout. It seems like something way Got three of the same people top on this road. Three of the same girl here. You've got somewhat of, like, a color scheme going. Yeah, I mean, I I wanted to try something different with we'll see photos instagram in having a cohesive gallery and that every three are having some sort of theme or thing going on. Yeah. So if you go to the very bottom I started with my three favorite wedding photos of every taken just to kind of get going and put content on there. Yeah, I then did another black and white modeling shoot with someone to kind of get more interest . I did some business people. This is easier. Like, this is my friend on the far right is just from before. This is before it's put this that these is taking a long time on, and that's his dad s. So I'm just using a great background on an open door. So those are all business sort of style images. And then these three here are three old actor head shots that I took with my Nikon back in the day. You were done with Nikon, Like, eight years ago. My self portrait is so breaking. Starting? Yeah. Now it's literally the breaking line. And it's kind of what I used. And I announced this on my normal instagram account because I have over 5000 followers on that one to kind of break break up my old photography with, Yeah, the new God. So I started with, you know, these three line breaks. Yeah. Um, you could see a lot of people, you know. Here we go. I liked it. Yeah, Okay. Like, oh, my. And yeah, you got your hashtag on a lot of these A really important for me. The headshots, headshots, actor, actors, life L a Hollywood model actress. Like all this stuff Ah, lot of people look at and go to. Yeah. Um, and so this is my free way of advertising. It's a very quick, easy way to do that. So once I hit that, I started with three sort of ways to build it out, and I use a program called on, um you know when you want to talk about that now or later. But to sort of lay things out first. Yep. And then see how it looks. And then you post posted, you know, in threes. Very cool. Yeah, well, look at that in just a minute, cause I want to look at your personal just toe compare. Oh, and so also, I guess, with the threes with what I'm court sort of leaning towards is that actors need looks. They need to have characters Essam ideas that I want to be able to show people that I can take one person and put them in three different basically looks or positions or characters on DSO. I'm starting to get to that point coming from here on out. I'll be posting the same person three times across. Cool. Nice. Awesome. All right, so let's go over to your personal account. And now they're different. Yeah, very different. And I think this might be what a lot of people's instagrams look like, though. Just general kind of photography. But you've done a good job curating nothing and coming up with style How you post your photos on You really do spend time. OK, do figure out which photos you want toe. You wanna post some people are posting every day, multiple times a day. You're not. I can't post maybe once every two weeks. That's every week. Maybe. But a big thing to me is I have always been taught, like growing up like the collection of photos. Is Justus important as a single photo? So having kind of a cohesive feel style, you can see that I I like negative space. I like big stillness. Um, you know, I like interesting compositions and stuff like that. That's for my course at night. For us? Yeah. Yeah. School. And so I also like the idea of having the framed white borders because I feel like it separates me from other instagram pages in your school. Especially when you're going through. Especially was going through it kind of pops up like it's, like total difference eye catching. Um and this is too pro. Promote me as a cinematographer. My other businesses is a cinematographer in the video world. And these images are way more cinematic. They're way more movie. Ask which is what I'm going for. And if you go deep enough yeah, let's keep going. You're gonna get Teoh. When I was doing, um CinemaScope aspect ratio, which I did for about Oh, yeah, I remember. It's and, uh, yeah, you can You get close and it got to a point where I felt like it was just I couldn't frame enough in the CinemaScope because the Asberry the aspect ratio is so thin. Yeah, and you could see each photo is really meant in here to get to that to promote my movie shooting. Yep. And that's what this sort of instagram was about. Was like, Oh, look, there's a so you can see, like, so that so that s victory show. And that image wing is laying out the type of business I was going for in that instagram account. Yeah, but I would also say, on Instagram it's hard because it's on a phone. Generally people Ligia and that aspect, it's question, and I finally got to that point. I was like this stuff, but it did set you apart for sure, and its style and different. I did it for a solid year. Yeah, and then, actually, when I got my Fuji's, I was starting being started, like I need to use this whole frame. So a lot of these Air, Fuji, Fuji shots and whatnot. All right, let's look at music Jones. Yes, CM. Sam has some beautiful photography. Yeah, like and his? He doesn't post that often. He doesn't post even less than ideal. You've got almost 9000 followers. It's pretty good. Yeah. Did you have I something? Sam's got another in shots because his band was a band that he works. But even still, he has a really cohesive I took that photo. Uh, he has a really cohesive gallery as well, and you can see his style And, like, big wides bids, lots of landscape, lots of Fotopoulos a travel lots of very like, deep, meaningful colors and richness. Yeah, he looks like he he had that going for a little bit too way back, the white background with a certain aspect. And how did he do that? What? Operating? I use V s CEO. But you have to pay it for it to get to the border. Ever. Really control. Yeah. And there are other free APs like square ready. And I think even Apple will let you do borders now. Yeah. All right. So we picked on Sam. Let's pick on me. So my personal account is just a personal stuff. Yeah. So this is again not something where I'm promoting myself as a photographer, but I try to do a good job. I I also sometimes I I was going through a phase of posting every day with photos that I was taking with my new Fuji camera, which was really fun. Um, but I would say that I don't do is good of a job at having a specific style. When someone comes to my instagram, they're not gonna be like, Oh, yeah, that guy shoots that way, and I like that way. Great. Those photos I've been so great photos. Yeah, I again some of these like, Yeah, the aspect doesn't show up on the mean page, but yeah, anyways, it's what that's that's That's another thing. Why? I have used the aspect because the gallery view changes the real phone. Yeah, it zooms in where I don't want to zoom in. Yeah, it creates a look that I don't necessarily like if I don't want you. Oh, um cool. Well, lie. Lots of cool stuff. Let's go into that app because I think that would be really cool toe check out and it's just a It's free, You said, right? Yeah, And it's a way to just make creating a good instagram presence easier. Right? So this is Dunham on. Basically, I have connected my instagram account to it, and and I've basically used these photos and you can see the layout right away of my instagram. Yeah, that's what's actually posted, so that's actually posted. But what's cool is you have all these grids and I have imported these three advance to show you and I could move them around. You decide how I want Teoh, you know how I want the layout to be. So if these are gonna be the next ones that I'm posting on my instagram I was from the shoot That after is probably the most recent shoot yet, so you can see Yeah, I mean, probably want to leave the pink one on that side because it's, you know, yeah, a little aggressive with that. But, um, I like that. That might actually be the way opposed to, and then within the app, you can click on it. I guess you have to do in order, though, because that's gonna be the 1st 1 posted and up here Sigh If you click on it Lagana and then we move it up here You can import and create your caption right here. Now I immediately delete when I'm branding on Guy, go down here into tags And I already have a girl model Reset, preset. Cool. I would tap it and look it up. All those that call those instagram handles just that much easier. And you can go into tags are here and you can create your own. Here's another one. I have model. Um, and you could basically added it And, um, this would be the 1st 1 that I do and then the next one. I need to get this because when I was, I was doing a lot with when I got my Fuji camera. I had specific ones for the different lenses that I use. Um, and I was copying it from a no pad, but this is cool, cause it just imports. And that's what I was doing before, too. So, um, so second example of this one again, we go in here will go to caption we delete on this stuff and my system with the girl model ones is here tags, We do the model and hair and we do this. So when I go back in Instagram, I'm gonna add the makeup artists and I'm gonna add the tag from the model And then this is now stretched down here. Cool. And the cool thing about this is I had done click here to export it, you see, at the top it's copy to my clipboard. And as soon as I hit post Instagram, it's gonna take me right into instagram copyrighted and it copies over to your clipboard and you just paste it at that point, adding any little edits you need to make But I'll sit and spend like an hour to building it all out on um, yeah, before I get on my phone and do it. And then when the ample in the right time, like in the morning, I feel like people are going to see it. Yeah. Then I'll post all the stuff you can't do when I'm on the desktop, Can you? I don't know. Not that I'm aware. I like having on my phone because I know that a time I'm gonna get to that point where I'll be doing it. That's very cool. So, yeah, that's the best. That's the best out that I have seen it. I know there are other APS to do the same thing. I just haven't gotten to that point checking that stuff out, and you can get to that at um dot L. A. And it says I have a new Web app. So that would be cool to be on a do on your wet desktop, not having to take your edited photos into your computer or whatever. I think the take away is that you're able to really customized all your hashtags and tags because that on Instagram is what's gonna make your presence deeper and more productive. And, um, use your time wisely. A lot of this business stuff you won't be wasting your time. You get used to it. I just found an efficient way to do that. Sit down, get it all done at once. Someone write a post post, both both post cool. Awesome. Well, if you have any other questions about Instagram or other social media or building on your online presence, we know we covered a lot in this section already But if you have any questions, let us know. Join star of the inference community. Post your questions there as well and, yeah, great stuff and we'll see in the next lesson. 39. Introduction to this Section: Welcome to this new section of the course. This is a really exciting one. We're gonna basically go through the overview of what an actual photo project or shoot looks like. So Will is gonna break it down each step by step, giving you tips and practical advice for how you can achieve each step successfully. So what are the steps that will be covering in this section? First is meeting your client next is booking that client. The next step of the gig is the actual shoot itself. Following that is the editing process. Then finally, it's delivering your final product and your photos to that client and sharing that work with the world. And then, of course, we repeat this process. So I'm gonna pass it back to will, and he's gonna dive into each of these steps from finally clients all the way through delivery up next 40. Step 1 - Meeting Your Client: All right. Step one, meeting your client. Now, at this point, you've already gotten your website up. You're ready to go. You're business is good. You have everything you need to do to shoot something. And now you're basically ready to book your jobs, meet your clients and get going. So the first thing you do is meet a new client now for shooting a wedding or headshots. Sometimes this requires a meeting in person, usually over weddings. You want to meet in person because you want to make sure that you can kind of drive with that person. You want to be yourself. You want, Explain to them what you do, how long you've been doing it, Uh, and show them that you could really be personal, make them feel comfortable. I mentioned this earlier before, but having your photo being taken is very vulnerable. And knowing that your photographer is confident what they do and makes you feel comfortable is like a huge selling point for a person who's hiring a photographer often with portrait's and head shots. You're not necessarily meeting the person in person, but you may have a phone conversation, and so the tips are to make them feel comfortable and be yourself because you don't wanna come off is like rude or fake or overly abundant because they're gonna expect that when you're actually shooting. Or that may be too much for them, and they may want someone a little bit more mellow. So this also comes into effect when you're shooting an event or headshots when there's other people around that may want to hire you. This is also a place where you can get new clients, say you're shooting at wedding on people see you working really hard. You running back and forth, you running up the aisle, you're running around the dance floor on. They see the bridegroom having a great time. Everyone's happy. People are gonna ask you who you are, where your business card comes from, all sorts of things to get you to work with them. And if you're not being yourself of being truthfully honest, Aziz, you are as a photographer. People are gonna come up to you and talk to you, so I get being yourself being pleasant to everyone around you, even if there some holding a cell phone up in front of you, just politely Asking you away is a really good example of how you can maintain that sort of composure while you're shooting and getting clients. So that also happens when you're shooting with your clients again to use weddings as an example. When you're shooting the couple often you have a bridal party. You have parents around these air, all potential clients, or they're all people that could refer you to somebody else. So making sure that your doing everything correctly, being as polite as possible to not only your subjects but everyone around you also lead to more clients. This also works when you're doing head shots or portrait photography. If they've bought a friend or if they are done with their photo session and they want to recommend you, they're going to remember how great you made them feel, along with wonderful photos that you've taken. So keep that in mind while you're shooting, not only while you're meeting people. Also, when you're collecting your final payment on the day after you've been done shooting all day or just before, you want to make sure to be as polite as possible and make sure that that transaction is smoothly and works well. You have contracts to back you up. You have conversations and emails to back you up if there's ever a problem, so just be, you know, as Melo and his polite as possible. It'll make everyone's experience great, and it could potentially get you your next job or keep you from it. A real quick tip for you when you're having a meeting for the first time with a potential client for a wedding or an event, it's nice to sometimes bring printed out priceless and stuff so you can kind of go over it physically with your couple. That's really kind of like a nice touch. You can also, if you want, bring photo samples or a book. If you've printed out, it's always really nice to have a centerpiece that you guys can kind of converse over. Talk about your style, talk about what they're looking for and, more than anything, make them feel comfortable about spending all that money on you. 41. Step 2 - Booking Your Client: Step two. Booking your client. So the meeting. Why? Great. That phone call went great that face time Skype call went great and your client is down for the price, and you've negotiated what they want and what you're willing to give them. For the certain price that you've decided, it's time to finally write it down and sign contracts and book him up. The big thing about here is making a contract. I can't tell you enough. Uh, how many times I've heard stories and myself have been burned by not having a contract and just having to move on. And this works for protection for both you and your client. There are also a lot of people have hired photographers I don't follow through. Prices are all over the place. Cancellations happen. So it's very important to lock in a contract lock in dates, lock in terms and have everyone on the same page before you guys start exchanging money and getting into the shooting. Now, we're gonna go over some ah specific example of a contract later. But here's some main things that you need to include in your contract Number one. The cost and the deposit Basically, you need to be up front about how much the total amount of money is going to be paid to you for your service. So what is that? You have to describe what you're going to be doing. How many hours air gonna be shooting on at what price? In addition to that, you want to figure out what your deposit should be. Now I have a general rule of asking for 1/3 of the total deposit for most of my projects with head shots and portrait's, I usually ask for half on. Usually it's a retainer or a nonrefundable deposit, unless there's some catastrophic thing that I deem eyes OK for me to give their money back . Um, I have some examples of that where a wedding literally had to cancel because of a death in the family, and we ended up giving that deposit back. So situations like that can occur where you'd be OK with that. But in general, there needs to be a clause in your contract about how much you're getting paid for what work you're doing, how many images, all that stuff exactly, and how much the deposit is needed at the signing of the contract to lock in that date, the date that is probably the second most important thing next to what you're doing, How much you're getting paid for. The day is so specific, and we as photographers, will start to get so busy, especially with weddings and working on the weekends. There are only so many key days in the year where people will want to do weddings, especially if you live in a certain area where there is a season versus the holiday season that sometimes there's a season for wedding. Specifically, faras, headshots and portrait sessions go. You could book out 3 to 5 people in one day, and you need to make sure that you're not losing that space or that time. So picking out a date, making sure that day is very specific, and the timing is very specific on the contract, so there's no discrepancy, so there's no discrepancy or anything like that. I've heard of weddings trying to shift a day or two around, uh, you know, their venue or something else very close to the wedding, and sometimes you already have a job book, then you just can't let that happen. cancellations. Now again, this has to do with the date and with the deposit. There are a lot of reason for cancellations. There are a lot of reasons why you may become sick, or you may need to hire someone of equivalent status for you to shoot. For you. That's in the most dire situations. We, as photographers, really kind of have to show up when we say we're going to show up sick or not, unless you literally cannot move but cancellation clauses in cancellation. Things in your contractor Very important because trust me, it will happen. And it happens more often than not. In Portrait's and headshot sessions, I've had plenty of headshots cancel on me the day of asking for their deposits back. Can't give it to them because they've taken a slot for me that I could have booked a full session for. So gotta keep that in mind delivery. Now this goes back to what you're doing. A Sfar Aziz cost and price goes, but you have to very clearly state what they will be getting at the end of the shoot for weddings, this means something like, Are they getting prints? How many photos air they getting, uh, how many special edits are they getting? Are they getting up? Book? Be very specific because things will be asked of you later on or on the day warriors shooting, They will ask, you know, can you do an extra hour? Can you do an extra couple hours for these extra photos? So you need to be very specific so that you have something that work with when those situations come up as far as head shots and portrait's go, you'd be very specific about how many photos you're going to edit. How many proofs you're gonna let them choose from? Because it really does get wishy washy when that Wow, these I got. I know you're gonna edit five of these photos, but, man, these other five, or really great, you just throw those in and edit them. No, you can't. Because your time is worth money. You need toe lay that out beforehand. You know what? I'm gonna deliver five photos every photo. After that, it's gonna cost you $50 an hour for me to add it. And that way there's no question when they go and ask honestly, the best possible way for you to make sure this is ironclad is to talk to a legal professional. I have had legal professionals look over my contracts, and again I'll have you see one of ours is really good for me. But it may not be good for you, and you should double check your closets because some people are willing to let things go away are some people are willing to let things get away than other people on DSO? Make sure you kind of talked to a legal professional for what your specific need is. Have someone check out your contract or have someone draft a contract that you can use as a template. It's worth the money to put into a lawyer that you could just use for the rest of your career. Um, and whenever you need to get some changed, you can. There are many templates online that you can use, but I wouldn't necessarily trust anything online. I wouldn't even trust the contract that I'm going to show you because you should be taking that extra step to protect yourself. 42. Step 3 - The Shoot: So Step three, the shoot. So everything's booked its shoot day. You're out shooting. You're doing it. You're on set shooting a wedding. You're doing head shots. You're doing portrait's. I would say a good tip for you is to bring a copy of the contract with you. And I don't mean just, uh you know, on your phone, print out a physical copy of the contract with signature. Leave the originals at home, but keep a copy so you can reference it if you need to reference it. Also, make sure your pleasant makes you doing your job well, because again, this is where you're gonna meet new clients. This is also where your start of your products happen. For your current client, typically on weddings and typically for head shots and portrait's your collecting your final payment on this day, I usually don't, uh, don't collect the final payment until the very end when we're done shooting. It's kind of ah, given take with your client. They have given you deposit you've shot. They give you the final payment, you give him final delivered. So it's kind of like here, here, here, you're kind of passing the responsibility and the trust back and forth. And this is great because it's builds trust that will allow them to recommend you for the next job. And it will allow them to be patient with you when you're a little late on the delivery or things like that. So collecting your final payment finished shooting and then go to whomever you've been in contact with. Whomever signed the contract about the final payment, you could be as pleasant as possible, and usually if you've made it this far without having any problems there already gonna be ready to give you the money because you've been so pleasant all day and you've been taking wonderful photos. A couple other tips. If you want to maintain this business in a long way, be prepared to help yourself out physically. Bring extra water, maybe bring a pair of socks or like some sandals for the drive home after a long day, really try and be as comfortable as you can. I tend to have an extra stick of deodorant in my camera bag after working on a 10 hour wedding. Also, bring some mints. If I have a second shooter, I'll put together like a little care package, sometimes for a wedding. Um, really Take this. Seriousness is a really job, and this is like bringing your lunch to your job, and you want to make this last as much as possible. So take care of yourself on and try and think ahead. How will you feel when you're done doing four different portrait sessions in one day? How will you feel after shooting your first wedding after 6 10 hours, 14 hours? Think about how you can treat yourself well at the end of that, because it will allow you to be happy in the end of the day and allow you to do your wedding the next day. 43. Step 4 - Editing / Post: step for editing your photos or post. I like to call this post. That's how I call it in my workflow. So you shot, you've come home from, you know, your headshot session, your portrait session, your family session, your corporate event, your wedding. The first thing I do is I download my card to two different spots, and personally, I have an archived, redundant hard drive of all my photography. I just dump raw photos onto and then I have a working solid state drive that I travel around with on my laptop. So I've taken that card and I've dumped him to both spots and I leave them on the card. Now I have gotten to the point where I can afford to have multiple SD cards. I have, like, six or 728 gig cards, which is a lot, and it's expensive, and you may not get to that point yet, but I don't format a card after I've been done shooting until both drives have been downloaded and I've uploaded the proofs to my online gallery there, then backed up three different times. Then I will then form at the card and this came this his Cup. I've had problems where I've had hard drives crash and this will happen to you. So keep in mind that that's my sort of workflow for post editing. Got them downloaded. Now I use light room. There are plenty of different products that you can use for post editing an organization. I tend to have different catalogues in light room for my different photography. So I have a wedding catalogue. I have, ah, headshots catalogue and have a personal catalogue. That's how I organize. And then within each one I organized by the job. So there be, you know, the Evin or Wedding will be in one catalog and within that will be all my organization. For all my photos from a head shot. So have the model on the actor actress and within they'll have a proof section edited section and a select section or something like that. So that's how I organize and I work all of that off of. I usually have my little s t drive. I don't work off of my backup archive drive where all my photos are ever. Usually it's too slow to do that, but also it just scares me. So now you've got all your photos organized. You've got imported. You've moved them off your, uh, si cards, your SD cards in your bag. Ready for next. Shoot your editing light room you've done. You've uploaded your photos where you uploading your photos to? The workflow is different for me for every project. So let's start with weddings with weddings. I've found that if you show your couple too many photos and asked them to choose your photos, they will never get back to you because chances are all your photos are great. So instead of going through and deleting all the out of focus over or under exposed towers and showing them 1000 photos having them picked 200 I now just pick the 200 for them. And then I will go into light room. I will pick out the 200 then I will start editing them individually. Now, for an event like a corporate of rent, a wedding, any sort of big event. I really don't spend more than 30 seconds to a minute editing each photo. I just go through to make sure that they look great. The exposures Nice and it's consistent now with a wedding. I tend to pick 10 to 20 really great photos, and then I'll spend, you know, 10 to 20 minutes on each one of those photos. And again, this depends on the package that they ordered with head shots and portrait's on and, you know, sit down sessions, family portions like that. I will then have our couple, or are people choose what photos they want. So for a typical headshot session with one or two looks, I'll end up shooting between 408 100 photos total. I'll end up showing them 100 and they'll end up picking about 5 to 10. And those are the ones that I added. The way I do that is like it all. The photos into my light room go through all of them whittle them down to the 100 that I show them. I upload them to Zen Folio. Basically, we'll talk about that in a sec. I send the gallery after them. They send back their five picks. I download those edit those, upload him back to them, sending the link. They now have their photos. We'll go over more of this in the case study, so there's multiple ways of sharing your proves. You congest put your proofs in a cloud based file sharing program like Dropbox, iCloud, Google and send them off. The problem is, you don't really have a lot of control over that. Sometimes your clients may download all of them and take them and edit them yourselves, which, you know, is something we can talk about. Or you can use a photography based website, something like Zen Folio Zen Folio. I actually by the top tier, and I really love it because I'm able to upload the RAWs for one. I'm also able to upload the proofs, send a gallery with or without watermarks, and they can actually pick their favorites. Great account and send it back to me. Zen Folio allows you to download the list of photos that they pick or prus that they pick, and you can import that into your light room. Light room will then pick those out and they'll be right there ready for me to edit. This is really great. Then I don't have to go through and look for the numbers that they've picked and match drag and move stuff over, um, again. It costs a little money, but to be honest, I think it's totally worth it if you start shooting that any photos and you'll start to see as you start to collect thousands and thousands of photos as you shoot. Another great thing with a photo centric website is that you're able to create watermarks. This is a big controversy, and I think we've talked about this in the photography and friends Facebook quite a bit. But watermarks are really useful for me during proofing for Portrait's and headshots. Not in so your weddings and stuff like that. But I've had times where I'll put up proofs for an actor actress. They love him so much, they start screen, shotting them, and they'll start posting them, even though they're not edited yet, there just proves, and then they'll tag you in them. And so now it looks like your your your photo that's been screenshot, a low rez that has not been edited. It is a representation of your work that's not necessarily what you want. So sometimes having a watermark when you're showing proves is super helpful to protect yourself from exposing other clients to potentially seeing your work. That's not of the quality that you want it to be. At other times, water marks may be kind of annoying because you're trying to showcase your work, but in this instance, it's there to protect your quality of image from other people. Sharing step for was really about creating your workflow for editing, and that really takes some time to sort of figure out what works best for you. Sometimes it's worth spending the extra money on a photo center site or an organization program like light room. It will also allow you to whittle down your hours or expand your hours based on how you want to do your pricing. 44. Step 5 - Final Delivery: Step five Final delivery of your photos. Now remember, we've decided exactly what we're delivering. It's in the contract you want. Adhere to that. There are plenty of ways of doing this now. Depending on how you want to do it, you can do it digitally, or you can put it on a CD. You could put it on a USB drive, but sometimes you may get into trouble with delivering a physical product because a CD drive with your logo on it. RCD whether you're gonna or USB drive with your logo is awesome. But that may start to contradict your sales tax, so make sure you see what is in your region as faras delivering, delivering digitally. You could do this many different ways. There are free cloud based programs such as Dropbox, iCloud, Google, things like that where you can upload a lot of photos for free, depending on how many is a lot to you. Or you can use a photo centric site like Sam Folio, which is what I use where I can kind of control the access in the download ability for each client. In fact, on my website I have a client access tab where clients can always go to my website and get to this end. There's an volley account specifically so that they can download what they need. 45. Case Study: The Business Workflow: Welcome back to a new case study. This Kate study is all about business workflow, looking at some specific examples of what you talked about contracts, invoices of editing, just some of the things we want to provide a little bit more information on. So really, you covered a lot of good stuff in the first few steps of meteor client booking a client. And I think, let's just dive in there when you're booking a client. The thing that a lot of new photographers are concerned about wonder about is like what an actual contract looks like. So let's go in and actually look at your contract that your you have as an example. So this is one of my basic wedding photography contracts. Yeah, and I've adapted it into will see photography. It's one of the older ones, and you see all the stuff that we've talked about kind of mocked it up toe look a little I've had fake information, so, but again, all the like specifics are the most important thing. So, like who the bride is, who the groom is. Or if there's agreement agreement, a bride and bride and their phone numbers, they're address how much the waiting packages at the very top A to the very bottom in that column is what you're going to be providing. So I still think those are the two most important things. How much it's gonna cost and what you're providing. Yeah, along with it on the right side is the date obviously very important that we talked about earlier, who we need to report to also the time of the wedding? How many hours is where it's at Because you want to be with a plan and understand, like this wedding song you know for hours away are like stars away, like all this stuff needs to be kind of talked about. It's nice to have it all in one location because it's something that if you didn't have it in the contract and make them write it out for you or tell you to tell it to you for the contract would be in some email conversation. Yeah, you have to search through in multiple different emails, and so it's nice to have it all in one, and I'm showing a wedding contract as the example, because it's so much more complicated than ah headshot a portrait. Yeah. Headhunter. Portrait's like all this can just be like, you know, studio report to yourself. Here's or shooting. Here's for how long has it been providing? Yeah, not a lot of stuff with this. I even have a number of guests. Oh, it's like got kind of joining us because we're opening it up to you. Not well, typically. So having a number of guests is really important to you, because if I show up to a wedding on, I understand that was, uh, 300 people on door. It was like, you know, 10 people and I hired a second photographer. We didn't need to do that. Yeah, or vice versa. If we didn't hire a second photographer and they tricked me and it was like 300 people, I wouldn't There's no way to be able to cover the whole thing. Yeah, so I needed to, like, make sure that that's, you know, written down and understood. Cool and down below as these bullet points, which this is, like, stuff you'd have on all of your Yeah, This is a lot of stuff that I have on a lot of different things, and we don't know, we need to go over everything specific. This is a lot of stuff that I got from a family lawyer. It's something that you should really look into getting for yourself per what you're shooting. Yeah, This is not necessarily legally binding for something that you're shooting. This is very specific. To what a time we were okay with letting slide and not slide. Eso you can't see jumbled right now. But the nonrefundable $2000 basic stuff, uh, you know, it's the exclusive photographer to perform photography services. Sometimes they might have, like an uncle show up and start taking photos or, like a nephew, a niece, and that will get in the way. And like that could cause issues with what you're supposed to be doing and causing problems . I got a lot of good stuff in here just, for example, like if you have to replace yourself or illness, if there's some sort of, you know God are, Yeah. I mean, if there's like a rain storm or like a tornado or something, yeah, causing some sort of issue that you are held liable for that test, and this is kind of stuff to protect you and protect your client. And that's how you kind of explain it to them when you're sitting down the sign it. I did have one situation. That's where kind of his case study where there is a death in the family, like a week before the wedding. And they were just at the point where they just were not gonna have the wedding. Yeah, and they're gonna hold off for, like, a year or so And they needed the money and they asked for it. And they said, We understand that you're not legally obligated to give it back, but we're just and we're giving it back to them because at that point, you know it's okay, is built for the times when they're like that. Cancel it because, you know, they broke up or, like, you know, other other circumstances that are kind of not necessarily like, you know, something you sympathize with or whatever. Yeah, where they went with a different photographer. Like something crazy like that. Yeah. So again, to protect you to protect other people. But also, you know, you can bend it cause you're kind of in control of it. A za much as you can to help each other out. I mean, I think the big thing is like trusting your shooting with two. Yeah. And of course, you have spots for you to sign and the clients sign. And I think this is a pretty detailed contract. A lot of contracts might be a lot more simple. If you're doing head shots or you're doing, you know, engagement photos. It could literally just be, you know, the date who the client is, what you're doing, the price and the delivery, What you're delivering and spot yet if anything, like just get that like, that's, like the bare basics, because it will protect you. And it's meant to protect you. Yeah, someone else. And I really do recommend going to see a lawyer having them dropped a, like, just a template for you to use in the future. Yeah, you can also use P p. A. They have a lot of stuff if you subscribe to them or become a member where they give you specific contracts to what you're doing. Yeah, very cool. One thing we didn't really talk about earlier was invoicing. But you have an example of an invoice. So this is Is this something that you send in addition to the contract? You always send an invoice or does depend on it Depends on who you're working for. A lot of event photography that I do through corporations. They require an invoice. Yeah, because they have their own business accounting to prove that they spend money for their expense accounts and stuff like that. Yeah, with weddings, I don't typically do it unless they ask for it. That's usually like the wedding planner. Or if it's a big wedding, just keeping track of everything. Or if they're really a type personality, they want something in paper and writing that has dates on and what they've paid or not paid, especially when you're collecting 1/3 of the deposit. Yeah, 1/3 of the budget is deposit. They want to know that they paid you and some proof of it s So that's why I have that prepared. I don't even use that for head shots or anything, because it's all very quickly transactional. Yeah, it's good to be able to do that, though, because you will need it for your records. Yeah, and sometimes I'll just create it. But I won't send it anyone. Yeah, so just so you know that it's been paid or you know how much you charge him. It's good to just make one. Um, for your records, for your files. In case of an audit, in case you need to reference it again, there's some sort of record. So I would always say, making invoice, But you don't have to send it. Yeah, And I feel like if you're working with businesses like you said, that's just Inc. Yeah, They're gonna ask you for an invoice, and and really, it's just its when you're saying hey, pay me So it is my invoice. So yeah, your information. Eso really something interesting that we do invoice I d in the upper left. I always because we don't do that, we're not gonna do over 100 jewel projects. Maybe we'll get to that point. But I do the year as the first number. And then the number of invoices 1902 would be in the year 2019. And it's the second invoice of the year. Yeah, we start that over every year, and that's a really nice way to be able instantly know when? The time of year. That's cool. Yeah. And then including your address, their address, their just due date. You paid by. Yeah. You know what? This one is actually missing. Something must have got cut, not cut off anything. But you should put down pay. Make cheques payable. Teoh. Whatever you're not? Yes, yes. Bottom. Maybe. Contact information, information and website. Not stuff. Looks like you got cut off. But that's something you should have Teoh for you? Yep. Just has the description. The Mountain Dew taxes. And and yet that definitely cough. But you should send it to you when you said it. Corporations even know where to send your cheque. Sometimes I included the bank account. But you have Cool. So that's a lot of cool stuff. Talking about that was really in step two with booking clients. And then also, I guess Step five when I was delivering your photos getting paid, um, moving in between two editing your photos, something you talked about was setting up your light organization. This is something that, um, everyone's going to be interested in is like, what's the process? You talked about it, but let's just dive in and look at light room and see what it looks like again. This is gonna be different if you're using a different app. We like using light room. I like using light room. I think it's the most professional easiest to use most powerful editing app out there. But there's lots of other ones that can do basically the same thing it is. You have to pay for light room. All right, so we're here in light room, were in the library. And the basic thing people need to look at is over here on the left hand side of your collections that you had talked about earlier on. So it looks like you have a different class. Oh, yeah, for headshots. Very different. I organized it by person as opposed to date, so I could get to the client the faster I needed to do this in my wedding catalogue, Teoh, I organize it by couple and then in each catalogue, I think if you go Teoh, uh, any of those Emily or fair or any of them you can see I have the raw gallery there selects and what they've selected. It sounds your ah, if you could click on gallery. Let's, um so you can see. So basically, you can see what you know I've selected, and those are the proofs usually on. And then I go through and rate them. You can see their star rating on a lot of them. And, um and that one, the one that there's only 11 in, is what she selected to be edited. Um, and so those are the ones I chose to help her, you know at it and get and get done with those came through Zen folio through a plug in. But basically, I just Every person is is their weight and, like, games do for them polio through a plug in. So in Zen Folio, You ready for this? Yes. I'm ready for this. I upload the proof. Suzanne. Polio? Which it already the raw files or Jay? Not the raw files. OK, so we'll start beginning. So to take the photos you're bringing a card home. You import them into your working drive, which we have here. They're the raw photos. They go into my catalogue. You put them all here. I go through them and pick out the 120 or so proofs. And then I export J peg versions of Yeah, so they're compressed on their smaller, and I put them into a separate folder on my working drives from taking up space there. Duplicated? That means. So there's a raw version of it. And there's a J pig version, uh, with me so far. Yep. So then I take those J peg those proofs and I upload them to a proof gallery on Zen Folio. Yeah, which we saw earlier. Yeah, so she gets a password, She goes in. She looks at the proofs. She picks out the basically the one within Zen Folio. She's able to create account click, send a photographer. I get emails from Zen Folio with a message from her. I love them. They're super great thes air. The 11 that I want you to edit. Zen Folio will then take you to that section, and there's a place where you can download basically like a data file. Yeah, that's because they've all been interconnected, and I've installed a plug in until light room already from's and Folio. They provided, uh, and so then I'll go Teoh Light Room and I'll Click Import list. Uh, and I import the list I downloaded from simple Leo. And it creates automatically a gallery of those 11 so I don't have to go hunting. You get eso eso those air still referencing the Ross? Yeah, I don't have to. What I used to have to do was I'd either download the J pegs again, see what you find the name, find the rock, make my own gallery, edit those and that literally that plug in saves me like one. Eat a 30 40 minutes. Yeah, per person. Yeah. And so, times money. Yeah, for sure. You know, that's a huge And so you are just editing these 11 selects, right? So I'm just editing those 11 for, and then I'll take those 11 and then export high res J pigs create another gallery for her within her pay Johnson Folio, And now she'll be able to download those keeping in mind. I made sure his employees those proofs were not downloadable, like, sinfully you could tell. You can tell it. Do not allow anyone to download these. Yeah, Whereas the final projects you'll be like, you know, you can download these. Yeah, So I'm just looking. I I'm curious just, um you know, again, this isn't a class where we're teaching out of edit photos or anything, but I just want to see you mentioned, like you just do basic at its a lot of them, um, super quick. So I'm just seeing it before and after, right here So you can see the Yeah, I know for sure. Yeah. They cut the Busta contrast exposure a little bit, soften out the skin. I think on this one, go back to the edited one. Uh, yeah. Eso que you can see. You can see the spots where I am. Okay, So that's all your different specific spot. Just have a different photo. Maybe because I like later room a lot because there's certain cloning things I need to do sometimes. And I don't want her. I want her is good. Uh, so, yeah, actually. So, uh, when we go into photo shop, I could send it straight into photo shot and get more precise, uh, stuff. How do you know about that? Cuba. Oh, yeah. Cubans. Great, man. I know about that. That's crazy. Um, so after this way, too. Yeah. So it's a really, like, powerful tool to use. And, um, I do like, you know, all I do is up, up, up the light, add contrast, um, at a little bit. Softness of Lou minutes. Yeah, um, I bring down the, um, clarity or the sharpness. Yep. Get helps with skin a lot. Yep. And then, um, if you really want to get super detailed sometimes depending on the look, maybe we could go into Rachel if you really want to see, like, a big difference. Yeah, let's do that. Um, e back in the library. Oh, man. Library. Rachel, Rachel Meyers. Uh, and we'll go into her six that she pigs. And that's a good one, actually. OK, to the Okay. So you can see a huge difference. And and she was very concerned with a lot of the lines and blemishes on her face. So I spent a lot of time not only on her Facebook, her right arm. Yeah. Yeah. So you can really see, like, what you're doing here. Uh, light arms Just so powerful. Yeah. For me, the starting A business is doing that. I'm clearly a photographer. Toe have all these tools. Well, and this is going to be a different style for head shots were, Yeah, you're gonna fix some of those blemishes on call that people want to get rid of. But if it's, you know, weddings of its family portrait, it's of this pop product food. It's gonna be a completely different out editing, totally different story. But, um, yeah, cool. Very cool. I hope that was enjoyable for you to check out his editing set up on. And that's pretty much covers it for this case study when the workflow of, uh, the business awesome seeing the next lesson. 46. Introduction to this Section: Welcome to this new section of the course where we want to help you take your business to the next level. This means we're gonna be talking about creating a business infrastructure. Treating your business as an actual business will be giving you APS and tools that we use toe Make your productivity's e easy and better will be going over things like accounting, taxes, business insurance, important things. If you want. Teoh, make it official will be also going over other ways that you can continue to grow and expand your business as you start to get more clients and you want to really take it to that next level. So there's a lot of things that we're gonna be covering. This is a catch all section for a lot of cool stuff, but I know you're gonna enjoy it. I'll pass it over to Will 47. Using Podio to Keep Track of Everything: So let's talk about productivity tools. There's something that I use all the time to sort of keep track of everything. And there are different ways of doing that different apse of using that. Something that I uses something called Po Dio. It's totally free, and it's very, very powerful, although it will take you a while that set it up, it's gonna be worth it. In the end, the reason I use this is to track all my clients and leads. Let me know where I'm at as faras joining the email them doing to send them photos. It also lets be tracked shooting dates, venues, crew that I might be working with. And I've also started using it to track my income and my expenses if I'm not using something like QuickBooks or, you know, an app like that, so let's take you in tow. Look at what I'm doing here, and you can set up your own structure either using todo using your own spreadsheets, using, you know, different notes pads. I just want to show you what I'm tracking, how I'm tracking it and how it helps me do that and stay on top of things So let's go right into podium. You can see here that this is my dashboard and I've set all this up already. Um and you can see that on, uh, the top. It's my total earn. And I've really just gotten this going. I don't have all my income in their yet to show you, but this dashboard allows me to see a really nice Snapchat snapshot of everything that I'm doing you can see and actions. I have five posts. Edit ings I'm working on. I've completed Teoh. I'm awaiting one for proof selections. I'm awaiting client awaiting proof. So that means that's a That's when I got to get going on. And so when I click on that, Scott's the one that's waiting for that so I can click on Scott. I can see that he's awaiting proofs. His chute was on this day, and it's done being shot. Click on that and it'll give me all the information for that exact shoot what day it was on . If it's complete inquiry, who else I shot that day? Where this where the venue Waas, who was there who the crew member was makeup artist here on then also you know are scheduled for that day and how much I made that exact day. We'll get back into that in a second. Let's go back and you can see up in here in a podia will go back to our main page. I've got all my APS up here, so let's start with clients and leads. So this is where I can see all my clients all at once, And in one snapshot, I can see who is done. Is he under complete? I can see which ones are in post editing. You could see I have a lot of editing. I need to do Andan also someone who's awaiting. I'm awaiting a reply from her because she's interested in shooting with me. Here's another one waiting proves again. Scott. Get away. Proof selection. I'm waiting for her to get back to me about the selections and another post editing one. So this because I'm dealing with a lot of clients. This is such an easy way to keep track of everything because I would be going bananas trying to keep track of who needs what and what's happening. So as you get more and more into it, more popular more business. This is gonna be a really good way to stand top of stuff. Now if I say I'm done editing and I'm and I'm waiting for something, I can click on someone and really get all their information right away so I can get their cell phone. I could get their email address what day we shot on all that information because I've previously set up the templates for all this. And that's what PODIA allows you to do. Let's go look at the shoot dates, so undershoot dates. I set up the full shoots, so there's information here for me. So let's go look at our last two day was on 5 13 19 Click on the shoot date and again I can see all this information in a snapshot. It's complete. Here are my clients that I'm shooting. Here's the venue and information about the venue. Um, again, who on my team is here? I could add another photographer. I wanted to, um or an assistant here is the makeup artist. We can add another assistant here as well. And then here's the breakdown I have made for the day. So all this I can get through the cell phone app to which is even more clean on you can get to very quickly. You could also create tasks for your day. So say they wanted created to ask and say, You know what? Uh, remember snacks We can create due dates, reminders, All this stuff, Great task. Now it's gonna show up, you know, ready to go so I can check it the day before, see what I needed to get done. Check it off. We're good to go. It's a really good way to really stay on top of your shooting. This because things will get complicated and start of, you know, start to move in that direction. Venues is another one. I really only been shooting at one stage so far, so I've only got one in there. But I have the contact information of the stage owner, their phone number, their location, all that stuff Cruz where I'd be putting my photo assistance If you get to that point where the makeup artists that I'll be using only have one in their right now Now, income and expense is really wonderful because you can see how you've gotten paid and who has paid you, so I have to in there right now. But I can click on Let's say we click on Fay and we see that it's connected to the client that we've already previously made and click on her if I want. Here's our shooting date. Here's the what level the paid status is that she's paying. This is the total amount. And again, this is awesome because we've created something on our home page up tallies all that up. You can see how much you're making under expenses. It's sort of the same thing, but a little bit opposite. There's nothing in here right now, but said he wanted to added expense. We could put new camera and we'll say we purchased it yesterday and the cost was $1 million and we can add the image at the receipt, and that's really great cause you could do that with your phone. Um, and it starts to like become a way to keep track of expenses without you having to worry. That's also attached to all your shootings, of so all your businesses in one spot. It's a really fun, easy way to keep track of all that stuff again. The best part about doing this is that you're able to sort of track what you're doing and stay on top of stuff. You want to be able to be responding to people quickly. You want to know where everyone's at in your system. You can start to create stuff for weddings and here to where you have contracts built out. You can add more things to each profile, and there are tons of different productivity APS that you can use stuff like Air Table Trail, oh, Google tasks, a lot of things that you can really get in and organize. 48. Business Insurance: Hey Phil here, popping in for this lesson on insurance. So insurance is one of those things that you might hesitate on getting when you're starting out. It's also an additional expense that you might not have money Teoh get when you're starting out. But, of course, it's something that can be very important, especially as you grow your business. Also, depending on how your business is structured, insurance is there to protect you. And if you're running your business as a sole proprietor or partnership, your personal assets art put protected from with your business. And so that's a no additional reason why insurance is important. Even if you have a corporation or LLC, it's important to have insurance. So I run my own personal production company, and I have a small business insurance. But there's a few different types that I want to just go over. So one is just general liability insurance, and these types, sometimes the insurance you get, packages them into one sort of bundle. But general liability is probably the most important. This is, uh, this will cover things like if someone sues you. If I you our on set and something happens this will cover those kinds of incidents. So as a photographer, I would imagine this being important. If you are working on a set with different people, even with people that you're working for, not only your science or if you are taking pictures out in public trying to sell things and you don't have the rights to do something and so ensues you, which you shouldn't be trying to sell anything you don't have the rights for. But if you end up doing that, so ensues you. It protects you commercial property, which is also usually bundled into photography insurance, covers your equipment or things like your studio. So if there's someone there's a theft, someone steals your equipment, you lose it. It breaks, damages your equipment. It's gonna cover that. So those are the two that generally come together, and I would recommend for any small business. There's a couple other things you might want to consider. One is disability insurance. This is if you get sick injured and you miss work, then you're gonna continue to get paid as a photographer. If you're doing this as your sole business, if something does happen and you aren't ableto, take on any jobs or anything like that. That could be really difficult for you or your family. So having some sort of disability insurance can be beneficial, and the last thing I'll just mention is. If you have homeowners or rental insurance, you should check with them to see if they cover your business equipment. Some do up to a certain amount in terms of dollar amount. Some don't s. So don't just assume that your homeowner's insurance will cover things like your camera, your lenses, your computer. If it's for your business. A couple examples of companies that you might want to check out and get quotes from our Professional Photographers Association. That's P p. A. They have a photo care plan. Got Hill and Usher TCP insurance and ensuring on these All have photography specific plans and they work Ah, lot with photographers. You can also go under General, You know your Geico, your state farm, your any other insurance company that does. Small business insurance can cover you as well. Depending on where you live on when you're watching this, the cost is gonna changed dramatically, I'm sure and how much coverage you want. But you can expect to pay anywhere from a few $100 up to $1000 or or even a lot more, depending on what your coverages. So again, insurance is just one of those things that as you grow your business, it becomes more and more important, especially if your business is your your and your family's lightly hit. 49. Accounting: a field back with another lesson on accounting. So you've probably been doing this as you've started getting clients doing jobs, paying for things with your business credit card or your business bank account that you've set up. But I did want to just go over some basic accounting principles to keep in mind. First off, what is accounting? ITT's the basic understanding of the money flow of your business. So this is your income and your expenses. The income is any money that you have coming in from this could be clients paying you for a job. If you are selling fine art photography, this might be used selling photos on the street corner. Maybe you're a stock photographer and you are selling photos online, and you're getting residual income that way by any sort of money that you're making is considered your income, and it's a good idea to keep track of all your income in one place so that at the end of the year, or whenever you have to pay taxes or whenever you're paying yourself, you have all this in one place, and then your expenses are any equipment, expenses, anything you're paying for. Travel expenses, things you're paying for it to run your business and the APS accounts you have online that costs money thes are expenses. So again, it's important just to keep track of these things. Now this can be done with easy to use tools and app, such as QuickBooks Fresh books. There's even a free app called Wave Accounting, and they have mobile desktop APS that make it super easy. You can even do things like connect your business accounts your credit debit cards so that if you make any money or if you have any expenses, it's automatically going to bring all of that information in there and basically do it all for you. Or you could simply use something like on Excel sheet or a Google sheet where you are just every time you make money. You write down how much you made when you made it what it was for. And then if you have any expensive same thing when it was, how much was it for what it was, what it was for? And it's a good idea for any expenses to keep track of your receipts as well. Again, one of the reasons why having an app or using an app like QuickBooks. Fresh books to keep track of your receipts is really easy, because most of those have mobile app where you can just snap a picture of your receipt and it will save it for you. So it's important to be doing this as you run your business for me whenever I'm doing my business. If I make money or if I have expenses, I typically just jog that down in my own excel. She, which I personally use for my income and expenses because it's fairly simple, and I just do it right then and there, Um, at least every month you should be doing this so that every month your understanding are you making money? Are you losing money? How much? If you're making a certain amount of money, how much should you be saving for taxes? How much can you pay yourself? Is your business growing? Is it not growing? And then you could look back month after month, year after year, to see that growth or that decline as well. Ultimately, this is important for taxis, and again, this is in our region and the United States. It's gonna be different for you. For us, I have to pay quarterly taxes or estimated taxes. So four times a year I got to give a chunk to the government. And that's just because I'm making throughout money throughout the year, and they want to get their money throughout the year as well. And by keeping track of my accounting and knowing exactly how much I've made exactly how much expenses I have, I can see and have estimate how much I have to pay in taxes every quarter. Or if you're just doing it at the end of the year, how much you owe at the end of the year, if you ever get audited. Having a good books and having all this information written out is really important. And one other quick tip is because as a photographer, depending on what kind of photography you do, there might be for better months and slower months. And so if you contract your income and expenses and kind of budget for the slower months and know that you're gonna work a lot more during the summer and it's gonna be a little bit slower during the winter, whatever it is, that's another reason why accounting is so important. 50. Taxes: Let's talk about everyone's favorite subject taxes. So I know I briefly mentioned it in the previous lesson about saving for taxes. But taxes are a part of everyone's life, especially people who have and run their own businesses. We keep meant changing this, but depending on where you live, your state, your city, your country taxes are going to look different for everyone, the percentage that's collected when it's collected. How you make those payments again, it's gonna be different. So it's important to find an accountant who can help you with this in your local area to talk to other photographers in your area to see how it works for them if you're just getting started. The main thing to understand is that you have to pay taxes on any income that you make, so it's a good idea. Toe estimate what percentage you need to save so that you can keep that in your bank account or even a separate bank account, so that you can make those payments from that account and not have to worry about where you're gonna come up with the money for paying your taxes do not fall into the trap of not knowing how much you owe and spending all your money that you're making because if you're running a legitimate business, you need Teoh be paying taxes and know how much you owe. Another thing that will mentioned briefly in the last section was sales tax. This is again gonna change, depending on what region you're in, what kinds of things you're selling. But if you're selling things like physical goods of your selling at the local market prints , you might have to charge sales tax that go to your local government to your state. So again, something you have to look into and you add that sales tax on the top of any prices you charge. And you have to save that money and send it back to the government with taxes. I also want to just mention that the good thing is that if you have expenses of the business, those are usually tax deductible, so things to keep in mind are, of course, your equipment. So if you're buying new camera gear, this is gonna be deductible. If you're running an actual photo business travel costs, which is mileage or lodging. If you have to stay somewhere that's also going to be deductible. Meals, depending on what is four of its during a shoot partially, can be deducted as well. Again. Gonna be different wherever you live, though. Also, if you have a home based office, some of your home office expenses can be deducted. Generally things like your Internet or even your other utilities. Electricity, water. Those things can be partially detected if you are working from home. It's important, though, to talk to an accountant to find out what is actually available Teoh deducted in your area . One thing you should consider, though, is because you might have to pay a lot of taxes on income. Is should you be paying that in taxes? Or maybe, is it a good idea to invest that reinvesting in your business with things like better equipment or bulking up your website? Advertising promotional costs, those kinds of things. This is something that maybe at the end of the year, you look back and see how much you've made and see if you've had enough expenses or what your taxes air gonna look like. And you have to make that judgment call on if it will be better for you toe reinvest in your business or not, So that's a little bit about taxes. I know it's not the best subject that everyone likes to talk about and again talk to him countin in your area to help you out with your own situation. 51. Scaling Up Your Prices: So you want to start scaling your prices up? You can't be at the same price forever, so we're gonna start by increment ing it by half years. I usually like to up my prices, maybe once a year. But when you're first starting out, you want to start to get the ball rolling a little bit again. This kind of goes back to our discussion earlier in the course when we're talking about what's the price range for your region, you don't want to start out pricing people. We also don't want to stay stagnant. So you kind of have to like judge based on what other people are charging again. I think I said I started 50% below a mid range photographer for your region and your style of photography. I think within six months maybe bump that up to 60% of that mid range photographer and then in a year get it up to 75 or even 100 depending on higher doing and higher feeling. You're not getting a lot of clients for those costs, you won't be able to keep bumping it up as quickly, but every year, if you're consistently getting more and more work. You can start to bump up your costs now by how much it kind of depends on your market. Typically, I bumped my prices up every year by 20 to 25% and that's yearly, and I've been doing that for seven years. At this point, I think for the 1st 3 years I was kind of staying stagnant at a certain price. But every year I move it up and up and up, and every year I get more and more busy. So again, this kind of takes time. This is another part where you have to be kind of patient about your price is about getting more work, and it also helps about how you're keeping track. Everything Phil just talked about as's faras accounting, we'll let you see how you're growing, and you can kind of project and see how your business moves. If you see that you made more money in the last three months than you did in the month before those three months, maybe it's time to up your price is a little bit. Maybe you've got into a skill level where people are willing to pay. If you see that you've made less money or you're kind of seeing at a middle ground. Maybe keep your price is the same. Maybe think about lowering them a little bit. It's kind of a give and take, and you kind of have to learn the trends as you watch your business grow or stay stagnant, so keep in mind that you gotta track it, learn it, see what other photographers air doing and kind of try and grow yourself. This is the business aspect of it that is really hard to balance. People go to business school for years to get a handle handle on this. So don't feel bad about not learning this right away or doing the right thing. You got experiment. Try things to other people are doing, so keep an eye on your progress. Keep an eye on your accounting. Keep an eye on other photographers. Urinary. Talk to people. Talk to your client. See if they feel the prices fair. Maybe nudge it up a little bit when people start to ask your prices, but keep an eye on it and this is something you'd be cognizant of if you want to grow over time 52. Attending Conferences and Meetups: another really great way to expand your business is to talk to other photographers in personal. This means there's meet ups and conventions. I'm a big fan of this because you start to bounce ideas off each other. It's not necessarily that competitive because you guys are all helping each other and you're keeping each other accountable. One of my favorite things that I did when I was starting out as a wedding photographer was we invested some money in going to specific wedding vendor conventions. These are little pocketed wedding conventions where you'd sign up, you'd have a booth. You put up all your photos on a wall, have some prints out, and potential couple couples would take laps around the whole convention center, going to different florists, wedding venues, videographers, photographers, DJs, you know, people printing out invitations, just all different types of wedding vendors. Now, this not only gets you in front of clients, but this gets you to meet other vendors who may could get you. Clients recommend you. It gets you in with other venues who might want to recommend you for stuff. You'll meet other photographers whom you will start to talk to you and you can talk business with you could talk shop. It keeps you accountable for your business, and it keeps you in the trend and knowing what you're doing, they're a little expensive. Some of the cheaper ones would range from 200 bucks to some of the expensive ones. Would be 1000 up, depending on the size of your booth or what you're doing or your location in Los Angeles. They're very expensive. Maybe in smaller areas. There may only be one a year, so it might be hard to jockey and get in there. But if you're feeling like you aren't able to go toe one year, you want to see what ones like. It's kind of fun to go in and pose as a new couple or opposes someone looking for a friend on. You can start to get quotes from photographers. You can meet photographers and pretend to be a potential client. You can start to learn what they dio, learn the prices, see what works you what you like so you don't like. It's really a huge wealth of information for you to attend and just check that out. There's also photographer conventions where It's just a bunch of photographers hanging out talking shop. One of my favorite conventions is called WPP I, and it's in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States and its basically wedding photographers and Portrait Photographer International. And everyone needs up. There's booths of different equipment, all the camera to part all the camera, cos they're Canon, Nikon, Fuji, Sony, um, camera straps of their flash like tons of products stuff. Zen Folio has a booth. There's just tons of equipment, tons of meet ups, tons of conferences about how to grow your business, how to engage with clients. It's probably all the information that I've gathered is being is from that from that and from experience. So go to that is so worth your time. So worth your money, Um, and how fun me other photographers learn, learn, learn, learn. You will always be learning because you are not only a creative photographer, you are a business entrepreneur, and the only way we can kind of help each other up is by sharing all this information really cool. I've had really cool conversation with photographers from other countries, other states, other cities that I have taken their practices and applied to mind. They've taken things that I've done. It applied to them constantly, learning constantly building. So a convention like that with other photographers is invaluable. And, lastly, an online community. There's Instagram, where you can talk to other photographers, chat, talk about business, see what they're doing. How are they growing? How are they using their prices? How are they editing? What are their tools? Also, groups like photography and friends that we've helped develop through video school online is such a great community, and we've noticed so many people asking questions and talking and growing. It goes from novice to advance, and you can really get in and talk to people about learning how to expand your business. Learning had expend your skill owes his photographer and just growing in general. So taking advantage of social media in a way that you can learn and build a community around your own business is also super valuable. 53. Case Study: Continued Business Growth: favor one pill and will back together again for another case study. Today we're chatting about business infrastructure and continued growth, trying to expand our business. So in this section you covered a lot things with Joint Ponyo, the project productivity tool that you're using. There's other ones that are out there. There's lots of things. I yeah, I used tremolo is another one that you can do a lot of similar things. Asana is another one, Um, and a lot of people can shoes. You know, It's document, I asked blinders on your phone. Um, we also talked about insurance I've talked about. I talked about accounting taxes. Eso yeah, I don't know anything else that we need to cover with insurance. Well, let's talk a little bit about insurance for your film production, which is a little different, but it's different. We have an overarching, very expensive insurance plan, but that's because we tend to have bigger shoots and film shoots where we have to kind of cover general liability as well. Workers comp yeah, will be renting trucks will be renting big locations, so our general insurance plan is a bit more expensive. Have you ever had to use that. Not once have you ever heard of anyone having. Yes, I've read a couple people, but mostly it's because of damaged equipment. It's usually like a dropped $60,000 camera or, I know, rental houses. They had to use it because but it's a process and it takes time. But, boy, let me tell you, is it worth it from the stories that I've heard? Yeah, you know, as photographers as we start to collect equipment and technology, your one drop away from, you know, not being able to show up for your wedding next weekend or, you know, not be able to show for the job for the rest of the day. Or, you know, save business is slow. When you buy a new camera, it's stolen out of your car like there are a 1,000,000 things that can happen that can shut you down real fast. Yeah, and so the insurance is really to help you continue your business in case of caddis trophic . Have you ever had to do any like, warranty stuff with specific year through like that camera? Like if there was a malfunction of like replacements, I have never had any deals without with, like, buying. You know, the biggest thing that we've had was drop drop lens, But it got to the point where it was less than our deductible. So, you know, at that point, we just paid for it. Yeah, it was, like a few $100. Yeah, it was all a mistake. But, you know, you're having a business. You're gonna make mistakes. Things are gonna happen. Yeah, uh, you just have to continue moving on. Yeah, stuff like that. All right. So with accounting, I talked about that, Um, you're using QuickBooks, right? Am I use QuickBooks? Uh, basically, QuickBooks exists as my Carnahan creative umbrella that we talked about for. So it's got teaching. It's got photography. And it's got a music cinematographer on DSO I. It's not just photography, but the way it works is that it's an online program that's hooked up to the Carnahan creative that we'll see photography bank account every time I use that card, it brings in those transactions every time I send it invoice to someone I send it through. QuickBooks has all the contact information for everyone there. Um, and basically, it's like it just sinks it. Yeah. So the end of the year, when I send it to my tax person, they can actually log in and see where my expenses are. They can put it up against my income so they can see like this. How much money you're spending every month. That's how much money you're making every month. Maybe stop spending so much money, maybe try to get more or or any day you make more money, you can write stuff off easily. So the point of having QuickBooks we're doing it on your own is like, so important to track in the long term. Like you want to see what your growth is or not. Yeah, and adjust accordingly. Yeah, and I mean, you make a lot of decisions off that, like if you have to increase your pricing because there's a lot of things I think beginners don't take into account with how much it costs to run photography business, let alone any business things like, you know, your domain name or external accounts or light room or whatever. You're not thinking about that. Your equipment alone, like your laptop, goes down like you would be able to edit you know photos. You need to be able to upload photos and then you think like you think about. Okay, I'm gonna go to a shoot. I'm gonna charge 50 bucks an hour. That sounds, that's a pretty good hourly rate. Or like anywhere in the world. You know, above $15 an hour is pretty good compared to what most people in the world make. But then you take into account everything else that we talked about. And yeah, so that's why is important to do accounting in tow. Know how much money? What your overhead is what you're spending. I mean, Zen Foley, it was so expensive, like, yeah, I love How much is it, though? I'm but I have the full tear. So it's like $230 a year, which comes out to, like, you know, lower cost monthly. As long as I do one head shot a month. Yeah, I can afford that. But that's eating into that s ou. That's what What I mean by your overhead like you're You know, if you're using Dropbox, it's 10 bucks a month. If you know you're renting lenses every month, that's another cost. A month you're gonna buy your domain every other, like you buy a new camera. And then that's like, you know, four months of work that you be able analyze the business income and expenses so important to understanding how to be successful on analyze what you're doing, right? Yeah, Now you're using QuickBooks. That does also cost. There's one I think I mentioned Wave APS or wave accounting. It's wave aps dot com like wave, and that's it does a lot of the same free stuff. There's a mobile app. You can connect your accounts and pretty cool if you want to get started. There's a self employed cookbooks. I think that's pretty cheap. Five months, 55 bucks a month. I can't recommend having some sort of app help you enough. We're not accountants. Yeah, you can learn and do as much as you possibly can. But having an account on your side or having an app that's really gonna be a tool and help you do this is is so work. And that's why. But that's also why we added it to this section of the course because a lot of people aren't at this point yet, necessarily. But it's really when you're about, really focus on growing your business that that you really want to start doing. Yeah, And if you enter into, uh, doing this full time, you really should look into it like it is if you're If this is a full time gig, it is just going to save you time and effort and, you know, yeah. Hurt. Cool. Taxes, taxes. Amanda worst. How about we talk about the importance of saving for taxi? Yeah, I have that bit you in the butt that bit me real big. The first couple of years, I was freelancing. And you don't realize it until you're you too far deep in. Yeah. Um, And now, after you know, doing this for years, it's fine. Yeah, because you learn through your accounting how much you should be setting aside for your taxes per year. Region again. You said this, Doctor. I can't talk to an accountant. Now. He's a knowing that we have to keep repeating ourselves, but it's so we weren't We can't give you a specific number that you need to, but generally I know for us like 30 to 40% is generally a super safe Yeah, no place to save and expect that you're gonna put that money back in your taxes. But when you're getting a check or you're getting a Venmo came very getting someone's hand . You cash while you're shooting like it's not text, you know it's coming and taking that money. And if you get it into your account and you start getting on it or some reason you don't pay your taxes, yeah, it's not. Get yeah, and of course, these things changed. But yet in the US, we have to pay not only our personal income tax but self employment tax, which covers things like Social Security and things like that. So that's just on top of that. That being said, there are, like the expenses that we can deduct from our taxes yet on bond again. That changes, though that's changed in the past couple of years, so you kind of have to be on top of that can. Why, it's important to have an accountant who knows the stuff and stays up today. They've literally invested time and energy into their job, and they will help you. Yeah, I know anything else about taxes, taxes. It's brought about time. It's just death and taxes, man. Yep, only certain things you talk, talk about scaling prices up conventions and meet ups. Any other things? Yeah. I mean, I think what I said in the class about, you know, slowly raising your prices, using your accounting, Uh, you know, radar to see where you're at and judge that, based on how you doing or not doing is really a good practice talking to other photographers like going these conventions is so valuable to lamb. Even us, like you and I both run businesses separately and together. And so, like, you know, we talk about stuff and, like we've worked off each other and Sam, like the three of us have been able to really like hone in. And I think when you doing it by yourself, it's it's you can. It's very easy, but it's so much more helpful when you have other people that work off of and be accountable for and understand how you guys air working with each other in tandem. I mean, you talked about like, uh, earlier in a case study when we were looking at your priceless how you would have three shooters at your weddings when you started and one was your partner. But you would always have another shooter. And so again, you know that you might not be the one that's finding the weddings. But if someone knows you're a photographer, if you're connected with them, they might ask you to Come on. Uh, I love I actually just covered for my friend in Palm Springs. I was a second shooter on I hadn't done in a long time. I was like Sure, yeah, just show a low profile wides get paid later. So it's always a good way to start to meet photographers and understand how they run their businesses fire in their down time. So you have meaning people in helping will really help you figure out of scale up. And you can do that at conventions meet ups. When you do. Yeah, I know for sure, but also with scaling up prices. I just wanted to add that, um, be confident in yourself, especially if if you know, you see your photos, it's easy to critique your own photos and feel like you're not as good as the competition in your area. But the people your clients don't necessarily know, like how long you've been doing this or whatever. But if they see your photos on your website and they like it, be confident and charging. Ah, higher price and up in your prices because typically, a lot of clients won't won't care if if they like you as a photographer than you know, raising your prices 10 20% over time isn't gonna turn away a lot of clients. So I just want to add that awesome. Well, it's been great in this case study, and I hope you enjoyed it and we'll see you in another lesson. 54. Introduction to this Section: welcome to this new section of the course all about actually selling your prints. So this is a section that might not pertain to you if you are doing something like event photography had shot photography, Wedding photography. This is more for people who are doing fine art prints who want to actually start a foot RV business where they are creating art that they sell. This could be either digitally or actually printed out photos that you sell at your locals Farmers market or you sell online and you shipped to people so well is gonna be going over things like where you actually sell your prints. How do you do that? Choosing a printer who actually prints your shots. Choosing different photo sizes, quality setting prices all specific to selling your photography as art. If you're not interested in this section, it's completely find a skip ahead to the next section. As we know, this section isn't going to pertain to everyone taking this class 55. Why Should You Sell Your Prints: the selling prince like why? And what does this mean? This means that we're taking our photos were printing them, were potentially framing them, and we are selling them now. This is kind of a smaller section in our class because this is actually very difficult to be very successful at. You can sell a print here and there and make a little bit of money. But this won't necessarily be a huge business unless you've coined some sort of really, really interesting and fantastic market where you're selling up. This is incredibly difficult, but it can be done. It can definitely be done. And I've seen people have a lot of success at it or do it in combination with their other photography business. The problem with selling princes is a whole different structure than actually shooting. It's just Prince is just fine art. You have to kind of find a niche in the market for it. I'm gonna take the example in Los Angeles. There's a lot of photographers out here that specialize in different style of photography, is very artistic. There's a photographer that only takes pictures of life guard houses and in that market along the beach community where people have houses near the beach. They want to put photos up of that, so he's kind of sticks to that area. Dizzy will sell that. Another good market that I've seen is people taking pictures of dogs or of specialty items like they'll go around doing a single sort of photo of skylines and also those skylines not specific city or the you know they'll go around doing specific street art photography, and they'll go sell them near people who are interested in buying more artistic street art . You really have to kind of find your market for it and then stick to that sort of genre of photography. It's gonna be really hard if you're all over the place, just trying to sell random prints. You want to try and find a market that would really work for what you're shooting and who is going to actually buy a physical print and hang it up. I've seen photographers get to the point where they're selling prints for thousands of dollars. I'm not talking like a couple of $1000. I'm talking like tens of thousands of dollars. There are people out there who will create whole galleries of all their art and be able to sell them. But this is a very long road, and it is a very specific way of doing a business and shooting. So let's talk about the basics of that to get started, even though it may take you a while to get to the point of making millions of dollars. 56. Choose the Best Printer: So you've decided you want to sell your prints, You've taken the photos, you have them edited. You're ready to go. You need to print them out. Now, where do you print your photos out? There are three options that I found in printing photos. The first is doing it online. You can goto websites on order prints online, but it's really hard to kind of tell the quality. There's plenty of cool websites where you can upload your photo. They'll mail it to you or the mail to the person that you bought it from you on. That's like a really quick and easy way to do it without having to deal with too many physical people. The problem with that is that you can't really tell the quality until he tested a few times . You may want to put some money into testing different size prints on different types of paper for that specific printer. The second is going to a chain. A store like a Costco or a big brand pharmacy has a print shop on just printing there. Their quality is not as good, but they will be very inexpensive. And when you start to mark up your photos and sell them for a higher cost. Or if you're printing out a ton of photos and you're selling amount of market, that might be the best way to go again. The quality may not be as of good, depending on the type of big sort of store you're going to, but you can get them for a cheaper price, and they may be good enough for the size of your printing. My favorite thing is to go to a really photo print store now that's usually attached to a photo shop. Or it's built out on its own, like a one old, one hour photo lab that's still doing digital prints. And typically with those you can go in with the USB stick, upload your photo or you can actually email it to them, or they'll have an online site where you can upload your photo and then go to the store to pick up your actual print. These I found the best because you'll get to meet the printers. They'll start to understand your style will know the type of print that you're that you're really going for and your color spectrum. It's really good to know that the printer that's printing is gonna be true to your screen or your starch. A learn other printer prints based on the photo that you're doing. If you typically have a darker photo and your prince is coming out lighter, you'll start to know to make your photo even darker toe adjust for their printer. You'll start. They'll start to understand what types of settings that you may like, and you can talk to them and work with them to kind of get samples from them. That's the best place to start putting your photo in my opinion, and it's going to be the most professional quality, and you will probably be the most expensive. But then that's when you start to mark up your prices and we'll talk more about that and how much you should be selling your prints. Four Suit Also a professional print shop will also help you find a custom framer, or you're gonna have to find a frame on your own. And again this is gonna start to add into all the cost value of your printed, so decide what size you want to sell. Decide what paper you want to use and go ahead and get a printed. You'll then have to take that size and put it in a frame. If you're selling the framed photo, or if you're just selling a regular printed photo on the tell you right now, you can sell a framed photo for a lot more than just a flimsy prince. 57. How to Price Your Prints: So you've printed your photo out. You've decided if you wanted a frame it or not frame it. How much money have you spent on making this photograph start to add it up. And I don't mean just the photo itself. The photo itself, the print itself. Maybe you spent $20 on it. Maybe you spent $100 on a big 30 by 40 print. Maybe you spent a couple 100 on the frame. Maybe you spent $10 on the frame. But also, how much time did you put into this photo? How much time did you spend editing? How much time did you go out to get that beautiful sunset on that coast? How long did it take you to drive out there? Spend money on gas? How much did that lens cost? There are so many factors when you're trying to sell print that are different from actually going out and shooting for, like, a wedding or a headshot session. So let's talk about your hourly rate again. How much time do you feel like is worth one photograph? Now let's take an example of just a simple 11 by 14 photo, which is about that big you've spent? I don't know what a really professional print shop. $30 printing it out on Matt paper. You then bought a print Ah, frame story about frame that cost another $30. So we're up to $60 on just this physical thing. Cool. Now, I spent an hour driving out to the spot to take this photo because I don't live too close to the to the beach. And then I spent about an hour and 1/2 hanging out, waiting for the moment to just be right on. I used my nice, mere lis camera. So I've spent two hours doing that, I think came home. And I spent roughly 30 minutes to an hour, uh, editing it and then out putting it and sending it to the print shop before him, and then spent another 30 minutes driving out to pick up this photo. So now I'm at a total of four hours, plus $60 of a printed photo. So let's just say that four hours to me was worth on the cheaper and $25 an hour that I spent. That's, you know, $100 of time that I have spent working on that photo. Now you can decide what our rate is, but I'm just during $25. So that's $100 that I've spent my time doing. Plus six, it's $160. So now if we sell this print that's framed print for $160 do you feel like it is worth it to you to do that? That's up to you. You have to decide what your market value for this giant print would be. I would personally say selling prints at cost is a very good way to start. But if you seriously want to make money at it, you need to start upping the price. You could round it up to $200 so you've made $40 on top of all this work in time, in monetary value, you've only spent 60 and you spend your sending it. You're selling it for 200 so you've sort of in reality, made a lot more cash than you spent. But also you gotta take into your time. You've spent time doing that. You could have been doing other things or shooting other things, so you kind of have to balance how you feel about that. Andi. I think a lot of photographers professional photographers use that time as time that they could have been putting into their company, putting in other places, spending with their families. You want to get paid for that time, or if you're just worried about that being the hobby part of it and the monetary value of it is more important. You spent $60 on the print and on the frame, then selling it for $200 seems like a lot more money, so it kind of depends on how you want to do this. You can make smaller prints for less money. Big Giant Prince You can double the price of the time it took you to do it and the time in the amount of money that it cost for you to make that. And that's really where you're going to start to make your money. Now, if you're only making $40 extra or you're only making $20 extra, may not be worth your time unless you're doing that a lot. Now, if you only sell one or two prints a month and you really need to be making money. And this is becoming a bigger business for you. You need to be asking for more money. Really? Big professional photographers are asking for upwards of 300 to $500 for a 11 by 14 size print. Now again, maybe you can start to talk about how you're only gonna sell one of these online or you start to build a presence. You're only gonna sell five of these, which makes them more worthwhile. Then you're gonna kill the negative. Or you're gonna make a giant print and spend like, ah, $1000 buildings, big print this custom frame, and you're going to sell it for $5000. Either way, that's how you sort of start to figure it out. Find out how much it costs to make the print. Find out how much it costs to make the frame. Calculate your hourly rate, how much time you want to be getting paid, creating this photo and decide how much you want a market up for that. Do you want to take 50% of that? And added on, Do you want take 100? You want 200% of that the big the big thing here is to decide what your market ability is, where you're selling it, who's gonna be buying it and see what's gonna work out for you. This is another thing that you're gonna have to kind of feel out, see what other prints are selling for. And this is all very physical. When you're selling online, you may just be selling the print without a sort of frame, or you may be selling it through a website, and they'll sometimes already have suggested costs for you. So that's also another way that you can kind of go about doing it. There are certain websites where you can put up a print set up a price, and the people will actually start to order them online. You have to do anything. Phil is gonna go through a couple examples of online ways of selling your prints 58. Where to Sell Your Prints Online: All right, Welcome to this lesson on selling your prints online. I just want to go over some of the tools that I know that you can use to sell your prints online. These air going to be a variety of tools. Some are marketplaces where you can actually post your images and people are there and concert. If they're searching for your image or your type of image, then you can tell they might find it and buy it from you. Others are websites. Where is just for you to set up a way where you can actually host a a picture? People can see that picture and ask you to buy. It might be a way that from your website you send people toe this storefront. We'll get more into that. There's other Morse photo specific tools that make it a little bit easier that are have good tools just for photographers. And then, lastly, if you're using a website like a WordPress website, there are plug ins that you can use Teoh. Add add the option to sell prints and sell photos through your WordPress website. So the first is at sea, and I know we'll mention it, but I really think it is probably the best option for getting started. It's similar to like E Bay, but for more creative type things. And so they haven't are in collectibles category on here. And so if we go under photography, you can see the types of photographs that are on sale. And so as we go on one of these listings, this is basically what you can do. You can put up your photo. It shows the photo example. You can have it set up with different sizes, and people can choose the size they want, the quantity that be they want. There's reviews everything you need on. It's a marketplace so people are here ready to buy, which helps. It's easier to sell to people if they're ready to buy. And if people are on etc. They're ready to buy. With any of these websites, you're gonna have to find the printer yourself so well talked about printers. Generally, you'll print the image out yourself and ship it as well. So to set up a business, just go upto etc dot com. Click Sell on Etsy. The first listing is, I think, 20 cents right now, at the time, and then it costs a 5% transaction fee on a payment processing fee of 3%. So it's about nine or 10% depending on how much you're charging for her photo that Etsy is going to be taking for providing the marketplace for providing an audience of people that are already willing to buy stuff from you a lot easier than probably just putting it up on your website and waiting for someone in the world to find your website to find to buy your photo even though it is competitive and it is marketplace, there's lots of photographers on there. It's definitely probably the best one to get started that the next kind of tool that you might consider using is something like Shopify. Shopify is basically a its own sort of website where you can create your own storefront so this could be your main website you could actually use. Shopify has your main website if you're more of a fine art type of Qatar for stock photographer, where you're selling prints through your website rather than directly to clients. As you can see here, though, if a lot of people you Shopify if they're selling things like T shirts, furniture, really anything, any type of business, and there's lots of tools for photographer is here. They have templates to set up photography websites and the whole payments and processing. That's what's beautiful about Shopify. It takes care of all of that. It does cost, though it does cost to get started. There is a free trial, but if you want to just have a basic storefront, it's $29 a month at this time on, that gets you your online store and things like that. But if you want more options, you have to pay for the more advanced plans. Now. Gum road dot com is a more basic option. Now, basically, what it allows you to do is just set up a listing for a product and sell it so it again takes care of the payment, processing and everything like that. But it's a lot more simple. So what you might do is set up a product here on Gum Road, and then you would have your main website and you would set up a gallery with links to the image on Gun Road, where you could sell it so it's free to get started, which is pretty cool on do. You can just start listing and see how it goes. Of course, like everything, if you pay for the monthly plan, you get more features. But yeah, it's cool because it allows you to accept credit cards, PayPal, different types of payment options no matter what people are wanting toe to pay with. Now, one of the coolest ones that I've waited to mention is visual society. Visual society dot com is built for photographers to sell high quality prints. The cool thing about visual society is that they take care of the printing, the processing, everything. You put up your work and everything basically happens automatically. And again, you consent people from your website to your profile on visual society. You could use it as your own website. If you are selling, uh, kind of like your own, uh, find our or things like that and you can get started for free, which is awesome and its worldwide fulfillment. So wherever you are in the world, you can use this to sell your photos. You The free plan only has six product up loads, so it is a little bit limited there, but for five bucks a month you can have 100 products. So it's a really cool thing. Let me just show you, um, let's go here cell. So I want to show you. So you have options to sell fine art with frames, canvases, poster prints merged like cellphone color covers or just digital downloads, and you can choose if you want to mark it up at a certain percentage. So if you want to mark up the price 100% you can see actually the caught what you be making . So if you want to sell for completely free or without making profits, you can see the actual cost that it it costs them to make these things. But say you wanna, you know, make $40 from ah, acrylic print or whatever. You can choose how much you want to make per different item. You can just show see how much mark of you have, and it's free to get started. So definitely I would recommend visual society as one of the best places to set up your photos. The last options I want to mention are a couple WordPress plug ins. Now this is only specific to you. If you are using a website built on WordPress, these are plug ins that allow you to basically sell photos on your website. So there are lots of different plug ins that allow you to sell products on your website. But these ones are specific to photos and Vera Gallery. It does cost to install this plug in, but it allows you to do things like create albums. Have image, proves it does all the e commerce of the payments and processing all kinds of things like that, and then sell media. Biograph paper press dot com is another one. And the cool thing about using a plug in like this is that you keep 100% of any sale, so there's no transaction fees. There's no fees other than what you have to pay Teoh print it, or if you're selling digital files, then there's no extra cost to you at all. So these are just a lot of options. There's so money, and there's so many additional ones out there to help you sell your photos, your prints, your downloads online. But I definitely recommend checking out visual society and etc. As my favorite options for selling photos online. Thanks so much for watching, and we'll see another lesson. 59. Selling Your Prints in Person: so where the best place to sell these prints will immediately The very first physical spot to sell them is a local marketplace. Ah, lot of places around the world will have small setups like swap meets and fares and art exhibits and stuff like that, where you can kind of go and set up a booth and sell your prints there. And the cool thing about that is that you could really target your area. Like I said, if you're trying to sell near a beach, and so a lot of beachy photos might look up a festival or an art walk or a block party where you can set up a booth and sell your photos. Pluses to this is that you actually interact with people and you'll get to be able to sell and see people by your images and have have the excitement there in front of you is like a really fun marketplace to do it, and something I highly recommend you dio. The downside is that you can't really you can't really sell it quickly. You kind of have to go through the process, set up and wait for a day. Ah, you have to sometimes get business permits for certain affairs. You have to apply some time. You have to pay for the space, so it's a lot of time and money to invest and where you may or may not sell a decent amount of products. I've seen places where they'll just put up a tent, put up all the prints inside, and then you'll just take orders and you'll go make them that. We're not putting in extra money to stuff that you may not celery, or you can sell the priests on the walls for a little bit extra. That's a really fun way to sell your prints, and you get to be outside interacting with people. The next place I've seen, a lot of people selling is actually local coffee shops. I've seen a lot of mom and pop stores, mom and pop coffee shops, where if you go in, you get to know the owners. You talk to them and you ask them if you can put your photography on their walls, sometimes I'll let you do it and they let you put little prices in the corner. A lot of coffee shops in Los Angeles and in bigger cities will sponsor different photographers for like a month. If you give them a cut of the of the take away or you pay them a little bit to put up your photos, you're gonna exposure every day, every day, every day. You could have an opening night. It's really cool way to sort of find a way to locally sell your prints. And I think if you're in a small city or small town and you could partner up with a coffee shop like that and create a theme that looks really nice in the coffee shop, I think it's a really good way to not only learn about getting new clients, they're pretty, but also learn about selling prints in a live spot. I think it'd be really fun to do, and I've done it a couple times before, back when I was starting out, and I've always had really great experiences with it. But I did know the coffee shop owners. So see if you could talk to local shops doesn't have to be a coffee shop. It could be anything that's Mom and pop own that is willing to put up your work 60. Wrapping Up This Section: so, in conclusion, selling your prints is difficult, but it's super fun, and it's very tactile. It's a really cool way to have a business. It's just selling prints, but it's also really awesome. Way to supplement your service photography to your print photography. Now during your service photography like headshots, modeling, portrait's family stuff, the weddings, the events you can sell Prince online to those customers after you've done it, or you can give them the images that they can print stuff in the future. You can do that, and you can also do printing and selling them in stores and selling them on the market and selling them anything and everything is open to you. But I really do strongly want you think about. If you're Onley selling prints, it's going to be very hard to have a full blown business. Not a lot of people could pull that off, and it takes an incredible amount of time, an incredible amount of patients and a lot of testing and figure out what market you're in Seville been. We'll get lucky style of photographs are doing, and sometimes you can turn that into even corporate shooting for like different magazines and products stuff. I don't know that kind of thing because that will really get you in the door in that respect. But this is not gonna apply to a lot of people who are trying to shoot people. And, ah, lot of people are trying to shoot events and Portrait's all that stuff. Print photography is a little bit different on really does require a lot of work. So if you're gonna go into it, I would say definitely Do your research be prepared for a long road. I think you're very capable of doing it, and you can. It just takes a lot of work. 61. Will's Tips for Personal and Creative Well-Being: We've come to the end of the class, and the last thing I wanted to talk to you about was so tips for personal well being. This is really important. This is a very physically and mentally demanding job, and although sometimes people think you're just taking photos again, it's not that you're just taking photos. You're also a president of your own business. You're the advertising of your own business, your accountant of your own business. You're the bookkeeper of your own businesses, anything. You're really every single part of your own business. If you're doing this on your own, and you have to figure out a way to maintain a balance between work, life, stress, relief, play creativity. Because if you don't you will burn yourself out. And I think when I first started doing this and I was working with a partner and some other folks, you start to just I want to be working all the time because honestly, there is always something that can be done when you're running your own business. And when you're dealing with art and photography, there's always something that you could be taking a photo of. Sometimes creativity comes real quick and inspiration hits you fast and you want to get out there and take photos. Sometimes, you know, you might be up late and you're like, you know, I could really work on my website. I should look at my accounting tonight. I should create a new invoice that should look at a new logo. I should back up this data. Try editing this. There's literally a plethora of things to do when you're going into a business like this. So a good practice is to start to set boundaries for you. I'm talking about an hourly boundary and potentially a daily about when talking about hourly boundary. Try to sometimes treat this if you're going full time treated like a full time job on Lee, work from 9 to 5 if you're just starting because you don't have any other job and you like So you're coming out of school or you're making a transition or your partner is the breadwinner and you're doing nothing but photography. Onley treated from 9 to 5 for now, work from 9 to 12. Have a lunch, come back at one work from 1 to 5 and then stop because otherwise you will drive yourself mad if you go into the night and work every night, work at random hours. Some people can do that. But in general I would try to set a little bit of boundaries, work during work hours rest during when everyone else is rested. Thing about being a freelancer Ah, business owner is that you can work whenever and you can take random days off. So thinking about daily days if you work Monday through Sunday, you're gonna burn out eventually. It's just gonna be too much. You're gonna be constant looking it stuff constantly calculating constantly. Talk to people constantly on your computer, straining your eyes and you want to take some time for yourself. You won't take some time, so keep your creative mind. You know, watch movies, listen to music. Stay informed. You want to take some time for your family because this could really take away from a lot of your life on. The whole idea is that you're building a career in a job for yourself that you love to do. But you can also step away and still have your life. You don't want it to overtake everything. Now if you figured that balance out where you can balance more work than not work. Great. But at a certain point, it is definitely a job and it will take over Ah, lot of your time creating boundaries as faras friendships and photography. Doing things for free, not doing things for free is something also you need to start to consider. Don't do things for free all the tim