ONE Decision that TRANSFORMED my Photography Business in 2022

I photograph people that's what I do it's all I want to do and that really leads me directly into the one major decision that I made this year that changed my business I started getting serious about my goals again I don't mean I decided to only photograph people I decided to do that about you know nine ten years ago what I did do is figure out exactly how and why I photograph people when it comes to the how there are basically two ways I like to photograph people either bright and Poppy or dark and Moody um it feels like a dichotomy of who I am as a person realized in in my vision of Photography as for the why comes down to capturing the the essence of a person or a heightened emotional moment usually fun and comedic or stoic and serious bright poppy fun and laughter or dark stoic Moody contemplative now this change has developed more and more this year to the point where I'm turning away jobs that aren't for me or at least I'm I'm pricing myself at a point where if I did get the job I'd be happy enough with the money to deal with the headache of doing the work due to covid the war in Ukraine the oil crisis the climate emergency and a number of other factors I've stop doing most shoots outside of my local region covid caused a lot of photography studios in Toronto to shut down the studios that are available are expensive and inconvenient you have to walk up carrying your gear up three flights of stairs there's no elevator and they're also expensive so I'm happy where I am right now and I don't want to spend the money on gas on parking getting my gear out of my car especially in the middle of winter and putting it on a cart lugging it down the street you know carrying it upstairs setting it up doing a shoot taking everything packing it up wearing all the gear down slugging it on the cart to my car like there's just so much work for what is generally not a lot of money if it's a company that's hiring me for the day to go and they're paying me thousands of dollars I'm I'm gonna go do that I have no problem doing that or wherever you wherever you want to send me I'll go if the pay makes sense I also started quoting my worth on estimates even when I know it's going to cost me the job as an example a couple weeks ago I sent out a quote for sixty one hundred dollars even though they already told me that they had estimates from two other photographers in the range of eighteen hundred to two thousand dollars now this is for a shoot where they needed about 35 images a full day of shooting at two locations and then they also wanted some video at the second location honestly my estimate is still lower than I normally would have sent given the scope of the project I knew it wasn't going I knew I wasn't going to get it but I figured if they did increase their budget at least I wouldn't hate myself for how little I was making and I'm honestly shocked that anyone would think eighteen hundred dollars was good money for the amount of work that that's going to take them just can't run a successful business on that kind of pricing after subletting my friend Marta's studio for a month in July and August I realized that I had to get back to having my own studio and now I do right next door this is my studio I share it with my friend Lisa having my own Studio gives me the flexibility to book clients whenever I need to instead of just whenever there's a studio available to me at whatever that rate is that it's available to me for now I'm not going to tell you how much my rent is because you would get jealous you pop a it's crazy cheap like crazy crazy cheap I rented studios in Toronto that cost more for four hours than this costs me for an entire month and I can use this 24 7. the other benefits of having my own space I can leave my equipment set up between shoots I connect the studio calendar directly to my booking system and I can start doing more test shoots which is something that I'm going to be doing more of in 2023. during covid I stopped testing in Ontario we were in lockdown for quite a long time and photographers were not legally allowed to work I ended up getting out of the habit of doing test shoots for myself now when I sell that Marta studio uh in the summer I spend the month testing like crazy I started exploring this pop art color block style that I like and I'm now offering it as a portrait style to my clients I'm planning to do one to two test shoots every month with a specific look and feel to them and to use that time to build up my advertising portfolio and then I can also create BTS images of each of those shoots for my blog and then use the images in my email campaign for prospective clients years ago when I had another Studio I used to have what I called my gym days these were the two days a week when I would have models come in and I would just work out with my camera I also wanted to plan to start having dedicated sessions next year where I invite people to sit for me and I will create portraits of them such as I did with these portraits of local film industry people that I took during the Hamilton Film Festival those Film Festival portraits were taken less than two months ago and in that time the amount of attention in business that that one shoot has brought me is insane it added value you to the film festival it was a great way for the people in the images to show their involvement in the event and I've had two clients book me in the last couple of weeks specifically because they saw those portraits most importantly I've moved my advertising and key artwork back to the top of my priorities list I spent two weeks of 10 hour days clicking through Linkedin rebuilding my contact database and my email list from scratched and then I started sending out emails again my first email blew me away my first email went out to 398 email address 320 made it through meaning they didn't bounce back or fail they got to someone they landed in an inbox only 10 of those unsubscribed that email had a open rate of 46 a couple of those people have clicked through to my portfolio multiple times and I'm also starting to receive attention from some photo agents that are on that list now my focus in 2023 is firmly on agency work testing and securing a photo rep I know covid is still out there it's not over we're still in a pandemic um it's been almost three years now in Ontario we were in lockdown for such a long time that our businesses haven't rebounded quite to the extent that they were pre-coveted and so that's been it's been difficult the last few months have been uh the best few months of the year I had a few months earlier this year where I didn't have any work at all or I had one headshot a month and you can't live off of that over the past few months it's really picked up I booked four headshot sessions in the last week you know during Christmas a couple of them were Christmas gifts things are looking up things are looking good for 2023 but my perspective is that if I'm going to be in a situation where I'm mostly shooting acting headshots and a couple of corporate gigs what I need to be doing is focusing on the work that I want to do for the rest of my life so moving forward in 2023 I'm firmly planted at the front of my mind not in the back of my mind right at the front of my mind working on developing Concepts and shooting Concepts on a very regular basis I'm hoping to be able to document that journey and share that Journey here on this channel with you as well let me know in the comments what your goals are for 2023 thanks for watching take care