Everybody starts their business at $0 profit, but the important thing is that they started at all. Many people get hung up thinking they don’t know where to start, but inaction is your greatest enemy. Even failure itself is directly proportional to eventual success, and venturing out gives invaluable information that lights the path to success. Here is an at-a-glance of my journey from $0 to $10k, and why I think every step of the process made a difference. I should also add that through photography alone, I paid off all of my and my wife’s college loans in four years, totaling just under $90k. It’s by no means a meteoric rise, but there is proof in the pudding here, and that’s a heck of a side income for someone who had/has a full time job, too.
I began making money as a photographer in a pretty formal way. I started as a student-photographer for my college’s alumni periodical. I would bet that every university runs one, and even the high school I teach at now does (it’s a private school so that may be less of a thing in the public domain). I made $8 bucks an hour to go to events on campus and shoot for stories they were running. Sometimes they were sporting events, sometimes they were nights of honor for faculty or alumni, sometimes they were discussions with a panel of experts, or graduations, there was a mess of situations to shoot in.
This was a huge asset. The journalism scene, although I wasn’t doing any writing, I was just on assignment, basically, was hugely helpful for setting me up for failure. That seems an odd thing to say, but I was EVERYWHERE taking photos. Assignments indoors, assignments outdoors, assignments on stages, assignments in lounges, assignments in the campus chapel, portraits where I had the ability to do my own lighting. The sheer variety of situations I had to shoot in were a trip through the school of hard-knocks, and it was awesome to be able to get exposure to that many situations with a fairly low amount of pressure. I wasn’t a professional, I was a student, and they weren’t paying me all that much, so if I came back with a bad images, I wasn’t worried about feeding my family with that money or anything, so I just learned and learned and learned from my victories and from my failures, and I read or watched everything I could get my hands on to solve the problems I had.
I don’t know exactly how much money I made cumulatively, but I did the job for two years and would estimate I made about $2,000 over that time. The downside of the gig was that they only needed X amount of images taken for X amount of publications, so I took work as it came, but it didn’t keep me particularly busy. Of course, at the time, I was student-ing, too, so it was a good fit at the time even though it wasn’t a very cushy job.
Following my graduation, I got a job as a staff photographer for a different university because I had a friend in their communications office. Having just come off a student-photographer gig, I remember the awkward conversation with the head of communications about what my “rate” was. There were a lot of uhhmms and errrrs on my end in that meeting because I didn’t know the answer. In the end, and in super unprofessional fashion, I asked the guy what he thought was a fair rate compared to what their other “professionals” were getting from the university. He said something to the effect of, “Our lowest staff photographer has a rate of $125/hr, do you think that’s something you could do?” It took all I had to keep my mouth from dropping to the floor. I had just received a $117/hr raise because I wasn’t a student anymore. I accepted as casually as I could fake it, and I worked for another couple years doing the same exact kinds of events I was doing at my alma mater.
Again, I am a little unsure of the exact profit from my tenure at this university, but it was the same situation as the other. Better money, but still only a limited number of calls from month to month, and they had other staff photographers who they would call, too, so I wasn’t the only guy they were going to. I’d call this about a $3,000 venture. It was probably more than that over time, but I’ll be conservative to get to the point about what made me the most money: weddings.
The best thing these jobs did for me were that they gave me more confidence to shoot in any situation, and that’s exactly what happens on a wedding day.
I made a few hundred bucks by assisting a few local pros at weddings over the next few months, and first wedding as the primary (and only) shooter came shortly after. My first wedding was for my best friend’s cousin. The couple was very young, and had a low budget. I was very young and had no wedding experience. We agreed to the price of $1000 but I profited probably about $500. Knowing what I know now, after years of experience shooting weddings, I look back and am a little terrified about how badly things could have gone on that first wedding, but I basically had the best case scenario handed to me. The church was bright, windows everywhere. It was a Christian church I can’t remember the denomination of, but they had basically no rules about where I could and couldn’t go. The weather was great, and I could think of about 10 more reasons I didn’t crash and burn on that day that had nothing to do with my skill level at the time.
Nevertheless, a wedding portfolio was begun and I started to have the material I needed to build credibility in the market place. I couldn’t say I had never done a wedding before, and I could honestly advertise being experienced in the space. I made a website and started blogging my events as they came. The remaining $4,500 that accounted for my first $10k came very quickly after that first wedding. Within a year, I was able to charge $2,000 and $3,000 per wedding, and even more after that.
For a handful more years I did wedding photography exclusively and was maintaining a pace of about 15-16 weddings a year, which is a decent amount for someone who also has a full time job – that’s how I kept paying off all my (our) debt that I mentioned earlier in the post. Anyway, my family started to grow and weddings became less and less convenient for me, so I began to transition away from them, although I still do a couple every year if I am asked.
Today, my main photography-based income is my “9-5,” as I am a teacher of photography and videography at an epic school in Houston. So in a nutshell, if you want to make your first $10k in photography, get some experience. Get experience that is low-risk like family portrait shoots with a modest rate – beat the competition’s prices in exchange for experience – or volunteer at your kid’s sporting events and let the coach know the team, school, etc. can use your pictures for marketing. Fail. Learn. Build your confidence. Learn how to build your portfolio and share it to boost your market credibility (by reading my article on it). Grow awareness of your presence and settle in to watch word of mouth work wonders for you. For a more pragmatic list of my advices for you to accomplish, check out this article on 10 non-negotiable ways to go about monetizing your photography. The thing you need to do the most is start. I am sure of it.
