new photography business - some advice would be nice :)

Heebie

Hello,

I'm working on starting up a photography business. (I've been in photography before, and I'm looking to get back to being creative after a decade+ in IT)

Kit I have... things I need advice on:

Best locations to have shoots in a studio setting, such as rentable studios, and hotels etc.., at a reasonable cost.

Forms/contracts for jobs of various types.

Good places to advertise in order to get specific customer types.

Places that do a good job printing photos, preferably including good colour control, where I can ship them off files with their own colour profiles embedded and get a predictable result, in various sizes of course. (even better if they can do all fulfilment for print orders.)

insurers, and good guidelines on what policies really need to be in-place.

any other good advice people might have.

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

wyf437gn6btzue

Hi heebie, Good to hear you are starting up with business. Not an easy step.
I`m only loosely still in the photography industry atm, I don`t advertise and only take jobs from the network I have, but it isn`t my main focus. If I was you I`d be focusing my efforts on advertising locally first, particularly to your specific niche, get yourself a good portfolio and get it in front of peoples eyes. As for locations etc I can`t advise on that as I`ve only ever did commercial work. For printing I`d point you in the direction of https://www.premiumprint.ie/ drop them an email and they`ll sort you out regarding pricing and so on. If you haven't already talk to some local or more established photographers, they`ll generally help you out a lot

Heebie

Any tips for me on getting my portfolio in front of the right people's eyes, or in getting commercial work?

The forums here are so much quieter than they used to be.

flyingsnail

I think it would be worth your while contacting your local enterprise board and asking about a start your own business course. A lot of what you have asked would be answered in the business plan that they would help you develop.

Heebie

Some of these questions come from the business plan outline that I have from Inner City Enterprise. I'm working on paperwork, paperwork, and more paperwork. I need at least two quotes for anything I want like insurance etc.. etc..
I'm just not having very good luck via Google in finding insurance packages for photographers and all that.

Getting recommendations from people in the field is what I'm really hoping for.

flyingsnail wrote: »

I think it would be worth your while contacting your local enterprise board and asking about a start your own business course. A lot of what you have asked would be answered in the business plan that they would help you develop.

Paulw

camerainsurance.ie do my insurance.

A few other Irish - Keystone, OBF, etc

Others are mainly UK based - Aaduki, Towergate, Riskalliance, Photoshield, etc

gloobag

Heebie wrote: »

Any tips for me on getting my portfolio in front of the right people's eyes, or in getting commercial work?

The forums here are so much quieter than they used to be.

This will very much depend on the type of clients you want to work for. Commercial work is probably the hardest to break into. I would start with building a clean website showcasing your best work and make sure your SEO is on point (I use Squarespace and I have no complaints). Most of my work came via people finding me on Google, but it took some time and a lot of tweaking and research to get to that point.

Heebie

Do you have a website I can take a peek at? (for some ideas.. not to plagiarise, I promise!)

I'm playing around with a few things on my website at this point.. don't have anything set in stone. Right now I don't want anything that I have to pay any significant amount for. I have photos there, and some organisation, but trying to come up with copy is a pain, and the "free" versions of the themes I've tried make is VERY difficult to customise things like text colours.

Ideally, I'd like to be working for the clients that think nothing of throwing tens of thousands of euro at me to get a job done.. but don't we all? I'm still working on putting together portfolio material, so getting some ideas from other sites is definitely on my agenda.

I still need to find something to use for organisation/billing etc.., as I'll have to keep track of all that sort of thing.

Thanks for the help so far, and anything else you choose to offer!

gloobag wrote: »

This will very much depend on the type of clients you want to work for. Commercial work is probably the hardest to break into. I would start with building a clean website showcasing your best work and make sure your SEO is on point (I use Squarespace and I have no complaints). Most of my work came via people finding me on Google, but it took some time and a lot of tweaking and research to get to that point.

gloobag

My website: http://brian-mcnamara.com/

I had a cheap-ass website myself when I started out a few years back. To be honest, it's just not worth the hassle. I pay about €250 a year to Squarespace and that gets me the website with a huge choice of customizable themes, e-commerce, domain, analytics and a Google business account with unlimited cloud storage.

In terms of content. The reality is that Google loves long-form content, so you may have to start writing some blogs. That's what I did to get the ball rolling. I haven't written a blog post in about 3 years now, but I still get lots of traffic on the few lighting tutorials I posted back then. They also help with letting Google know where I am and what I do, which helps with the search rankings.

You won't be getting €10k jobs in Ireland. It's not that kind of crazy market that you read about in the likes of Fstoppers, etc. Even jobs for some of the big local names like Arnotts, Brown Thomas, Dunnes, etc, probably don't pay as well as you might think. If that's the way you want to go though, you're talking about jumping into the endless ocean of wannabe fashion/commercial photographers in this country, with the reality being that those jobs are being given to the same lucky few constantly.

Sorry, I don't want to be negative, but unfortunately, it's not exactly sunshine and roses out here in the wild at the moment. It's a crowded, competitive market. So to make any real money, you have to stand out. My advice, if you are determined to go down this road, is to try to be among the best in your geographic and photographic area. If you are good, and people can find you easily, you're off to a good start.

Heebie

I was joking a bit about that. That would be nice to find, but I know it's unrealistic.

Thanks for that information, it's all good to know! Differentiators are always key... and are not the easiest thing to find. Photographic style is probably the biggest one available.

gloobag wrote: »

You won't be getting €10k jobs in Ireland. It's not that kind of crazy market that you read about in the likes of Fstoppers, etc.