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glort Offline [X]
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level1photog wrote:
I've had people asked me for a free family photoshoot, gave me ultimatum by lowballing me and demanded more things.Nowadays, everyone has access to professional gears, but to provide professional service and beautiful images with good lighting, editing, posing, that's hard.
As much as people get upset when I mention the old days of film.......
In this area things were pretty much the same. You got people wanting freebies and if you do this for free now we'll give you a heap of work and pay you later and anyone could buy gear and a lot did and became weekend warriors.
I'll certainly concede digital has brought out loads more of these tryhards which has made things more difficult but the fundamental issues were the same and I think pretty much are for a lot of businesses.
I also notice there alot of photographers on Facebook that's endlessly marketing their photography in groups, etc.
I agree but this IS something you can avoid. I think my dislike of FB and the surrounding hype and insecurity of basing ones business leads from such a medium are well enough documented already but this is the exact reason I have the position I do of it.
It's like the old Yellow pages. Everyone is trying to market themselves in direct competition with everyone else.
The part most miss is it's the absolute sandbox for marketing yourself due to the proliferation of the low end of the game all taking advantage of it being free.
Yes, everyone is going to jump on and say they get all their work from there and the best shooters have pages and..... yeah, whatever. If you are doing well from it great, stick to it.
The amount of posts I see where people are not is the ( large) area I'm talking about.
A lot of the problem comes back to the old thing I harp about and that's business skills.
So many these days thing marketing and advertising is FB and thats the holy grail where all the business is. Rubbish. It's where a very select Niche market of clients can be found with and over saturation of shooters chasing them.
There are other markets and there are other ways to approach them but it is undeniable that many shooters these days are just too damn lazy and purposefully ignorant to do anything else.
what people do on FB doesn't worry me in the slightest because I have never used it, never depended on it and still had a PROFITABLE business and avoided so many of the problems I read about.
I let weddings go years back and didn't chase it for a while back in the days well before FB. The bridal mags and especially shows were becoming totally oversaturated when electronic Auto everything film camera's came in and the expense of finding clients became too high as to other mediums and markets. I was paying like $3000 for a half or quarter page ( forget which it was) ad in a bridal mag. No gaurantee of returns because you might get 50 enquiries and 25 of them straight away would ask " What can you do for $500" when the ad stated " Wedding coverages from $1500"
OTOH, I could run a 1/3rd page strip ad in a womens lifestyle magazine for $300 promoting my glamour work and book out for a fortnight at a time non stop a week after the mag came out and pull $1000 out of each 1 Day ( max) shoot with no other work involved than hand over the prints.
This isn't the first time the wedding market has become over saturated and IMHO, non viable or at least there have been much more profitable markets out there.
If there is one thing I can say for myself, it's that I am flexible. I'm not out to create wedding or portrait or landscape or pet or any other art, I'm out to make the best returns for my efforts wherever they may be and happy to adapt and change to wherever that opportunity may be.
I don't put much effort into weddings atm either. When you advertise you seem to attract a price conscious market these days whom are exposed to all the FB and web page price orientated purveyors out there. When you get refferals and WOM, it seems totally different. Like these people want to fly under the Radar and can't be bothered with all the hype and scratching and eye gouging that goes on either.
Could I make a full time ( decent) living out of wedding work? I definitely believe I could.
I would set up a referal base of a min of 10 sources mainly being other vendors both local and further out in targeted ( non wealthy) areas and build rapport with those vendors so they were each giving me a few leads ( minimum) a month. I would only need to convert 30% of those to sales ( well below what I have done for many years) to be getting 10 Jobs a month.
Be those up market or backyard weddings is irrelevant to me. They pay my price, they get my same standard service and I make good money.
The question is do I have the motivation, Dedication, passion and would I be willing to put in the effort to do this?
Not now, no way in hell. Unfortunately, I can see there are a great many out there that have what I lack in drive and motivation by the truckload but are absent of my advantage in the game of knowledge and flexibility. Yeah, you can go gugngho at FB all day long but I'll guarantee you'll do better showing up on vendors doorsteps with a nicely presented printed info package and a stack of business cards and building a long term relationship with them and you'll have to put far less time into it over all.
Will most people in the game do that? No, not a hope in hell of that either.
It's not about working hard, it's about working smart.
IF FB isn't working for you or you don't like it, fine, go somewhere else to source your leads.
I see a lot of people complaining about FB but I don't recall any saying " FB wasn't working the way it did for me so I went and tried finding new clients by....."
And if weddings can't give you the returns or hours or whatever you want and you still want to be in the photo game, Open your eyes, turn your head from side to side and see where the better opportunities are and go after them.
No use getting upset because grandpa made the family fortune selling Model T parts but now you hardly have one person a week writing you a letter to order something.
Photography is a LOT harder to make a living from and in some areas, as always, there isn't the population base to support it full time. The main thing I see is that for all the increase in difficulties, you can still do it profitably, full time or otherwise, BUT, it does take a lot more BUSINESS savvy than what one could get away with before with just passing out business cards to people they met.
Most shooters however are still totally obsessed with taking the best picture ever taken on the latest and greatest gear and edition that to artistic perfection.
That's all well and great but without backing that effort up with proportionate marketing skills, the $500 guy is still going to beat you out of a lot of work simple because to a lot of prospects you look so good they assume you are going to be 10X out of their price range.
It has to balance. The whole thing in what you do, how you present yourself, your systems, procedures, price, marketing, delivery... EVERYTHING, has to BALANCE.
Change, adapt and get smarter or as a long gone photo hero of mine once told me " Go find another post to piss on".
There is nothing else you can do other than starve.
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Oct 06, 2016 at 06:08 PM |
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