Photography Business Secrets by Lara White

Pho­tog­ra­phy Busi­ness Secrets by Lara White is a new book that will show you how to take your pho­tog­ra­phy from a hobby to a suc­cess­ful busi­ness endeavor.

Becom­ing a Work­ing Photographer

It’s a dream for many. We spend time and money hon­ing our craft and think it would be great to do this for a liv­ing. For some, it becomes a few side jobs here and there, and that’s enough. For oth­ers, it’s a pas­sion that beats what­ever they’re doing for a paycheck.

The trick is to know how to get from here to there. Lots of peo­ple on the Inter­net offer advice, but how suc­cess­ful are they and how valid is their advice? I had the good for­tune to work as a tech­ni­cal edi­tor on a book about the pho­tog­ra­phy busi­ness by some­one who’s been involved in the busi­ness and proven her busi­ness acumen.

Pho­tog­ra­phy Busi­ness Secrets by Lara White offers a great and truth­ful account of the things you need to know in order to be suc­cess­ful. It’s not about pho­tog­ra­phy. It’s about how to start and run your business.

The Real Secret of Run­ning a Business

If you want to be a pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­pher, you’re expected to know pho­tog­ra­phy. This book is about all the things you didn’t learn else­where about suc­ceed­ing as a busi­nessper­son in the pho­tog­ra­phy industry.

• How to iden­tify your tar­get client
• How to estab­lish and build your brand
• How to ensure you make a profit
• Com­par­isons of dif­fer­ent busi­ness models
• The traps that can under­mine your business
• How to build rela­tion­ships that will refer more business
• Under­stand the legal, finan­cial and insur­ance impli­ca­tions of being a pro­fes­sional photographer

Pho­tog­ra­phy Busi­ness Secrets by Lara White is full of gor­geous pho­tog­ra­phy, but the busi­ness insight she brings is the real draw of this book. Lara and her hus­band Geoff run a high end wed­ding pho­tog­ra­phy busi­ness. She’s also the founder of the web site Pho­tomint, an edu­ca­tional and busi­ness devel­op­ment site for pho­tog­ra­phers. It sounds glam­ourous. Beau­ti­ful sub­jects, exotic travel, des­ti­na­tions and venues like you see in mag­a­zines. Doesn’t every wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher dream about reach­ing that level?

Here’s the other side of that coin. It’s demand­ing work. You don’t make clients happy by meet­ing their expec­ta­tions, you have to exceed their expec­ta­tions. That means hav­ing a solid busi­ness plan, know­ing the kinds of things that can (and will) go wrong and being pre­pared to recover from them. It means being care­ful to select your clients, too. Rather than tak­ing just any job, you need to work with clients you under­stand and who can refer you to future clients in your niche.

The book isn’t just for wed­ding pho­tog­ra­phers, though many of the exam­ples are from that field of expe­ri­ence. The truth of the infor­ma­tion works whether you’re shoot­ing wed­dings, com­mer­cial or other types of pho­to­graphic assign­ments. You need to know your cost of doing busi­ness and how to cal­cu­late pric­ing so you can earn a profit. You need to know when to spend money on other pro­fes­sion­als like accoun­tants and attor­neys so you can be fully pre­pared and edu­cated to do business.

Run­ning a suc­cess­ful pho­tog­ra­phy busi­ness includes every­thing from cre­at­ing your port­fo­lio and web site to lay­ing out designs that sup­port your brand to know­ing who can help you earn more busi­ness. A lot of great pho­tog­ra­phers are poor busi­ness­peo­ple because of what they don’t know. Pho­tog­ra­phy Busi­ness Secrets by Lara White shows you what you need to know in order to run a suc­cess­ful business.

I’d like to thank my friend Alan Hess for con­nect­ing me with this project. Jen Bowles was a great edi­tor and incred­i­bly fun. Of course, Lara White did all the work and wrote a book that nails the sub­ject per­fectly with her expe­ri­ence and prac­ti­cal advice. I won’t promise you that run­ning a pho­tog­ra­phy busi­ness will be easy, but I can tell you that you can elim­i­nate a lot of the stress when you know how it’s done. Lara def­i­nitely shows you what you need to know.