Forever & Always Update

I've been pretty quiet about the photography business. For some reason, I doubt myself on actually saying it's a "business". I think because I'm not making a ton of money, not really marketing and just kind of going. My goal for this year is to shoot two sessions a month. The goal of those two sessions are to really improve my skills. I want to be confident going in to every shoot. I want to take photos that are worth something. I don't want to be the $50-75 a session photographer for much longer. I want to be the $300-600 a session photographer. I want to be known as the go-to photographer for newborns. Lofty goals? Yes! Attainable? Yes! I will have to say that I feel crazy for putting this out on my blog, but I also feel light-hearted about it. I'm sure Luke will be relieved that I can "talk" to someone else about this. LOL.

I haven't wanted to put a whole lot in to marketing so I haven't had as many shoots as I had hoped for. I have had four inquiries within the last week, so that has been good. I have three sessions on the books: a two-year-old, 6 month-old twins and another newborn session. I'm pretty happy with that.

Luke is almost finished with my website. I think we will be able to launch it early summer. I've been holding him up on quite a bit, because I can't make myself resize pictures for the site. I also have a to-do list that only I can do, but it isn't done yet. So, some of it is on him, but some of it is on me as well. Once the site is up, my pricing structure is going to change. I am going to start charging for prints and make that a part of the whole package. Everyone knows that photographers make their money on their prints, but what they don't understand is that the quality of the prints you get from the photographer greatly exceeds the quality you can get as a consumer anywhere else. I printed through two different professional photographer's labs and then compared the prints to Walmart, Walgreens and Target. I was blown away by the quality and color difference.

I choose my lab and calibrated my monitor to their printing machines. That makes sure that everything that I see on my screen and in photoshop will match what they see when they print. Eight months ago, I would have never guessed that all of this goes into printing. Crazy, isn't it?

.... and that's it!