How did I get my first paying client?
If you’ve ever thought of making the leap to becoming a professional photographer, and how to get that first paying client, then this article is for you.
I had become burnt out in my 10 year sales career, and with no love left for that type of work, I started thinking about how to be paid as a photographer, and spending the rest of life pursuing a career in photography, as this was my true passion. I had years of experience with taking photos, owned a bit of camera gear, and I loved the idea of spending my days behind the camera - I just needed some paying clients!
I started reaching out to anyone and everyone who’d listen. I used mostly a combination of social media and email to try and entice people that I’m the world’s best photographer, ready for service. There was a major flaw with this. I was much worse than I thought - my portfolio existed of a few family shots, some surf photos and photos of my pets - hardly a high quality showcase of work.
Most people would make excuses that they don’t have connections, or a great portfolio, or the equipment to make it happen. I had none of these and there were only two things that kept me going - desperation for money and the love of photography - a powerful combination really. The late Steve Jobs of Apple once said that building a company is hard, and if you don’t love what you do, you’ll give up at the first hurdle - so true!
So my first piece of advice is to make the best possible portfolio with the limited time/money/equipment you have. And while I’m not generally a fan of doing work for free, you really have to be in the mindset of doing whatever it takes, and this may be doing some work for free. If you can just come up with a dozen decent images to put on a website, preferably with a few different subjects, this is the bare minimum required to get started as a professional, because you will always be judged by your portfolio, no matter how many years you’ve been shooting for.
I built my own website with Squarespace (very easy!) and just put the best dozen images on there that I had at the time, knowing that I can always add better ones as I go, because the thing you’ll learn is that you’ll only get dramatically better as a photographer once you start getting paid. Why?:
You’ll be pushed out of your comfort zone and forced to learn on the go
You’ll be able to review your work from the previous shoots and improve on them
You’ll learn how to maximise and work with the gear you have, which means getting creative
Once you have a portfolio decent enough to work with, you can start the process to find work. There are many ways to do this:
Ask your immediate circle (friends and family) for work. They might give you work directly, or know someone who requires photography services.
Then go out to your wider circle usually your social media networks and ask them for work.
Then there’s the cold approach - reaching out to people who you don’t know. This could be directly to event marketing managers, for example. Reaching out to other photographers who require extra hands from time to time. And finally, reaching out to partners who could provide you work, wedding planners for example.
The social media approcach - posting your content on social media and building a following.
There’s also the paid approach - paid Google or social media ads, and paid services that provide you with leads.
I wouldn’t recommended doing anything paid while starting out. Don’t waste your money on marketing yet, try and build a solid foundation before you spend too much money. Any valuable connections you can make by reaching out to people will be much more beneficial. Once you have some income you can set a marketing budget and test what works.
The way I got my first paying gig was by reaching out to other photographers, and one happened to respond to me to say that they had a gig booked and were unable to attend. I jumped at the opportunity. My only request was that I could use some of the images to build my portfolio, to which they agreed.
The shoot was a business event with about 200 people. I was tasked with getting shots of the speakers, audience, branding - all standard event stuff. The photos turned out well, given that fact that I really had little idea of what I was doing. They even offered my repeat work - all from sending an email to a photographer.
I must point out that you’ll likely be paid at a lower rate for these types of jobs than if you were able to find the work yourself. Looking back now, I was paid about 1/3 of what I would normally get. Sometimes you might get even less than that, sometimes more, it just depends on the client and the third party supplying the work.
The important thing to remember is that in the early stages, you are really just trying to build your portfolio, and get better as a photographer, so don’t focus too much on the money. I’ve previously done 2 hour shoots which I had to travel an hour each way for, for less than $100. Looking back now, it was the best thing I did to get started on my journey as a professional photographer.
Once you’re journey has started, the search for work doesn’t end there. I found it takes about 12 months to get any real traction, provided you are doing a good job. Clients will start to give you repeat work, and refer you to new clients. But in order to provide you a decent income, you’ll still need to continue to make new connections and generate more work.
The maths depends on many factors, but lets say you want to earn $100K/year as a professional photographer. If your average client spends $1,000 per shoot, and does 2 shoots per year, you will need to find 50 clients. And this is assuming that every client loves you and will never leave you (which is not possible), so its more like 60-70 clients.
If you continue to produce good quality work and make clients happy, this will realistically take 3-5 years. There’s a famous saying that everyone overestimates what they can achieve in a year, and underestimates what they can achieve in 10 years, which is so true. The first year will be the hardest financially, but it’s like that in ANY business. 3-5 years is where you’ll start to reap the rewards, and 10 years is likely where you’ll have a genuine asset with value.
If this timeframe scares you, and you are happy with your day job, then I would recommend keeping photography as a hobby - there is nothing wrong with that. I was very unhappy with my day job so the choice to go for it was relatively easy.
What is stopping you from becoming a professional? Let me know in the comments.