Reply To: Waiting for the bottom to fall out.

[cassie]

I think you have a lot of potential. Your stuff actually reminds me a lot of where I was about 1 1/2 years ago and decided I actually wanted to learn how  the technical side works.

 

I do have some stuff for you to ponder: are your prices actually fair to you? When you are in business, it isn’t enough to just scrap by when you havea high demand. I would take a break to learn  more, because you  will burn out working the load you are working without good compensation, or  start intense research to learn the technical side,  pick a tutorial on a new camera technique every few days to practice and learn, research, and practice some more. When you  more and open shop again charge a lot more. Trust me, it’s a lot  more relieving running a business where you need to have four clients  break you even than charge so low you need to have 16 clients (and yes, that does mean I think you should be confident in your ability to charge 4 times what you are right now). It doesn’t even matter if you only have 1/4 the number of clients because you still pay yourself the same amount of money at the ends of the day. Actually  you pay yourself more because you save yourself significant amounts of time shooting, editing, gas and car maintenance. It helps keep you from burning out, because if you don’t compensate yourself well enough, you will burn  out  sooner or later and it will be a chore not a hobby anymore. While I don’t havea photography business, I do have a service based business with highish overhead and my  prices set me at break even point if I have 2 clients a week. It’s comfortable and really doable even with two kids under three. I can’t afford daycare at my price though and  trade services and swap babysitting for them however.

 

If you like pinterest a lot/  and since you are a mwac (nwrong with being a momtog btw, I think we have an advantage) check the site iheartfaces.com. Critiques on  their forum are really weak IMO but the tutorials in it are incredibly useful. Lots on manual flash, camera modes, lighting,  editing does and  don’ts, etc. I think you’ve gotten good constructive feedback, there’s just one thing I want to  point out about the horse  portraits that hadn’t been yet, and it’s an equipment thing. Horses are really really long compared to people, and unleyou are taking a pic of them from the side, if you aren’t usinga long lens, they will looka little long, skinny and stretched out.  Next time you go to take portraits with a  horse, start looking at  portraits with horses, you’ll notice most of then are taken witha really long lens to compact the background and the horse if they aren’t taken directly from the side and include the horses full body. Bring your regular portrait lens, but also bring  your longest lens.