7 Essentials to Start a Photography Business

What's up? This is John from John Branch IV Photography, and I cannot believe that 2019 is already over. It was an amazing year for myself, and I hope it was for you all as well, but it's 2020 now, and it's that lovely time of year that everyone is setting new goals. I wanted to help you all out with one in particular, which is starting a photography business. It may seem overwhelming to get started, and you might think that you don't have the funds to invest in yourself to start your photography business, but honestly, it's really not that expensive, and it's something you could get started at today while you're still at your day job and build yourself a portfolio. So let's talk about the seven essentials to get you started with your photography business. Starting out with the most obvious one, a camera. Now, there are a lot of options out there for camera systems. You have Sony, Canon, Nikon, Fujifilm, but if you're familiar with the channel, you already know that I'm super biased towards Fujifilm. I've been using the Fujifilm system for three years now, and one of the best things about it is that the system is cheap. If you need amazing quality for cheap to start out with a new camera or to upgrade your camera, definitely check out Fujifilm. The camera I would recommend to anyone starting out is the Fujifilm X-T30. This thing currently on B&H is only 1099 with the 18 to 55 millimeter lens. That is an amazing price to get started. It's something you could pay off quickly with just a couple of sessions, or even just save up some money over time and have it before you know it. The X-T30 has an APS-C sensor, 26 megapixels, and uses the exact same technology as the X-T3, which is the main camera that I use for wedding photography. It's tiny, it's powerful, it shoots video at 4K, 30 frames a second, so the quality is really, really awesome. You can actually tell just here in these photos. So that would be my opinion for a camera to start out with. I know Sony has an equivalent, I think it's the A600 or 6600. I'm not sure, I'll link it down below, but that's another great option. These mirrorless systems are super small, they're super light, they're cheap, but they look amazing. So if you're always scared of the price of a camera, and you're like, oh, I'm not gonna buy a camera because they cost too much, definitely check out these new small mirrorless cameras like the X-T30, because you will be surprised at the quality and the price. So for our starting investment, we're talking around $1,000, maybe even cheaper if you pick up your camera used. As you can see here on B&H, the X-T30 is only $799 when you get it used, which is super awesome. The next essential you're gonna need is Lightroom and Photoshop. Now obviously this comes into play because you're gonna be editing your photos. Adobe has a really awesome photography plan which gives you Lightroom Classic, Lightroom CC, and also Photoshop for only $999 a month. You may be thinking that getting a program to edit your photos is gonna be super expensive, but it really isn't with these monthly subscriptions. Lightroom Classic gives you the full power of Lightroom, enabling you to edit your photos and get them ready for print quality. You also have Lightroom CC, which you can use on your iPad or your iPhone so you can quickly edit stuff on the go. Lightroom CC, you've seen me using multiple times on my iPad here. I absolutely love it, and it's really amazing how you now can use an iPad to do serious work. So even if you don't have a computer, you need something cheaper, you can use an iPad and Lightroom CC to get you started. And then having Photoshop is always a great option. It helps you with removing objects from the background, any epic healing stuff you have to do on the skin or your photo, or just if you wanna do a lot of photo manipulation. I don't personally use Photoshop too much, but it's great to have in my back pocket when I need to remove something from a photo. So all of that for only $999. It makes it really easy to get in, take your photos with the camera we just talked about, and then edit them with the Adobe Photography package. I have a link in the description where you can go ahead and grab that too if you wanna check it out. Also, check out some of my past live streams where I'm editing to learn more about Lightroom. So $999 a month, let's go ahead and add that to the list of how much it's gonna cost you to get started with your photography business. Essential number three is gonna be a website. Think of your website as your storefront, your portfolio. The thing that everyone's gonna wanna see before they hire you. This is probably one of the most important parts alongside, obviously, having a camera. For websites, I highly recommend Squarespace. I used to work there, so I am a little biased, but I also have been using them for about six years now. My website is built on Squarespace, and it is super, super easy to use. With Squarespace, not only do they have a lot of templates for photographers, but you can also build stuff from scratch very easily, and you don't need to know how to code or anything of that source. There's also all kinds of resources for Squarespace, like different templates you can buy outside of Squarespace themselves. One of my most favorite is Square Muse. They make really awesome templates for Squarespace, specifically for photographers, so definitely check them out. Squarespace is coming in at only $16 a month, which isn't bad, or you can go up from there if you wanna use their business plan. Now, with the business plan, you're able to actually sell products and then not take a commission from it as well. And selling products opens up the ability for you to sell prints. So if you're not doing something like wedding photography like myself, and you're doing landscape photography or street photography, and you wanna sell your prints, you can do that right through your Squarespace site and not even have to deal with another website like Etsy or something of that sort. It's definitely something you should check out. So that's $16 a month to get started with your website, which is really not a lot, it's not a lot. We're gonna add that to our list as well, and now we have our camera, our editing software, Lightroom, Photoshop, and also our website. Here it is, not too shabby. Next up, in my opinion, is the most important essential, which is a client management system. Client management systems will help you communicate with your clients, receive your payments, sign contracts, and keep everything in one place. I know it's tempting to go ahead and just use all of Google services like Sheets and the email and all that stuff, but if you really, really wanna have everything in one place and be able to handle lots and lots of clients, like I was doing 40 weddings in 2019, then you need a client management system. My preferred client management system is HoneyBook, and if you haven't heard about it, you can automate your payments, communicate with your clients, have them sign your contracts, and receive your money super quickly. It's how I was able to book six figures worth of weddings in 2019 and have all the payments smoothly get to me, have all the contracts signed easily, and not have to pull out my hair going through Google Sheets and all the Google emails and all that craziness. HoneyBook comes in at about $40 a month, which is not too shabby for a service that really gets you all of your payments quickly and easily and makes you look more legit by having contracts and e-signing all in one place. There's a link in the description as well for you to start a trial of HoneyBook and also receive 50% off of your first year, so definitely check it out so you can get that money quick and easily. So now we're up to our camera, our editing system, our website, and a way to manage our clients and receive our payments. For the next essential, we need a way to get our photos to our clients after we've shot our sessions. And for that, I would suggest PicTime. PicTime is an online photo delivery service that's fairly new, so not a lot of people know about it. You'll usually hear people talking about ShootProof and Pixyset, but I've recently switched over to PicTime and absolutely love it. PicTime gives you beautiful galleries where you can load all of the photos from your sessions and deliver them to your clients easily. They're able to download their photos, they're able to buy prints from the photos, and it's just quick and easy to get the photos to them and looks way more professional than just throwing it in a Dropbox folder and sending them a random link. Also, the greatest part about PicTime is that they want you to sell prints, so their business is highly focused on making sure that they help you sell prints and physical products. You can see here, in 2019, I grossed $1,700 worth of print sales, mainly because of PicTime. They have really awesome automations built right into PicTime to help you sell prints, and you don't even have to do anything. Literally, you go in there, turn on the automation, select which sessions you want the automations to work on, and they're basically gonna work it out for you and help your clients buy their prints. And the really great thing about this, you get most all of those features for free. So PicTime's starting plan is free for 20 gigs of storage, which is not bad, especially if you're starting out. That's a great place to do a couple of sessions, load them up there. If you have something like JPEG Mini, 20 gigabytes is more than enough because you can truncate the size of your JPEGs while you upload them. Also, their next plan up is only $20 a month, and that gives you 100 gigabytes of storage. So PicTime is definitely a must-have. There's a link in the description. Definitely check them out. They are worth every penny, and it makes you look much better in the way that you deliver your photos. So we'll go ahead and add this one to our list is free. So now we have our camera, our editing system, our website, our CRM to talk to our clients and receive our payments, and a gallery to deliver our images to our clients. Essential number six is gonna be a way for us to backup and protect those photos that we've taken for our clients, which would be BackBlaze. I'm a huge fan of BackBlaze and have been using them for a couple years now. I have a video here where I talk about my backup process, and BackBlaze is a huge part of how I backup my photos. Now, I do have a whole bunch of different hard drives, and I shoot on a dual-card camera, which is a huge deal, but after I have all of those backups made, being able to back it up to the cloud at unlimited storage is a huge plus. BackBlaze comes in at only $5 a month per computer, and it allows you to be able to backup everything on your computer. So if you're like me and have a desktop computer with like 50 hard drives in it, you can backup every single one of those hard drives as well as your external hard drives for $5 a month. Unlimited data, I mean terabytes of just all this information right there for $5 a month in the cloud. It is super awesome, and if you have a large amount of data and let's say you lose all of it, all you have to do is purchase a hard drive from them, they'll ship you your data, and if you don't need that hard drive, you return it and you get your money back super quickly. If you don't have some kind of cloud storage, you really, really need to get on this. I have a link in the description which will give you one free month once you sign up. Definitely check it out. It has saved me so many times from deleting a full wedding by accident, but at least having it up in the cloud. So that's only gonna add $5 a month to our price of how much it's gonna cost us to start our photography business. So let's talk about the last essential, which is one that a lot of people don't think is important, but I honestly think you should always have them on you, which is business cards. So I know what you're thinking. You're like, John, it's 2019. I'm all digital. Who uses business cards anymore? It's so old school. But let me tell you, business cards are super important. So the first way to think about business cards is it's actually advertising. I know we're in a digital world now and everyone wants to do things digitally and I know you can share from your phone and send stuff like that, but tell me a company that has not put a billboard up or put new advertising on the side of a bus or put new advertising just somewhere in the city that is physical to see while you're out and about. You wanna advertise 24-7 at all times and places. And when someone comes up to you and sees you doing photography while you're out doing an engagement session or something of that sort, and they go, oh man, you're a photographer? You got any business cards? And you go, oh no, sorry, I don't have digital. No, just no. You wanna have business cards and you wanna have them on you all the time. I'm personally a huge fan of Mu and I have been using them for a while now. You can see my business cards here. They're nice and beautiful. And what I love about them is that you can put multiple photos on the back of your cards. So I can show off my portfolio while I hand out cards rather than just having one single business card. They have pre-made designs that you can use or you can upload your own designs and make sure that on your business cards you put your Instagram account. Because yet again, going back to the digital age, it's cool that you have something physical but still let it be easy for people to find you. Your website, your Instagram, your number, whatever you wanna have on there. I can actually personally say I've booked a couple of weddings just by having business cards on me where I'm at the reception and people see me dancing on the floor with everyone while taking pictures and they go, man, that photographer's great. Come up to me real quick. Hey, do you have business cards? Boom, hand him a card and guess who hits me up six months later? Hey, we're getting married. Trust me, you want business cards and you want them on you 24-7. You can get a pack of 50 cards for only 20 bucks which is not a bad deal. And you don't need a whole bunch of cards. You just run through what you have and then go ahead and buy some more when you need them. I also have a link in the description for 25% off your first purchase. So I mean, come on, 25% off of 20 bucks. Get in there and get yourself some business cards. So those are your seven essentials to get your photography business started. So let's go ahead and add up how much this would cost you to get started. Starting out with your camera at 10.99, an editing software like Lightroom for about 9.99 a month, a website for $16 a month, a client management system like HoneyBook for $40 a month, gallery delivery for free, online cloud storage like Backblaze for $5 a month, and business cards for 20 bucks. That brings us to a grand total of around $1,200, give or take. It's not so bad to start. I'm sure you could save that amount in about a month or so. Go ahead and purchase everything you need and get started. So go ahead and get out there, get what you need to start, and don't skimp on the little things. I know you might be thinking, John, $1,200 is mad money. Save it up because yet again, like I said, I made six figures in 2019. $1,200 compared to six figures is nothing. Also compared to having my own time, running my own business, and having the time that I want to spend with my family and travel whenever I want to, I think $1,200 is totally worth having all of that freedom. So I hope these seven essentials helped you out. Please don't feel discouraged if you do want to start a photography business. In the description below, tell me any other things you think you should have when starting your photography business. And also just drop some encouragement down in the bottom, or if you have questions about how to get started, or just want to hear a little kind word from me, leave it down in the comments below. Also, if you love this information, hit that like for me, hit that subscribe so I can send you more information like this and make 2020 amazing. I'll check you all next time. All right, peace.