We’ve been teaching for many years and truly enjoy it. We think information should be accessible and available for those who search it out. When we first started teaching photography classes, we focused on basic classes, often focusing on teaching the blooming blogging industry how to use cameras and the basics of setting up. 

Things have changed in the last 6 years, in the blogging industry and the photography industry. These two worlds we have been straddling seem to be merging. Will has been in the photography industry for over 15 years and back in the day, you got into the photography industry by assisting. After graduating college, you went to LA or NYC and became an assistant. That’s how you learned the biz, you spent time in studios and saw the behind the scenes operations. 

Fast forward to 2016, and our friends who are bloggers have been coming to us the past couple of years asking questions that are kinda heavy commercial photography questions. Bloggers educated themselves and are some serious self taught photographers. Will and I were talking and looking at the difference of coming into the commercial photography industry via assisting, or through self education and teaching yourself, like the blogging community has done. It’s pretty impressive! 

One major gap we saw is the bloggers who are entering the commercial photography world didn’t have access to the business community we’ve been able to experience. The commercial photography industry is a funny one. Most of the photographers out there, don’t really talk to each other! For me, starting off on the advertising side then moving to the photo side, I was kinda shocked. But it was/is so competitive, so I get it, but I think it’s strange. I love the community and think there is enough work for all. 

We’re going to share our industry know-how with bloggers who want to transition to being a commercial photographer, or add it onto their offerings for their blog clients. Y’all know who you are: you know your images are important and valuable, but you don’t know how to monetize them. Thankfully, we do. 🙂 

Learn from working professionals: business tactics, estimating and how to make monetize your existing images.

Here’s what we’re going to cover in our first class:

– Cost of doing business: We’re teaching you how to figure out how much it costs you to run your photography business. What’s the bottom line? What’s the least amount of money you can afford to charge, and how to understand when you are being profitable. 

– Estimating: Where do you start when estimating a job? We find the pricing to be all over the map with photography, but we have a good formula that will help you get started. Combine that with your cost of doing business, and you know what you should be charging. We’ll show you how. 

– Selling stock: Some pointers in getting started with selling stock. For bloggers, I think this is the biggest opportunity. You have cash income just sitting around and you’re not using it! Food or travel bloggers, even more so! We’ll review different options for selling stock and you’ll know your next steps if you want to get started. 

So many of our blogger friends are being approached by companies about collaborations, and the company wants to buy the images after, or they are being approached by companies to create images for them to use to promote their company. That’s all commercial photography! But you don’t know what to charge or where to start. 

We want to help you answer those questions. Seriously, there is no reason you can’t do this. It’s a great supplement to your blog income. The blogging community has been welcoming with open arms to us, we want to do the same for the bloggers entering the photography community. Also, we want to help everyone produce images that are excellent, polished to industry standards and that you can be confident in sending to clients. 

Please join us at our little school by signing up for our mailing list here. We’ll be on Periscope answering your questions about the business of photography.  You can always catch the past Periscopes on Katch. We have some exciting classes planned for the future, like shooting tethered and post production techniques. And we’ll put some classes that we’ve taught in person like styling for your blog and iPhoneography online as well. 

Make sure you’re signed up for our email list and we’ll keep you in the loop when the class launches. Once our class, Blogger to Commercial Photographer Blueprint, launches, we’ll do some live webinars and periscopes to answer questions. We want to see this community grow!