Archive for Starting a Business – Page 4

Starting a Photography Business: Part 37 – The Insider

By Ruth Bayley
Monday, June 6th, 2011

Last week I went to listen to a well-known English landscape photographer, Charlie Waite, give a talk. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect; it was in a theatre and so although I knew he’d be showing his work I wasn’t sure how technical the material might be.

He started with a little philosophy, a really interesting snippet about Ansel Adams; did you know that he only expected to take 12 great images a year in the camera? I get so used to seeing his work condensed into books that I tend to forget that he must have had his off days too!

I love listening to other photographers in my field talk; I like hearing about their successes and their frustrations, in fact, I’m always charmed when they humbly confess that they’ve had those days where they’ve struggled to make anything work, weeks spent abroad praying to find that one moment that makes their time away worthwhile.

As we looked through his photos, me making notes from time to time in my beautiful new notebook, I came to realise how similar we all are in the way we connect with the environment, and how special that connection with the universe is for us even though we all work slightly differently.

Someone asked me the other day what is it that you feel when you are taking the photo and the emotion afterwards? I wish I could say I gave a polished answer, but I fumbled around with words trying to explain what it is that it does for me; unfortunately for them, I fell short of what they expected me to say, as they tried to put it into their own words. “It makes you feel like this….?” Well no not really it doesn’t.

It’s a tough gig to explain to one person let alone a theatre full of people what images mean to you, and I couldn’t help but notice that when we got to the really personal photos; images where Charlie had clearly felt an intense connection in the moment between him and the universe that took his breath away, he too was fumbling around for the words to convey the importance. Read More→

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Starting a Photography Business: Part 36 – Old Foes

By Ruth Bayley
Monday, May 30th, 2011

An old friend came to town this last week and I think my friend has been having more fun than me catching up.  The old friend I speak of is my old foe; pricing.

We’re just starting to get all our prices together for the holiday tour and it’s kind of interesting. I’ve just had a moment of looking at all the figures, thinking oh no they are getting a little bit scary now and it’s all getting a bit real, and then I realised; hello, hello hello, here’s my old friend. I didn’t enjoy you first time around and guess what; I’m not going to jump into your swirling pool of gloom this time around. I’ve seen you lurking in that dark corner of my mind and I’m showing you the door.

It’s interesting though isn’t it how we deal with an issue and then feel stronger because we’ve dealt with it, and then have to deal with it all over again when it comes back to visit again a little while later. It’s been a while since we’ve been here but here it is again, though I caught it and I feel quite good about myself for realising what was going on.

Quite often when I find myself getting a little bit tense about hotels taking a while to get back to us, or writing proposals to do photography workshops in local hotels, I take a deep breath and come back into the moment. I stop and realise that gosh a year ago I was no near this point and this is a pretty fantastic thing I’ve done to launch a business, and now we’re talking about photography holidays and I’m moving on with a second business which is photography related. Read More→

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Starting a Photography Business: Part 35 – Read the Instructions!

By Ruth Bayley
Monday, May 23rd, 2011

This last week I’ve been working on a bit of promotion for the website, but not down what you might consider traditional advertising of clicking through.

Come close, make sure no-one else is listening, are we safe to carry on?  This is something that I read to do, but technically you don’t do it under your own name.  How about a Wikipedia listing?  This doesn’t unfortunately help with page rankings on search engines; it does though give you a bit more coverage if people search for your company name.

A word to the wise, when you create a Wiki account it has a manual of how to create a submission, do read it, don’t start to read it think, I use WordPress or other such sites I’ll be ok and stop reading it half way through to save you time.  Hmm, I tell you this as a top tip, as I was that person that half read the instructions, thought I’d be able to figure it out and got well and truly stuck on the coding.  I haven’t had time to go back and finish it yet, but I will try and get it figured out by the time you are reading this.

To make the page official and be listed by the site, you need to have a point of reference, a link people can click on that takes you to an independent website to validate your page.  I have put a link to my about page and used some of the text from it, and its here where I got stuck; adding in the reference point list.

Another thing that I’m starting to create is a channel on Youtube.  It was something that came up in our last mastermind call; a colleague is creating one for her travel business to promote her tours.   A light bulb went on and I suddenly saw how I could have a presence, even if not in the most traditional sense of a video.  It’s a site I’m eventually going to use when I do short promotional videos of my photography courses, yet I suddenly thought what is to stop me having a slide show of different styles of my photographs? Read More→

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Starting a Photography Business: Part 34 – Staying True

By Ruth Bayley
Monday, May 16th, 2011

This week has seen a change of heart in one area of my photography holidays; the cruises. There have been a number of things about doing a cruise that have been bugging me for a while and this last weekend events happened to help me realise that I needed to make a tough call on these holidays, and postpone them for now, so I can stay true to my love and passion of photography.

A cruise holiday is such a wonderful idea, and from an organisational point of view the accommodation is easily sorted, yea! From a logistical point of view though, recce and supplier costs were starting to rack up. Working out the logistics of how to do our group excursions independently of the cruise ships excursions, without incurring huge costs for wanting to be flexible, was proving tricky too.

There was also a very good chance that if we weren’t careful, with the time limits imposed as to when you can disembark at ports and the time you need to return to the ship, we wouldn’t be able to get very far into the surrounding countryside and so be limited to towns and cities; and there a little part of my being would have started to die. We, my business partner at her travel agency, Life By Travel, and I, had done our best to choose cruises with varied port of calls. Yet it would have been very frustrating for example, in a Tuscan port, not to be able to drive into the countryside and take photos of the rolling hills and cypress trees, or stay on for a sunset. Our guests were going to lose out on so much.

So we took the decision to re-think and instead I followed my heart to go with three things I love, gardening; so I’m close to nature, photography and the Amalfi coast in Italy. In combining the three, we are embarking on a holiday tour, in the Gardens of Naples and the Amalfi Coast that fills me with joy. When I think about this tour, which we have pretty much organised in a week, partly because I know the area so well and partly because I’m so excited about sharing some little known places with people; it’s shown me the difference between doing something different, and doing something that fills me, and hopefully our guests, with passion. A land based tour will give us the flexibility to take sunrises or sunsets at the best locations, rather than making do. Read More→

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Starting a Photography Business: Part 33 – Foot in Mouth

By Ruth Bayley
Monday, May 9th, 2011

With social media only too eager to broadcast the ramblings that we have and let’s face it; a lot of us use social media for keeping a hand in for our business, without constantly tweeting business messages and links, maybe sometimes we don’t necessarily think too much about what we say when we stick a message out there. However that lack of thought can cause enormous problems at times.

Here in the UK on Friday, I’m sure that most of you will be aware that there was a royal wedding. Someone that I follow on Facebook made a comment about the wedding, it was on the anti-side of the royal wedding and though English, they completely misjudged the feeling of people in this country and amazingly, around the world. The torrent of messages disagreeing with her and some quite strongly worded ones flooded in from people worldwide.

Social media makes it so easy to put your thoughts out there without a filter; your filter becomes the people that react. The person I’m talking about is an author, and I was curious as to how many people she lost as followers and how many people just shrugged their shoulders. Read More→

Categories : Grow Your Business, Social Media Marketing, Starting a Business
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Starting a Photography Business: Part 32 – Stop Doing Lists

By Ruth Bayley
Monday, May 2nd, 2011

As my days have got busier with marketing the site, social networking, writing photography courses, working on plans for photography holidays my days also seem to have got longer, and sometimes not always so productive. I have started to write to do lists, but between you and me; they’ve never really done it for me, I usually get to the end of the day with my list uncompleted.

Just this weekend, thanks to an article was reading by Daniel H Pink, in the Sunday Telegraph business section, I have found a much more interesting solution to the do list, a ‘stop doing list’. Bear with me on this; I think you might be as intrigued as I was. The article concentrated on two different business coaches, Jim Collins and Tom Peters.

Jim Collins idea is that a ‘stop doing list’ cuts down on the time you waste doing things that hold you back and litter your working life. I love Jim’s analogy of how a stop doing list can help, it appealed to the photographer part of me. “A great piece of art is composed not just of what is in the final piece, but equally important, what is not. It is the discipline to discard what does not fit — to cut out what might have already cost days or even years of effort — that distinguishes the truly exceptional artist and marks the ideal piece of work, be it a symphony, a novel, a painting, a company or, most important of all, a life.”

What would be on your stop doing list? For me I’m being more careful with my time. I don’t reply to emails first thing in the morning when I’m full of energy and probably give lengthier replies than necessary. I don’t start the working day or go to bed until I’ve meditated. I don’t have meetings unless they are truly going to take my business forward. And I don’t reply to Facebook & Twitter messages all day long, I schedule my time on the sites. Read More→

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