Let’s face it, everyone today is an aspiring photographer whether they are taking pictures of their kids with a camera phone or shooting over your shoulder at a wedding with an entry level DSLR.
Photography tuition and training is a busy marketplace, especially at the semi-pro level (these are the ones with the spare cash after all) but I think some photographers often overlook people that could potentially turn into photography clients as well as tuition clients. It’s all very well training other photographers who want to go pro but at the end of the day what is the likelihood of them asking you for a family portrait session?
Back in the days when I was working as a cruise ship photographer I hosted a series of photography basics classes aimed at people with very little knowledge of their camera other than knowing that the big button makes the picture (that’s not a typo it’s a direct quote).
The first class we offered (which was free) would always attract a full house of up to 200 people. That was about 10% of our rather uniquely captive audience.
Follow up classes, for which we charged a rather modest $20 for, would usually be compromised from about 10%-20% of the freebie crowd.
$400 might have been a drop in the ocean (excuse the pun) when it came to our $60,000 weekly target but it did help us build relationships with our clients in a different way than we had before. Most of the time we were hassling the passengers for pictures on gangways and in the restaurant so this sort of interaction was a welcome change.
We sold cameras and probably more photos than we did before so it did prove a success. Read More→
Michael has been working as a photographer for the last ten years. In that time he has shot over 100,000 peoples’ portraits and worked in four different continents. In 2001 Michael graduated with a degree in photography from Manchester Metropolitan University.
