I almost let a very important milestone pass without acknowledgment. I have now been in my Laguna Beach studio for 10 years!
How it all started:
I was working as a freelance graphic designer from a beach house in Cardiff by the Sea, North San Diego County. My place had a view of the lineup at Cardiff Reef, so I was spending too much time surfing and not enough time working on my business. A friend in Laguna Beach was moving out of his studio and offered to sell it to me. I didn’t have the money but we worked out a deal where I would pay the rent and let him use the stage for occasional shoots. This turned out to be the first truly great business opportunity of my lifetime.
I came to Laguna with very little; just two cameras, a strobe kit, a few lenses and a Macintosh computer. Knowing how to use that computer led to my first jobs doing photography and graphic design projects for small businesses, book publishers and film production companies. As much as I liked graphics, the endless revisions and mind numbing client meetings were starting to wear me out. Photography was my best skill so I started to concentrate on that more again.
In a need for cash, I stated shooting weddings mostly because they pay up front. It was shortly after that I discovered my genuine passion for weddings. They were the perfect marriage of my background in photojournalism, fashion photography and creative portraiture. I even drew on my skills learned as an assistant for architecture and still life photographers. The real moments and raw emotion of a wedding were more exciting for me to capture than any sport.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was part of the great metamorphosis in wedding photography that was taking place as photographers from diciplines such as photojournalism, fashion, and fine art began to discover the untapped creative potential of documenting weddings. As creative boundaries were expended, value was added and therefore the amount that people were willing to pay for great photography also began to see new frontiers.
As soon as weddings offered the potential to be creative and make consistent money, young photographers right out of school began to see weddings as a career goal. When I was as student nobody ever even mentioned wedding photography without sneering a bit so this acceptance was a major shift in people’s perceptions.
As weddings went from low hanging fruit picked by guys in bad tuxes and red cummerbunds to the “hip, new, now!” place to be, the market changed drastically. I reduced my marketing efforts for weddings and began to branch my business into other areas like family portraiture and back into commercial work which really took off due to my years of photographic experience.
Then, four years ago I had the second great business opportunity of my life which led to me starting my own wedding album company, Laguna Albums.
The album company is the perfect place for me to use my experience as a photographer to help other wedding businesses become more successful.
Now as I look forward to the next ten years, I am very excited about the possibilities! This is the perfect time to rewrite my business plan and to start to look at retirement planning a lot more seriously. When you own your own business, these important questions don’t have clearly defined due dates with numbers attached. As scary as that sounds, I wouldn’t have it any other way. In fact, I have been self employed for all but one year of my working life.
This would be a good time to extend a special thank you to everyone who helped make the past ten years a success. From my mentors, to my assistants, to the fellow vendors and clients who trusted me with their referrals. Every one of you has played and important part in my continued growth.
I thought I would illustrate this post with a picture of the first non-food/toy item I ever bought with my own money.
It is a Casio calculator that I found in the sale bin at Palmaroys department store. It was $11, a lot of money for a kid in 1975. When I bought it, I said to myself that one day I would own a business and be adding huge amounts of money on it. It has been on my desk for all of these years and has seen daily use. The numbers added seem to get larger all the time. I think my ten year old self would approve.
