Inside the Photography Business: Steven Norris
PhotoMerchant: Tell me about yourself and your photography business.
Steven Norris: I’ve been about a photographer for 20 years and selling my work for 15. Like many others, I didn’t start out doing photography meaning to do photography.
I’m a sailor, and at one stage was a fleet captain for a local sailing club on the coast of North Carolina. Sailing is a big sport there, but it was never mentioned in the paper. I went to the local newspaper about it, and the sports editor asked me to bring him something. That’s when I started photographing friends sailing and racing for the paper.
I run Steven Norris Photography, and I do photojournalism and documentary photography, as well as landscapes, scenic, and wildlife. In the last year I’ve turned my attention to portraits and weddings.
I also teach photography, which is a good sales channel for my business ì customers of my scenic photography work are mostly my students and their families.
PM: What’s the most important thing you’ve learned about running a business?
SN: I think that you have to develop your own style. You cannot do what everybody else is doing. I have a friend who is a great photographer, and he told me that when everybody is pointing their cameras in one direction, you should turn around because the better shot is probably behind you.
PM: Why do you think your customers like working with you?
SN: In my portrait work, I try to make them all look like models. I have someone who does the make-up and styling to make people look good and feel good. When they feel good, they take a better portrait. When they take a better portrait, they like working with me.
PM: Is there anything you’ve changed about your business since you started?
SN: Like I said, for many years, I did scenic and landscape, and now I’m doing so much more portrait and people work. I made the switch for a couple of reasons. I believe doing weddings and portraits is certainly more lucrative. People are more apt to buy photos of someone they love rather than landscape and scenic photography. But occasionally, for my mental health, I still wander back into the woods!
I market to my wedding and portrait clients strictly by word of mouth. I don’t do any advertising, but I use Facebook religiously. I have friends across a wide social spectrum and I gain a lot of clients through my network.
PM: How do you manage your workflows?
SN: I’ll normally do two weddings and three or four portrait sessions a month. I’ve got my photography work, teaching, and working with the photography club to juggle. I also have a day job in marketing for the community college, but can arrange my hours around my photography work. I’m lucky to have that flexibility.
PM: Have you had any experience running a business?
SN: I’ve taken courses on running business, and I was a business owner for about seven years, which gave me a lot of important experience with accounting and taxes. Joining Professional Photographers of America (PPA) has been a great asset to my work in the business and has helped me to treat it as a business instead of a hobby.
I attend a lot of workshops. Some are on business, some are on technical aspects of photography. I also do a lot of business webinars. Mark Wallace puts out some very good YouTube videos.
It’s good to get to know as many people in the business as possible. It’s very rare in other businesses that you could pay a few hundred dollars and rub elbows with experts. This is invaluable.
But there comes a time when you’ve got to develop your own style. You cannot emulate what someone else is doing. At some point you have to see things in your own way, and that’s a lonely road.
PM: What do you do to stay competitive with other photographers in your market?
SN: I try to do everything differently. I try to look in the opposite direction that other people are looking. If you look at other people’s work ì and I think you should look at all kinds of genres of photography ì you’ll see that a lot of people are doing the same thing. But with digital cameras, it’s easier than it has ever been to do something different. No one has your creativity when it comes to sitting down in Photoshop. You’re the one who’s going to put your own spin on it. I have a workflow process that nobody else that I know is doing, and it results in a different look. It’s what differentiates me, and that’s the best way I know to stay competitive.
I think it’s very important for a wedding photographer, especially a male, to have a female assistant. I have assistants I work with from the club who may not be that experienced, but they’re female and they’re good photographers. It helps a lot to have a female perspective when it comes to a wedding.
PM: If you could go back in time and give your younger self a piece of advice, what would it be?
SN: I would have started photography much earlier, and I would have attended more people photography workshops. I enjoy the social interaction of people photography much more.
I realise now that people photography is more unique than landscape. You can find 100,000 photos of any area around Sedona, but nobody has taken the shots of people that I’ve taken. If I went back, I’d have done more people photography. Today my portfolio would be bigger and more unique.
PM: Do you have any tips for new photographers?
SN: Learn to think with the right side of your brain ì the side that controls the creative process. A lot of people don’t naturally do that. I did a lot of study on how to balance my left brain with my right brain and do more right brain thinking, and it’s helped my work a lot.
Take a basic course in photography; you can learn the basics more quickly if you just invest $100 and take a basic course from a good instructor.
Go to workshops if you’re serious about your photography, and go to different kinds of workshops to find out which kind of photography you can get your groove on with. You may find you like food or portrait or landscape photography, and workshops will help you find which one you like best.
PM: What do you think is going to happen in photography in five year’s time?
SN: I keep wondering if all of this digital stuff is going to get to be old hat and subside a bit so we don’t have as many new people going into photography. I think we might peak in the next couple of years.
Technically, I think you’ll see a topping out of the megapixel craze. I think manufacturers will learn to create the sensors in a different and better way to create photos of better quality. I think ISO performance is going to improve dramatically.
PM: What do you do in your spare time?
SN: I promote and support the photography club and I travel a lot, domestically and internationally. I really want to get to Australia one day, especially Perth or Freemantle.
I also do a lot of hiking. I probably walk 7-10 miles a day. We have some of the greatest hiking trails here in southwest Virginia. As they say, a body in motion tends to stay in motion.
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Steven Norris runs Steven Norris Photography, a Salem, Virginia-based wedding, portrait and scenic photography business. |
