Colours of Photography

BY KATHRYN HOLLINRAKE

How to be unignorable

RED! Red means passion! It means unignorable, like a fire truck. It means urgent, fire truck again! Coincidentally my nickname in school was “Towering Inferno” (tall, red hair, lots of energy). So red is a colour I can relate to.

After the many years since I started my business my hair is no longer red (I’m calling it strawberry blond) and nobody calls me Towering Inferno because thank goodness (I’m sure people think) I have calmed down a bit, but it’s not as if the fire has gone out. I’ve just got it under control. And figured out along my journey how to harness its energy for good. Let’s look at the fires of passion, being unignorable, and urgency as they relate to a career in photography.

Remember that charging less than your worth is more likely to teach a client that they can expect great work for little money, than that your work has value.

There is a lot of energy expended around the idea of finding your passion and then figuring out how to make money in its pursuit. But just because something is your “passion” doesn’t mean it’s a viable career choice. I think Stephanie Burns whose May 2019 Forbes article entitled “Why We Should All Stop Following Our Passion” might have it right. Maybe it is the other way around - passion follows, not we follow it - which is why the sooner you start on your 10,000 hour quest towards expertise the sooner you will find your passion. You create that passion by diving in, getting really good at something and feeling the deep satisfaction of being able to reliably and repeatedly create something excellent, while generating enough income to make a living, which will in turn allow you and your passion to continue to thrive. So how do we ensure our business is viable?

You need to be unignorable, have the confidence to really show up, to know your value and to charge what you are worth. Your career depends on it. And in fact so do the careers of your fellow photographers who depend on your doing what you can to maintain the value of our profession. Someone who can’t be ignored and knows her value as a professional negotiator and coach is Fotini Iconomopoulos who comes to mind partly because of her signature red wardrobe. Like Wonder Woman in her red cape Fotini is unapologetically confident and impossible to miss. As she says “If you don’t believe in yourself, why should anyone else?” The tie in for photographers is of course not the wearing of red, but the power of confidence. Whether you are pushing your technical boundaries, or photographing your desert island movie star, or a grumpy, harried executive, remember that confidence begets confidence. So dig deep and fake it until you make it if you have to. The success of your shots will depend on your subjects feeling that they can trust you and can’t ignore you. That is how you get a great shot out of them. They look great, which makes you look great, which then pumps up your increasingly unpoppable (red) balloon of confidence.

A note re pricing: remember that charging less than your worth is more likely to teach a client that they can expect great work for little money, than that your work has value. When you suddenly raise your prices having taught them that they can find someone who will do it for less, just like you did, they may flee. So what do you charge when you are starting out? The advice I got was to charge the same fee as an experienced photographer. As it was explained to me, all low balling my quote would do is indicate to the client that they were getting someone worth less than the other guy.

Unable to photograph people (thinking woman in gorgeous red dress) to illustrate the power of red, due to the pandemic lock down, I decided to use these ranunculus flowers to create an image that would be full on red, beautiful and rich, with one flower spot lit to signify “unignorable”.

The key to success is to consider a bunch of things “urgent”: continually growing professionally, figuring out and nurturing what sets you apart from every other photographer, and shouting it out to the world. All this ties into the skills you’ve developed while building your passion, and the confidence that comes from that. It is urgent that you do great work. It is urgent that you charge enough to make a living and make people understand why they should choose you instead of hiring the cheap guy. It is urgent that

you be out in the world (as challenging as that is during the pandemic) because you can’t stumble across opportunities if you aren’t.

It is urgent that you pay attention to the market and what people want. The bottom line is that one could probably make a career out of being an ‘ok’ photographer who is great at business, but the most brilliant photographer likely won’t make it if they don’t embrace the urgency of being smart about their business.