My photography journey # 6
Launching my business as a kids and family photographer, documenting artists and artisans in Florence + my first editorial assignment. (2012-2013).
If you are new to this series and would like to read the previous posts, I have made a menu item at the top of my site. All you have to do is click on My photography journey, and all previous posts will magically appear.
In my last post I wrote about how 2012 was mainly dedicated to blogging. However it was also the year, where I started getting more and more requests for kids and family photography.
I had done some publicity on Facebook in local mum groups, and I did get some clients that way, but more often it would be friends of friends, who had seen the photos, I had done for other families, and now they wanted to book a session themselves.
Around May 2012 my maternity leave had come to an end, and it was time for me to make a big decision. My fulltime job was in Rome, but I was now living in Florence, and if I was going to keep the job, I would have to travel back and forth between the two cities while sometimes working from home.
With a one-year old child I quickly realized, that it was a no-choice situation, and to be honest I wasn’t too unhappy about it. After having experienced one year of pure freedom I wanted more. It was time to become independent, and so I quit my job and got myself an Italian VAT number.
(I should mention right away, that I wasn’t going to rely solely on photography as an income. Ever since I quit my job, my main profession has been that of a translator between Danish and Italian. It’s what I studied five years for at Copenhagen Business School, and it has always been the main source of my income. I am writing this, in case there are readers considering quitting their job in order to become a fulltime photographer. Of course it will work for some people, but personally I would never have managed to survive from photography without also having a second income.)
In the beginning I did the very classic lifestyle family photography, although my sessions also contained a certain level of documentary photography. I would arrange to meet the families on different outdoor locations (typically parks or playgrounds), or we would do the photos in their home.
My photos were natural and spontaneous (especially compared to traditional studio photography), but my editing was still rather pathetic, as I was exaggerating the use of presets. (Apparently I was very much in love with a dreamy haze filter, which seems a bit crazy today, but maybe it was a thing back in 2012…)
Those first two years I also played around with maternity photography, but somehow it never managed to become my thing. Over the years I have done a couple of sessions, but because I have always preferred the spontaneous, non-posed portrait photography, I wasn’t particularly attracted to maternity photography, where, no matter how hard you try to look at it in a new and modern way, it will always be the belly, which is the most important subject, and it’s hard to avoid posing.
Ever since the beginning most of my clients have been (mainly American) expats living in Florence or Copenhagen, or they have been Danish families. Of course I have also had Italian clients, but there is no doubt, that family photography is not as big a thing in Italy, as it is in other countries, and it’s my impression, that many Italian families just aren’t willing to make the investment, which is of course fair enough. We all have our priorities, and I can absolutely understand, that it’s a lot of money. However this difference in cultures has been the biggest hurdle on my road as a professional photographer and one of the main reasons, why I decided to quit last year. Italy is just not an easy market to be in for family photographers.
(Truth be told I just did a session last month in Copenhagen after a break of almost 1.5 years, so maybe I haven’t really quit after all. We’ll see…)
I ended up doing around 25 paid sessions over the first two years. Of course I was charging relatively little in the beginning, and I was only delivering digital files. No prints. I have done a quick calculation, and to give you an idea, I can say, that my average price for these 25 sessions was €185 per session. Surely very little compared to the time invested in making and editing the photos, but on the other hand probably fair enough considering my level back then as a photographer.
In 2013 I did a personal project, which I called Artists and artisans in Florence.
Through the online community Creative People in Florence I got in touch with all kinds of professional and non-professional artists and artisans, who I photographed in their studios or in their homes. These included writers, painters, sculptors, jewelry designers and more.
The project was connected to a series of interviews with the artists conducted by an American jewelry designer in Florence and published on her blog.
When I look at the photos today, I have to admit, that I am not particularly proud of them. I have almost 400 photos in my archive from this project, and the ones in this post are the absolute best ones. You can easily see, how I was at the beginning of my “career” both in terms of composition and editing.
However the project was fun to do, and it really made me realize, how much I enjoy being the fly on the wall, when I photograph people, without having to guide them into poses etc.
Some of these portraits were of course posed, but in my opinion the best ones are the unposed ones, where the subject isn’t aware (or at least pretends not to be aware) of me.
This has been a constant in my photography up until today. The more invisible I can be during a session, the more relaxed and comfortable I feel, and that’s when I make the best photos. And of course that is probably also when my subjects feel at their best and most relaxed, which all adds extra quality to the final outcome.
In 2013 I also got my first editorial assignment.
That year I had participated in the second edition of the blogger conference The Hive in Berlin, and I had met two German sisters, who had recently launched a digital magazine (this was quite a new thing in 2013!) called SisterMag.
They wrote to me asking, if I would like to contribute to an article about bloggers’ favorite hotels in different cities, and thus do a piece about a place in Florence. I was more than happy to say yes, and I would even get a small fee for the assignment.
I decided to write about a less famous and rather different, yet very photogenic place, which I thought would be perfect for the article. It was an old apartment located near the Duomo in Florence, which had been made into a bed and breakfast. The name was Le tre stanze (The three rooms).
I remember how I spent several hours photographing the place, because I wanted so badly to do it well, since this was my first commercial/editorial job, so I really wanted to make sure, that I had enough good photos to choose from.
When I look at the 105 photos in my archive today, I can see, how it was completely overkill, compared to what I needed for the article, which ended up including only six (even rather boring) photos. On the other hand the place was indeed really photogenic, so I can see, why I couldn’t stop myself back then.
The photos from Le tre stanze in this post have received a small touch up in Lightroom, as I only had the raw files. If you are curious to see the original published outcome, the article is actually still online here. (See page 158).
That was all for now. If you have written about your own photography journey and would like to share it, please leave a comment, as I would love to read other people’s stories. I find it so inspirational, and I think we can learn a lot from each other.
Once again, so cool to hear this story. It’s so varied! Thanks for sharing.