Photography businesses can be intimidating.  Not only is equipment expensive, and not only is it a learning process to interact with clients, put yourself out there, and learn how to work a camera with a ton of buttons on it- but it can also be confusing because you may not even know what basics you need to set yourself up for success!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve shared a blog with my top five tips for new photographers and my top five tips for finding great education on a budget!  Today I want to share a few must haves for your new business!!

 1. A DSLR Camera

DSLR’s range from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars but don’t feel like you have to break the bank at the very beginning!  I started on a Nikon D60 (which is not even produced anymore!) and my most recent purchase was the Nikon D810.  If you are in the market for a good starter camera, I would recommend the Nikon D3300!  Its affordable and sophisticated for the price!

2.  Lightroom and Photoshop

These two are legitimate must haves for editing your photos.  I use Lightroom for basic edits to color, exposure, shadows, contrast, etc.  I use photoshop for more targeted touch ups such as removing blemishes!  You can start a free trial and purchase a subscription to both through Adobe Creative Cloud!

3.  A Good Lens

If you purchase a starter camera (such as the D3300) it will most likely come with a lens such as an 18-55 mm.  This will be good enough to start out and get the job done.  However,  I recommend investing in a nice prime lens sooner than later and the 50 mm lens is a great one to start with!  The 50 mm 1.4 is affordable and a staple that you will continue to use throughout your career!  Prime lenses will produce different images on a DX camera (cropped) vs an FX camera (full frame), but it is still a great lens to work with for portraits no matter what camera you have and you’ll notice a dramatic difference in your images!!

4.  A Mentor

Mentoring is soooo beneficial!  You’ve got lots of questions and they’ll have lots of answers that will help you find your groove faster and avoid a few common new business mistakes over the next few months or years!  Rather than a Facebook message asking to “pick their brain”, I really do recommend signing up for a mentoring session with a photographer that you look up to because you’ll have more targeted answers specific to you and your business goals.

5.  Patience

This is a necessity for sure!  Go into this understanding that a successful small business takes time and growth and growing pains and a lot of wins paired with a lot of fails!!  A small business is not an overnight accomplishment, but instead, its an all day, late night, years of practice, and never giving up kind of business that demands patience and persistence.  

We’ll be chatting about that some more next Friday because I’ll sharing with you what I do day to day aside from just taking pretty pictures!!

Don’t forget to shoot me an email at abbyhudsonphoto@gmail.com if there’s a question that you’d like answered or a topic that you’d like covered through these Friday posts!!!

Hugs to yall!  You’ve totally got this and Im cheering for you!

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