You’ve decided to set up shop as a high school senior portrait photographer. And you think you have a chance of becoming pretty good at it. You love photographing, and you’ve photographed a variety of friends and family in the past. So you put together your business marketing tool set and start on your way.

Then you start looking at the marketplace. Dozens of photographers are in your area, marketing themselves as senior portrait photographers. The local high school’s latest newspaper has 15 ads for photographers in the 10 small pages of news.

Ugh. Do you really stand a chance?

How do you fight all of this competition?

You may be making one fatal mistake if this sounds like you. You may be thinking of other photographers as competition.

Why Photographers Aren’t Your Competition

Let me tell you a story of a group of wedding photographers.

A number of years ago, we ran into a nice couple at a local wedding expo. We had booths next to one another, and we chatted throughout the daylong event. We even agreed to have dinner together after the expo, and spent another few hours talking. We hit it off immediately, and decided these “dinner talks” were something we wanted to do again and again.

We decided to meet a couple of weeks later, and had another friend in the business we asked along. So the three of us had dinner, boosted up our concepts for our businesses over a few hours of chatting, and agreed to meet again the next month for another round of business, wine and friends. [Read more…]