Lessons

Lesson Info

Sue's Background and Philosophy

came a speaker so that I could teach people what I do not to speak about myself so I do have to obviously I always say that when I do my talks do you have to speak about myself in order to teach you but it's more important the ellen from may then you hear me present something to you so I I have I got my story packed down into what I think is my formula of how I did it and it's going to unfold over the next three days so my intro is about describing teo everybody what it is that I do and how it is that I'm standing here right now so I'm just going to go through that I'm going to then launch into what I think desirable product is and what I think women want in terms of portrait photography and why my business became successful so it really starts in the eighties it's uh the glamour was the biggest trained in photography in the eighties in the late eighties and I was twenty years old so um I watched I walked into this market azari touches a professional retouching and what I did was I fou...

nd of that the photography was really boring at the time I was twenty years old it was babies it was really boring family portrait with brown backgrounds and then the blue background came in and and we started to really you know five things up and winning photography was incredibly boring as well and then one day somebody came in with a studio and put some glamour photography in front of me and I was a re toucher at eighteen so I saw glamour photography and I said that's it this is where I want to do I want to do this so I bought a camera and I started to teach myself photography and I spent four years is a professional re toucher so as those four years unfolded I was shooting on a minolta x three hundred and I was just shooting anything that moved my friends my friends children's anything um and I was just tryingto up skill and upscale and upscale and by the time I was twenty two I walked into new zealand's leading glamour studio is thie studio manager in the re toucher and within two years I was shooting full time on the floor so by the time I was twenty four or twenty five I was shooting portrait glamour so what then happened in our market in the early nineties is it died completely away and we weren't allowed to call it glamour anymore so it has such a negative connotation to it the world glamour that when you actually say it people physically blanche and so what I did was I didn't want to shoot children and I didn't want to shoot kind of wedding so I make this quite well no one to everybody I would rather stick pins in my eyes then shoot a wedding um and like a power socket I decided back then that I was never going to shit with things and I don't see babies either all I had to do was keep glamour alive because my boss said if I could keep the makeover portraiture side of things alive then I could sustain a business and a stream of income into our studio then I could keep it alive so I just started to evolve it so mid nineties I'm reading black and white magazine and black and white magazine is just the thing to read it's got nude it's got her brits it's such a beautiful magazine and I'm I'm just buying it every week and soaking it up and trying to lynn natural light photography gone is the soft focus and the boar's gone are the colored backdrops in the five glamour poses and the windows opened up in the studio and it's a studio very similar to this were big windows and lots of nice rural concrete walls in all of the sudden I was trying to evolve into something else but the problem wass I was not allowed to call it what it was known for so I really spent ten or fifteen years being a nothing and nobody nobody identified with my my folio nobody really identified with me and I wasn't really a notable genre shaun right sorry so I wasn't really making my math I was just trying to service the clients that I was macking down mag going directly to so darrin says it's not the strongest of species nor the most intelligent that survives but the one that is the most adaptable to change so when people talk about changing our industry I've bean a photographer now for twenty two years and I've seen nothing but change okay I was there when they invented photo shop I trialled the first photo shop I said that's never going to catch on you know I absolutely hated the first digital camera the second digital camera the third digital camera I spent the first ten years shooting on a medium format hessel bled and then somebody took my film away they took my twelve thousand dollar beautiful big camera away and all of a sudden I've got this crappy you know shoots jay pigs fleas throws magenta twenty thousand dollars thirty five mil for met and they were just like change and then they removed my retouching and we started to shoot we were shooting film scanning our work and trying to lin photo shop and it was so limited and I had to try and learn that when we finally got through the sort of technology and we finally started to evolve that technology is evolving so fast that I can't you can't keep up with it anyway I'm always learning something new so when photographers say what's the state of our industry and where we going I always say listen it's always been changing the whole time I've been in it so just embrace it and be as adaptable as you can and if you're not learning you're not growing if you're not growing gun do something else because it's such an exciting industry about twelve years ago um sitting years ago actually ninety nine this was all shot on medium format so this was me changing from the glamour into my style now so I found my style very early so the first thing I'm going to ask you as a photographer is what is your style do you know what it is and if you don't know what it is I suggest you find one immediately and it must be one that you really want to do because until you define who you are you cannot create product in the market or a marketing plan or a promotion plan on too you can identify who you are because until you identify identify who you are you can't really put it out there so my style came forward really fast really quickly it was about a natural light glamour I wanted that contemporary magazine feel I showed this to the people I work with at the time they said nobody's going to buy it you've cut everybody's head off nobody smiling nobody's looking at the camera okay so really what it came down to for me was at that moment I was sort of mid to late twenties I was really finding myself in photography and everybody was rubbishing what I was doing but I had to hold inside what I believed I could keep to the idea really is when you're a rock bottom in terms of winning money it doesn't matter what you do because I can't go backwards I just have to hold to what it is that I want and try and make it and come out of it so if you fast forward that in years by brand has not changed its the same it's exactly the same so that tells me that I found my style and now I've spent the last fifteen years developing the service around it the business around it the marketing around it and so I really I know that your style will evolve and I know that I have evolved so much of myself but as soon as you identify who you are it just makes it so much easier to create a business out of it so all of a sudden I think I realized that I knew what women want so my brand speaks to females yes it does it is a woman driven brand now that does not mean I don't photograph men because I photograph husbands and boyfriends and partners and the more you include them in into your studio the more income you will make but what I do is I market my brand two women so when I talk to studios I know one thing who's ringing you to book the wedding the bride okay I've bean in studios for twenty two years I've had one group to book a wedding I know it's becoming more popular now for the boys to be arranging it but for the last twenty two years I've been booking brides who books the baby shoot the maternity shoot the boudoir shoot the glamour shoot you know who does that the girls do it right so I think this just definitely a different way we sell to a woman the woman wake up in the morning and go you know what I want to experience what it feels like to be that the guys don't wake up and go im I really want to spend three thousand dollars on photography today because we have a different way of thinking about it so my brand wass based on what his woman want woman wanna look younger slimmer and gorgeous wouldn't you agree I photographed over five thousand woman and I've never had one say could you make me a little wider in low light yeah they want to feel beautiful inside and out feel beautiful inside and out and will pace that's pretty much it right say we want to look younger slimmer gorgeous we want to look and feel beautiful inside out we want everybody just to get along so I am not a boudoir photographer and um but I'm gonna address this because obviously in my creative live video I said I don't shoot bombs now I have I do not dislike the boudoir genre I think it's beautiful I when I look at boudoir photographers that classic good while that you see everywhere in the american market is definitely full of it more so than australia new zealand and perhaps other countries big props to the boudoir market it's it's beautiful but I believe and I'm very out spoken about this so you can challenge this in the chat rooms if you want I believe that is three percent of the market I believe my market is a lot bigger I believe that after photographing five thousand women I have never had one asked me to take a photograph of the bomb so whether I'm attracting a different type of client I don't know and I believe that there is a huge connection between the image issue show and the clients that you attract into your business this image here is beautiful as her bomb is does not make me want to show you mine in fact that one says to me your bomb doesn't look like mine say that could be a double edged sword there right there and so I feel sometimes but where can push people food there away then bring it in so instead of saying I'm anti boudoir because I take shots like this which would imply to you that I am a boudoir photographer but the difference between me is that really everything I shoot is about the face okay so everything I shoot is about the face and every part of the image after that drops away so I'm gonna teach you that I'm gonna teach you how I do that you'll notice I have two eye lines to okay so none of my posters or anything on models are looking away or connecting in any other way there are only two ways that you connect personally to a camera in my camera one is directly to the camera straight through and the other one is down your own body line because this too may these two airlines say to me I'm looking straight at you and the own body line says I'm in my own south in my own energy but if I'm looking away or I'm doing any of the other eye lines I feel like it's more of a model typos and not a portrait so what I'm trying to do is bridge the gap between boudoir portrait contemporary portrait rolling it altogether and creating something that is entirely beautiful zeen that sits in that square crops you also notice I shoot everybody directly straight on the face flat lit with a reflector bouncing back this way so obviously now that you hear me explain my work you're going to see a lot of consistency in my work because all of it is the same all of it is exactly the same line same eye line same feeling to it so my evolution was based on one simple question who are you trying to attract as a client so when I started my business people said to me you cannot you cannot put a website out with just glamour photos who's gonna come and do that and I said but I don't shoot babies and I don't shoot weddings and I'm not going to show that because those of the clients that I'm going to get and I don't do those things so if I just showed a website with glamour photography then I'm only going to get glamour shoots correct now I've currently at that stage got no money so if I don't attract anybody else but glamour what does it matter I can't go backwards if I start out there and so really I stumbled across that desire to only shoot what it is that you really want out of necessity because I figured that nobody could make me shoot something I didn't want because ahead to do you know how many photographers I talked to tell me they hate doing something I hate it so what do you do it ah the money it's not you know resistance and all of that just create more negative in your life stop doing the things you don't like now in focus only on the things you love you will find a way to create an income you will find a way to create an income if you truly love it because you become this force of nature I believe a woman's beauty is here kate so I'm starting all of these phrases with I believe okay this is my experiences in my opinion I believe a woman's beauty exists from the top of her here out to the outside of his shoulders to the bottom of her to college taj everything that I study about body language about human behavior about beauty seems to involve this diamond I do not close this diamond down I enhance it so now that you see my work you're going to try and see that everything I try and shoot I try and enhance this diamond this area because I believe that is where at all of that beauty comes forward right down through the heart and I'll explain all the body language toward next I believe that my brand now has become very feminine in terms of what it is that I'm doing with the way that I imposing remember posing posing opposes oppose aesthetic pose I look at it it's directing right were directing them to relax and touch the bodies and move on and we're directing a look we're directing in online so I believe that when my brand now sort of speaks of a very feminine modern contemporary glamor and that's what I'm trying to achieve when I show images like this the one question I think I get asked more than anything is um why is your work so feminine can a man do this and yes can a woman who doesn't have the sensuality and herself direct somebody else to be sensual on themselves yes so yes do you know why because I've seen it I was taught by a man a man who loves women he just loved the woman he's comfortable around them he directs them and he loves women and he taught me and then I kept going and I have taught people without that sensuality in themselves and they can direct it and bring it forward and others because they just rules this simple rules that I follow that I'm going to teach you so my brand now is sort of has this look about it but the stick in question I guess I get asked more than anything is how do you get people to look at you like that but you know the weird thing is they're not looking at me they're looking in the camera because when that big black camera covers my face and that self conscious veil comes over the client that you're looking at everybody knows that that feeling like they could be quite relaxed and look quite beautiful and then the camera comes up the mouth goes completely stiffened and eyebrows go up and everybody's holding their body and all of us have all of all of the expression is gone when that happens you have to remove that so that's something else I'm going to teach you today because this is what I call connection and if you look at my images you will not find one without that connection and that's how you sell portrait's it's all very well to do beautiful poses and beautiful here and makeup but any photograph that has that direct connection to you as a photographer we'll sell to your client because that is the most important aspect of what we do is connecting with our clients I really think my business winds exploded for me when I started to ask this question who was your target market people do not know the answer to this question who is your target market you know do you know who your target market is can you see her walking towards you do you say she's my client right there bang that's the one I want somebody asked me a long time ago who was your target market and I said all women aged eight to eighty and he said that's not a demographic and I said yeah it is it is that's my demographic so I want a woman all siders or ages eight to eighty a lot of people ask me if you could photograph anybody in the world who would it be I get asked that question all the time and interviews you know I think they think I'm gonna say angelina jolie or something although I'd like to meet her um I don't want to photograph anybody famous I want a photograph sandra from canada and amanda from florida you know and t y from nigeria and mop wanna from hawaii going to photograph any woman in the world so this's so stay because I'm gonna crawl ready until I have had our um anyone in the world who's ever looked in the mirror and not felt good enough about his health at any time in her life on a photograph it every year through the changes of her teenage life through her twenties so her thirty through forty three fifties and issue flowers and to her most beautiful nests I want to photograph here every year off her life toe watch and celebrate the changes of who she is and what she is so that she can experience how she looks to other people it does not interest me to photograph famous people beautiful people that have already being photographed a million times that's who I want to photograph said that is my demographic if I make that clear that's how I attract um my brand opened when I started to say I don't just should claim up because I can shoot couples too and then all of a sudden he's involved and when he's involved then my sale doubles but the copa is is he's not on my website she's on my website because hey comes with her by the way he's like kin comes with bobby I know she's watching some just I'm photographing their wedding in may you know how I said I'd rather stick pins in my eyes well ought not for this one because when I meet special people like that and they say you know you have to photograph her wedding I'll go into that yeah so my market opened when I shot faces do you know how many people would walk into my studio over twenty years and say it's just my face write just my fur that you're just gonna do my face who said that just up here right you're just gonna focus on the top half the truth is is that the face shot for me is a signature shot and it's a shock a lot of photographers don't do it cannot be cropped from a distance it must be photographed like there I started to open up sisters mothers best friends I'm going to talk on the third day I'm going to talk about expanding your marketing to the entire inner circle but as soon as I started to show these images in my work as soon as I started to show sisters and mothers and best friends and couples and families then all of a sudden my shoots exploded not from one girl coming in for a gram a shoot but for six girls coming in for girls day out now six different girls in one day six different sales and I learned the power of the inner circle so long before I read the science of marketing to women I started to understand that women don't go to the toilet on their own women don't go to the toilet on their own they get up to go to the bathroom in a night club or a restaurant or wherever you are and they go I'm just going to the restroom we say bathroom you say race train okay the rest of the world knows what we're talking about and your friends go I'm coming with you and all of a sudden the social network and the woman's bathroom is quite amazing and just so you know guys we come out of the bathroom we put a little lip gloss on we gossip we all talk to each other we have a grand old time and we say oh my god I love your shoes and falco I love you hear thank you we put on lip glass we checked to each other this does not go on at the men's urinal yeah you know I'm sure you guys on in there you know heaven and I love your shoes don't look at me do you wait we had this social network because this is another thing I've learned women speak on average of twelve thousand were today and main speaker on average three thousand so we have more words than you and long after we have exhausted your ear when you've had a guts full of ass well tuned to our girlfriends our sisters our mothers yeah to expel the rest of them because we can't possibly go tto go to bid bet with nine thousand words banked do you have any idea how much that's going to keep us awake so you know you do the yes dear yes dear we keep on talking so that makes us the most powerful networkers in the world currently now if I photograph sisters in a mom like that and I market to them as the makeover experience that each see this beautiful individual print if I mark it to these woman is a glamour shoot then really what I'm doing is a family show right so I've got a family shoot where three adult women all of whom have children a husband grandchildren so these woman are connected tio our family of four a family of four her family of five children plus spouses plastic grandchildren plus her husband every one of these people are connected to eighteen others and as one group is one group of shoot I'm marketing glamour but this is what I'm selling to so you can see how clever how how well I've managed to morph my brand to attract the female client but then open it up to a family market that spins dollars on portrait shoots so then I started to show before and afters because before and afters to me with a single denominator that said you are not only achievable you you anybody can do this and I started to say I didn't want them to look bad and there before and after sometimes I should before and after with makeup on if the before and after is bad I will retouch it but what it did wass I put it before and after gallery on my website and the hits on that gallery went nuts because what people wanted what people love is the transformation and interestingly enough why are we so captivated by the transformation like white can't we just appreciate her beauty without opening that up and going oh look at that head because people love the before and after now pop culture tells me that you're behind the scenes your kardashians in sixty six million dollars last year you're behind the scenes your reality tv your makeover transformation shows your weight last transformation shows your plastic surgery transformation shows your everything transformation house transformation life transformation money transformation doctor phil oprah everything that you tell me about your tv which we love which we as consumers love tells me you can be a bit of person at any time anybody can improve themselves and anytime anybody can be better and once I started to include that before and after what it did was it started to tell my clients what it is that I did that speaks volumes to doesn't go next door total hottie pao and who looks good when they wake up in the morning really I had to show curvy girls and my advertising and I had to show curvy girls we just so you know we're a day one you'll never hear the word let's stand in time you're gonna hear me say plus size is two words after each other I think that is gonna be the single most revolting tim in the history of all anything plus size so you are not like everybody else and I said goes with curves you can say whatever you want why say anything at all just go you know um average being my for a supermodel twenty years ago waas a present lower than average female in the world and now it's twenty three percent lower ninety percent of the models currently in europe have an anorexic be am I and then we're telling girls that she's not normal and and she is a majority in this world now I am not auntie zero size movement if you want to live like posh spice fabulous I wish I could you know but I can't but what I'm saying is everybody you must open your market to everybody stop showing young skinny models in your advertising and wondering why you're not attracting a different type of client the cage you must open the reality ofthe your brand up to every woman and as soon as you do that every woman will come so somebody came up to me after my talk in vegas and they said I finally understand I shoot seniors but I want the mother and daughter shoot but I don't get the mothers why don't the mothers want to be photographed by me and I say what mothers you showing in your advertising are they real women are they like a real woman I have to address that when I say real woman I am not discrediting thin beautiful women but you know at the end of the day when I say riel women I mean are they are they marketing wise achievable to the everyday market are you looking at this person and saying she looks like my my girl next door right she does she is a real woman to me she is somebody who was nervous about being photographed who came into my studio going you know what I read your message on your block that said love yourself now and she said I could have come in and said that I'm going to lose forty pounds but she said why I need to love myself right now I'm doing this right now you know that to me says that I spoke to her and my message was very clear that I'm available to here now I I feel so passionately about this because I see so many disconnected brands I constantly open web site and look att brands and see that they're not showing a really client they're not showing the reality of what it is that we're doing every day and they're showing that beautiful and achievable client that doesn't spend any money so just so you know I have had people say well I'm not interested in that money market or that older market if you don't want that market you can leave all of them for may because I'll take them nor a problem at all I want to make it achievable that no matter how beautiful you are no matter if you have skin disorders or whatever that I can photograph you and I want to tell stories around each of my chutes so that you identify with here is a woman that you identify her as somebody who you know struggled to be photographed because she felt like she was in a place where can I be photographed beautifully you know I photographed this woman because I gave a talk in melbourne in australia and she's so beautiful she's sitting in the audience and she said you talked for an hour but you said one thing that resonated with me and I said what was that she said I know what beautiful looks like when you said that when you said I know what beautiful looks like and I can find that and you because everybody has it I know what beautiful looks like she said when you said that I just knew you could find mine and I wanted you to find that beautiful in may um eighty because eighty is beautiful and eighty comes with daughters and more daughters and and a network of people so all woman all ages about two thousand three I've been shooting in the studio eleven years for a tin for eleven years and I built this amazing folio I had already defined my style glamour photography was a distant memory and one of the most amazing parts about that wass that I really had kind of called myself contemporary portrait but I still employed a fulltime makeup artist that was also a receptionist so she had a dual role which is the only reason that her job survived through their era because I felt that it was still important that we were putting makeup on people fast for two two thousand three and I was still aiming for five hundred dollars a week is a wage and in my thirties that wasn't enough so I made the distinct choice of going out into business now at this stage I turned up every day at nine o'clock I took photographs and then I left at five just like that I had a job and my job was to take beautiful photographs and I did that so all of a sudden I'm faced with starting my own business and I had no idea how to market cell no idea how teo um playtex I had no idea how to create a website designer brand I had I could not sell my own work I was lucky to get a four hundred dollars cd at that time even though my work looked like it did I said do you understand it doesn't matter how good your workers until you learn how to sustain an income in a business from photography you will not you will not no matter how good you our people don't buy it just because it's good people by because of the way it's sold to them of how it's presented to them off how your business to sit up so I was shooting really beautifully at that time and making no money so just to be awesomely um you know I also had no money so I had to start a business with zero income and a ten day cannon ten day okay so second eight megapixel camera one lends a twenty four twenty five and nothing else a laptop and a mouse I didn't even have awakened tablet I would return click click click click click so all of a sudden I'm going well I'm going into business or cem nothing and I lived half an hour out of the main city in new zealand in a country cottage okay and I had a four car garage which I converted into a studio so I'm gonna tell you on day three when we talk business I'm going to show you how fifteen weeks later we owned twenty thousand dollars and I could not believe how we managed to achieve that so I built a business by borrowing three thousand dollars off my mom dead which I paid back tenfold and a year after that I built an inner city studio and it's quite weird because at that moment I exploded onto our market and yet I had been a photographer thirteen years at that time if I could give anybody a piece of advice about building a business like that I would say that um you have to give everything you've got to make something like that big make something that big work but anybody can do this I have no I have no education I have no magazine degree I have no business degree I'm not even trained as a photographer I was told a million times I would never be able to achieve it and I believed it because whatever you believe becomes true for you and I'm not a rich wife it and I'm not a trust fund baby I've got blue colored work it parents my parents worked their whole lives and they still work now on their six five and they taught me how to work hard and the rest I learned as I went along so anybody can do this anybody I'm not I'm not special I'm not you know I'm just a hard worker and a very competitive um I'm going to read this ta now because it's very important the time will come when with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome and say sit here in eight you will love again the stranger who was yourself give wine give bread give back your heart to itself to the strangers loved you all your life whom you ignored for another it's about falling in love with yourself and this is my philosophy and the philosophy is in the floor of our studio when we built it because I wanted people to understand that when they came to me that until you honor and value your time until your honor and value yourself you will not create anything with it you will not get paid for it you will not be honored for it because you do know on it in yourself if that is my my philosophy and how I built everything then that would be it right there uh what I love about this palm which was written by derek walcott is take down from the bookshop the love letters from books out the photographs of desperate notes peel your own image from the mirror and sit and faced on your life it doesn't describe what we do you sit down you see yourself you give yourself the time that you've given away all of your life you peel your own image from the mirror which would be a photograph you sit and then you faced on your life you see yourself you fall in love with yourself for mei that sums up everything that I do in my business and I love it this has been on my wall for eight years it's written by paul adan it's actually from the book it's not how good you are it's how good you want to be that talent will get you far but not as far as ambitious jin ok some of the most successful people in this world are the least talented and that's something I always address in my talks how many of you have set at a computer surfing other photographers websites saying I just don't understand why they're so successful when I'm clearly so much more talented than they are I did that I did that for years I sat down without realizing that my attitude it was just all about they have it and I don't and that's where cause I'm way more than them and I was nothing because that is just the voice of a blocked out a sitting at home criticizing others who are actually out there doing it and that is the first message that you need to get up and take action I'm going to talk on the third day about creating that style and then all of a sudden the brain and the product that goes with it because my brand and my products suddenly became very clear about what it is that I do and I'm going to teach you about the two tops of photographers that make money the sitting fei and the alicante um I'm going to show you how I've simplified my priceless so much that I have made it easy for people to buy from me and when I look at the products that I sell and I'm gonna show you all of these and I bought them with may and how easy it is to understand both my priceless and what I charge then you can see why when we opened our studio we had an average cell of eighteen hundred dollars uh from a single girl and now my average on my own in sydney is three thousand three hundred