I’ve Moved!

Hopefully for the last time…

You can now find me at: http://www.sarahwaytephotography.co.uk.

Thank you all for keeping up with the moves recently, but this should be the last time now…

Sarah Needs You!

The closer I get to setting up my website, the more aware I am of how paltry my portfolio is! After showing it a few times to potential clients, I feel I need to expand it some more.

For this I need willing models and subjects! In other words, I need you!

So, this is what I’m offering, in return for your time and dazzling smiles:

• Up to 2 hours of shooting time, in a location of your choice, either in front of a white backdrop or with a more natural backdrop, the choice is yours.
• A disc of low resolution images, watermarked, for use on the internet.

For an extra fee (£75), I will provide the same images in high resolution format which can be printed as many times as you like, for personal or family use only. Or, if you only want one or two images, I can provide individual prints approximately 10″ by 7″ and mounted, ready for framing. The price for a single print is £25, two prints is £45 and three prints is £60.

All I ask, in return, is for a little bit of your time and your permission, in writing, to allow me to use your photographs in my portfolio.

You can contact me either my leaving a comment on my blog, sending me a message on Facebook, emailing me at madmalteaser (at) gmail (dot) com or calling/texting me on 07717 533962. I look forward to hearing from you!

Presentation

Source: ellymacphotos.com via Sarah on Pinterest

Today, Kelly and I went to Bluewater to visit the wedding fair at the Glow exhibition centre. It’s the first wedding fair I’ve visited without Stu in tow and, with no disrespect meant to my future hubby, I had a thoroughly lovely, girly afternoon. It was lovely to get a girl’s perspective, for a change, even taking the time to look at some wedding dresses – as loathsome as I find the experience.

What I found most enlightening, though, was talking to the wedding photographers, of which there were many. It was interesting to see how they presented themselves, what sort of packages they offered and the prices they charged. It’s made me realise how important presentation, packaging and branding is when presenting myself to the masses and, while I know I should have been getting ideas for my own wedding, I actually picked up lots of different ideas for my photography business.

Which reminds me, further to my last post, unofficial permission has been granted for me to get my photography business up and running. I need to wait for the official letter from my HR department, but I’ve had the go-ahead from my line manager so I’ve started making moves to getting my website up and running. As of yesterday I’m now the proud owner of a domain name! And the lovely Davinia Hamilton has designed a beautiful logo for me which I will show you all very soon.

I’m starting to think about my presentation a lot too and am looking at a variety of things as far as that goes too. So, lots going on, as always! And still more to come!

The First Brick

Source: online.wsj.com via Sarah on Pinterest

 

Turning your hobby into a potential money-earner is no easy task. It’s not simply a case of charging someone for your services, particularly when the service you are providing is something like photography.

I have learnt a lot in the last few weeks about branding, marketing yourself and the legalities required to work as a photographer and, while I find it very interesting and exciting and I’m very keen to get going with it, I am held back by one thing. I already have a full time job.

Now, this isn’t a cop-out. I am not trying to get out of this before I’ve even begun. But when you do a job such as mine, there are things to take into consideration. One of those things is that, without permission from my manager, I cannot take on any kind of work outside of what I already do. Which is why I’ve been holding off, to date, on getting my name actively out into the arena.

But that will hopefully soon change. I put in my request to my line manager this week for permission for secondary employment and I’m hoping they will reply soon and grant me that permission. Once I get the go ahead, I will be cracking on with getting a website up and running, as well as putting together my branding and getting things off the ground properly!

For someone with absolutely no business sense, I am actually really enjoying everything that I’ve been learning about so far!

Shiny & New

Source: cookinginstilettos.com via Sarah on Pinterest

First of all, welcome to my shiny new blog!

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed my time over on Blogger but I was starting to feel the limitations of the site in relation to my blog. So, after some sound advice from a friend, I decided to make the move over to WordPress. And here I am!

I’ve been keeping busy since, too. I’ve been getting to grips with my lovely new lens which I was able to buy courtesy of all the lovely people who got me vouchers for Christmas. Thank you to you all! It’s a fantastic bit of kit and I’m really pleased with it, but I would never have been able to get it without your generosity. So big love to you all for that.

I’ve also made it my mission to get to better grips with Photoshop. Until now I have done very little in the way of post-processing – making colour adjustments, basic black and white conversion, rotating and cropping and slapping on a border have been the limits of my expertise. But the internet is a minefield of information and, with the use of some good how-to guides, I have now learned a better method of black and white conversion which really makes my photographs look so much better and now I know how to do selective colouring which is something I have put off for a long time, but is actually a lot easier to do than I thought!

And a week or so ago I decided I’d like to see what my artwork looks like printed and mounted so I got a couple of examples made up. They arrived in the post last weekend and I’m really pleased with the results. I’d be proud to have them hanging on the wall.

And there is more yet to come, but I’ll keep you posted with that as and when it happens!

Now is the Time

Back in 1997, at the tender age of 16, I stayed up late one night to watch the Academy Awards. As a teenager with a passion for writing, I was keen to see who would win Best Original Screenplay and, way back in 1997, what I was about to see was a fairytale in the making.

The winners, that year, were a little known duo from Massachusetts. It was their first screenplay and they both starred in the movie. Of course, I’m talking about Good Will Hunting and the writers were Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

When I found out it was their first screenplay, I was enthralled. And from that moment on I dreamed of the time when I, too, would stand on that stage giving my acceptance speech. But this is real life and here I am, 15 years later, with an incredibly well rehearsed (and old) speech and no golden statue on my bookshelf.

It’s taken me 15 years to realise that those fairytales are very few and far between and that acclaim like that just doesn’t happen without some seriously hard graft first.

But bear with me here because this is not a tale of woe and I am not fishing for sympathy.

In the last 15 years I have done nothing as far as chasing my dreams are concerned. In fact, until I started this little blog just a few months ago, I hadn’t written anything more intensive than a shopping list for several years. That’s not to say I’ve wasted that time. I have lived my life in the best way I know how and have learned so much along the way. And I realise, now, that I had to do that living to prepare myself for the hard graft in order to chase those dreams.

Interestingly enough, the Academy Award is no longer the dream. I’m actually not sure what my ultimate goal is yet but I’m starting to get an idea. And it’s only now that I realise I am probably closer to accomplishing my goals than I ever was and I finally have the knowledge and life experience to get me there.

Latest Project

A little while ago I got asked by a friend if I would like to take some photographs of her children and newborn niece. In my new spirit of yes (which is getting a little easier each time I do it), I jumped at the chance. Talking to the friend, it sounded like she wanted quite traditional “studio” shots. I had to figure out, quickly, how I was going to manage that on my meagre budget.

We put our heads together and came up with borrowing a projector screen and some fluffy cream rugs from various people and, using the shoot as an excuse, I popped out and bought myself a cheap flashgun. After a little bit of reading up on studio portrait shoots, I felt reasonably ready to go for it.

And here are some of the results…

 

Charlotte

Oliver

Zara

Group Shot

It may surprise you when I say that I’m actually really quite proud of these photographs and, for the first time, I don’t mind admitting it! So, how did I do?

Selling Yourself

Just last week I met with a friend of a friend and her partner to discuss the possibility of photographing their wedding next year. This is my second such meeting and so I felt a little bit more confident and comfortable about what I was going to say.

So far, I’ve kept these sort of meetings informal and they have involved a get together over dinner, first just to chat and see how we all get along before getting down to the nitty gritty of showing off my work to date and discussing the ins and outs of what I would do.

I’m 31 years old and all this showing off my work to strangers is a very new experience for me. In 20 years, I’ve developed the habit of being quite secretive about my work, whether it be a poem, a story or a photograph and have always chosen to keep what I have done, or what I am doing, largely to myself. It’s only in recent years that I’ve branched out and started showing some of my stuff to friends and colleagues, so to show my work to complete strangers is an alien concept that still has me turning into a gibbering wreck.

With this in mind, when I do show my “portfolio”, such as it is, to people, I find myself being generally quite modest about it. I’ve always had a tendency to downplay myself in any given situation, so that sentiment has moved over into these meetings too. The first meeting I had was just me, the potential “clients” and our mutual friend. I never heard anything back from them so I’m assuming they chose not to have me as their photographer. This is fine and perfectly understandable. The decision you make about who will photograph your wedding is an important one and it’s a brave couple that chooses to have a non-professional do it.

However, at this recent meeting, Stu came along with me as, in this case, he was the mutual friend. So there I was, handing over my portfolio and giving my little, modest spiel which involves stressing the fact that I am not a professional photographer by any leap of imagination, that I am strictly an amateur, having only photographed one wedding so far and all the while, Stu was sitting reasonably quietly and letting me get on with it.

Afterwards he asked me how I felt it went and I decided that, actually, I felt while his friend liked my stuff and would probably say yes in a heartbeat, her partner wasn’t so sure. I got the impression that her partner knew her stuff when it came to photography, that she knew exactly what she wanted and probably had certain expectations and that, for one reason or another, I didn’t meet those expectations. So yeah, I figured that, while we all got on, I wasn’t expecting to hear a “Yes, we’ll hire you!” response. I asked Stu what he thought and was surprised at what he had to say.

I forget his exact words now but maybe he’ll enlighten you with those in the comments if he reads this but, basically, he told me off for underselling myself. Apparently I mentioned, more than once, that I was an amateur and he tells me I also stated that I didn’t know how to use a camera (which I don’t personally recall saying, but hey, we’ll agree to disagree on that one!). Now, in my mind, I was trying to get across the point that I am not a professional which, when we’re talking about wedding photography, is very important. I don’t want to come across as the big I am, only for them to be disappointed with the end result. I would sooner them expect the work of an amateur (yes Stu, that word again, I know how much you hate me calling myself that!) and be pleasantly surprised with the results.

But I do understand where Stu was coming from and I suppose I should work on selling myself a bit more. It’s just that, after so many years, it’s going to be a hard habit to break.

As it turns out, they did get back to me that very same night. And the response? “Yes, we’ll hire you!” So, I must be doing something right!

Regret what you have done, not what you haven’t.

Never Regret

In my line of work, or my “day job” as it shall heretofore be known, I am faced with the elderly, sick and dying on an almost daily basis. It’s funny how, when a person gets to this stage of their lives, they entrust so much in a person like me that they have only known for, at the very most, an hour or two of their lives.

I used to think my day job was about giving these people medical care and trying to keep them alive until they were safely in the hands of the nearest hospital bed but I’m very quickly realising that there is another aspect to my role – the confessional.

To be ill, particularly as you get older, seems to encourage people to reminisce and recap their lives and it’s quite common for me to be told at least one lasting regret on the ride to the hospital.

The most common regrets, as noted by Bronnie Ware in her book “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying” which she noted in her time working with palliative care patients, include such things as losing touch with friends or not nurturing friendships as much as they should have, spending so much more time on career instead of on family, not saying how they felt but instead trying to protect the feelings of loved ones, not being happier with their lives and, finally, not having the courage to live their lives the way they wanted instead of how they were expected to live it.

What seems abundantly clear to me is that people spend a lot of time regretting things that they have not done and, when I think back to my own regrets, it seems I have fallen into the same trap. I regret not doing my A Levels when I had the chance, I regret not carrying on my education after secondary school and I regret not standing up to school bullies more.

What I don’t regret, however, are some of the things I have done that, in hindsight, I know were incredibly stupid and entirely regrettable. And experience is starting to show me that this seems to be the general consensus. So why is it we stop ourselves from doing something for fear of regretting it later?

With this thought in mind, I have decided to alter my decision-making process when it comes to opportunities and experiences that are thrown into my path. From now on I will take a moment to stop and think to myself, “Am I likely to regret not doing this?” Because, let’s face it, I’m more likely to remember, when I’m lying on my death-bed in years to come, the fact that I didn’t do something rather than the fact that I did it and got it spectacularly wrong.

So what do you regret not doing?

Inksperience

Once upon a time, a few years ago now, I was having a quiet afternoon with a friend with a small amount of money in pocket and no ideas on how to keep us entertained for the afternoon. Suddenly my friend stumbled on an idea…

“Let’s get your tongue pierced!” she said. Now, this is something I’d wanted to do for quite some time but had never really had the balls to do so, when she suggested it on a whim, I trusted her judgement and off we went to the piercing shop.

A short while later I was pierced and drooling and feeling very happy with myself. Years later I still have that piercing and, when I notice it’s presence, I’m reminded of the moment we decided to go and get it done and that feeling always makes me smile.

For me, it wasn’t about being pierced. It wasn’t about the prestige or trying to impress people, or even to prove that I could do it. It was about having the experience at all, making that decision to do something and actually experiencing it for myself instead of being told about it by someone else and wistfully wondering “some day…”.

That desire to experience things is what keeps me going and is as good as any raison d’être that I can think of and it’s for this reason that I want to get a tattoo. Not because I think tattoos are beautiful, not because I think they’re cool and certainly not because other people have done it so I should too. I want to be able to experience what it feels like and I want to have the opportunity to regret it or to be proud of what I’ve done.

And so I’m deciding what to get and making plans to get it done. If you have a tattoo(s), what made you get it and what made you choose the design you got?