Lessons
Class Introduction
05:21 2Business Portraits Overview
04:14 3How to Find Business Portrait Clients
07:05 4Business Portrait Lighting Philosophy
07:56 5Portrait Lighting Location Kit
09:42 6Shoot: Basic Lighting Setups
09:18 7Shoot: Three Light Business Portrait
13:41 8Posing Basics for Business Portraits
08:04Lesson Info
Business Portraits Overview
All right. So business portraits and headshots. That's the name of the game. There's a large demand for quality business portraits. I'm sure you guys know the not-so-quality ones. You see them every day in your local newspaper, on billboards. If you're browsing the internet at all, you'll see on LinkedIn a lot of awful portraits. So people are always, they wanna look their best, but not everybody's a photographer, so they don't necessarily know the in's and out's why a photo is the way it is. A lot of people know a good photo when they see it, but they can't describe it, so your job as a photographer is to provide that service to them, and for me, it was once I started doing these nice clean set-ups that people wanted that because they could just really see the image. There wasn't that distracting light. There wasn't horrible editing where people just look like plastic or worse and things like that. So I noticed in my area, I started looking through, I don't remember what caught my att...
ention at first. I think it was an ad for a hospital. It was a whole bunch of orthopedic surgeons in an ad and it was the worst. So I thought, well, there's definitely a market for this. If somebody paid enough money for that to be on a billboard, clearly we can raise the bar a little bit, and there's an opportunity there, so I put together a little bit of a plan, and we'll get into that on the marketing side. But there is a demand because everybody these days are using photos, whether it's for their website, their business card, their billboard. Anything like that. There's just a lot of demand for photography. Like I said, integrated into the web. That's where the majority of my photos end up are people who are re-doing their websites, re-doing their marketing scheme because they need fresh new photos for web, mobile, and print. Always important to diversify your income, so on the other side, for you, I started doing this not only because I saw an opening in the market, but because I live in Omaha, Nebraska, where in the winter, it is freezing. The majority of my photo shoots are outdoors, on location, environmental portraits, things like that. But in January, nobody wants to take photos outdoors, including my equipment. It won't even function. So I needed to find a way, when my bank account was getting a little low come March to get January and February back up into the black, and how could I make more money and shoot indoors and all that type of thing, so that's where I started. I came up with a little card that I sent out, and contacted some people. And that really helped me push through those months, and now it's become such a major part of my business, it's almost half of what I do. I know I mentioned that I had 91 attorneys. That was in a two-day shoot in August. So just knowing you can have that kind of thing in August. There's also that type of thing year-round, so just with a little bit of time commitment, you can really add a lot to your bottom line. And again, it's not the most exciting thing in the world, but if you can just make good clean portraits, there's a demand for it, and there's a lot of money to be made if you price it right. And it's also a great way to network. I'm not a wedding photographer, but if the right client comes along, I'll definitely photograph a wedding. And someone I photographed in the last two years, I was taking their business portrait, and it was a man, and he said, "Oh, we're. "Do you do weddings? "We're about to. "I just proposed to my fiance, "and we're getting married next year." So I sent him all my info, and I also knew where he worked because I just took his business portrait. So I knew there was some availability in the income, so I sent him all my info, and they booked. So it was like, just a bonus on top of that. I would have never met this guy otherwise. I don't have a wedding website. He just happened to ask, so I shot him an email after our business portrait session, and what do you know? I got a client for another reason. And that's happened multiple times with other types of clients, so it's a great way to network because if you're in the room taking pictures of, you know, one person or 91 people in a couple days, you're gonna see a lot of faces, and there's always one person in there who might need photos or know somebody who does. So I always make sure that I bring my business cards and all that type of thing, and normal stuff you do to be able to network because you just never know where other jobs may pop up.
Ratings and Reviews
TRacy Sullivan
Great class! Lot's of usable information. Loved Dan but wholly cow he talks fast. lol I had to rewind him a couple of times. Thanks Dan - You rock!
user ccf5d7
Loved it! What a great course. I certainly learned form this one and found it to be excellent. I am a full time photographer specialising in Real Estate Photography but I am asked every year to shoot head shots (hence buying this course). I found the information to be really good and was a bit surprised as I did not expect to learn as much as I did! I mainly learned small things here and there but they are invaluable for me!
user-d1a938
I really enjoyed this class! Lot’s of good information! Thank you so much! 😊