OK partner here's my story of how I became a photographer. The year was 1984 in New London  Connecticut. What happened was one day my girlfriend's brother asked me to lend him $500 of my hard earned money. I did not really want to loan the money because I didn't trust him I asked him if he had anything to put up for collateral.  He walked back to his car popped the trunk opened and pulled out a large camera bag and said "I pawn my cameras to you and pay you back next Friday on payday."  Well he never did pay me back. About a year later he skipped town and disappeared and shortly after that I broke up with his sister. Now at that time I hardly knew anything about photography and had hardly even looked at the contents of the camera bag he left me. But it turned out those cameras were top-of-the-line Nikon F-3’s along with an assortment of lenses and a motor drive to advance the film.  So I decided I was either grown too sell the cameras or learn how to use them. I took one of them to the local pawn shop and sold for it $700 but I kept the other one and bought a photography magazine to read up on the subject. I came across to advertisements in that magazine that really got my attention to one was for home correspondence course from the New York school of photography and the other was a  classified ad that simply said “Free Report  how to earn $300 a week with your 35mm camera and one light”.

 

So I responded to both ads. I am rolled in the home correspondence course which top me the technical skills of operating my camera it was held earn $300 a week with your 35mm camera and one light book that really got me thinking they I could make photography my full-time career. That little book was one of the best investments I ever made because it was written by an old-time photographer who knew exactly how to get all the business he could handle.

 

So I started thinking about going into business for myself but I did not have the confidence at the time because I did not consider myself to be a good photographer and what happened was a friend dropped right after the holidays and she asked me what I had been up to.

 

So I pulled out my camera and my home study correspondence materials and started showing her some of the pictures I had taken and she said ‘hey I just came from the unemployment office and they have some big photography company their to lay they have assigned in the lobby that says it photographers want no experience necessary if you really want to learn photography why don't you go and apply to the position?” and that's exactly what I did.

 

Well that was my lucky day because the interviewer like me and higher me on the spot the company was Jones and Pressnell studio's out the Charlotte North Caroline. They had the photography contract for all of the Kmart stores east of the Mississippi. So a week later they told me to drive to the Kmart store in Augusta Maine to start my training as a professional baby photographer.

 

After just a week of on-the-job training they set me up with a photography rig and props and off I went travelling up and down the East Coast from Kmart the Kmart store. The pay was only $150 a week plus .23/cents per mile and $35 a day per diem for hotel expenses.  But the company didn't care where you stayed as long as you had a receipt to show that you paid for accommodations.  So like most of my fellow travelling Jones and Pressnell photographer's I'd bought a tent in sleeping bag and  paid an average of four dollars a night to pitch my tent in a State campground.

 

Well the company still gave me $35 a day per diem but because it only costs me five dollars a day to pitch a tent in the campground versus $30-$50 a day to stay in the motel I effectively doubled my income. I soon found out that the life of the travelling photographer was not nearly as glamorous as I have thought it would be.


Luckily for me all the Kmart stores gave me rave reviews and I was soon given a promotion and a pay raise to train new employee's. That added another $150 per week to my income. Now $450 per week in 1986 was pretty money but I wasn't satisfied because in 1979 I was earning over $12 per hour doing construction work. I worked at construction jobs during the spring, summer and fall and would collect unemployment benefits during the winter months and that was $300 a week for doing nothing.

 

Here I was seven years later travelling on all over the countryside living out of  a tent and working 60 to 80 hours a week to make less than I did in 79.  Camping in a tent  in November, December, January and February was not much fun so after a few years of this I had enough and is started to look for a better job.

 

After a brief period of selling Time Shares in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania I landed a job shooting church directories for “Portrait Inc.” located in Bethlehem Pennsylvania. This was another travelling photography job but it was much better than working for Jones and Pressnell who had by that time had gone out of business due to poor management decisions.

 

Portrait Inc. insisted that you always dress in a suit and tie, drive a late-model car and they would book and pay for your hotel accommodations in advance and did not pay a per diem. However unlike Jones and Pressnell studio's in addition to taken the pictures you would also return two weeks later to each church you photographed in too sell the portraits you had taken. And you were paid a percentage of whatever you sold. At that time the national sells average for family portraits was about $50 which I  but because I was shooting between 100 to 150 family groups per week I was earning up to $750 per week. Not bad pay for 1988 but again it wasn’t much fun constantly travelling from town to town shooting high volume sessions. You had 9 and 1/2 minutes to do each family. No wonder that the national sales average was only $50. It is very difficult to do a family justice on their photographs when you can only give them 9 and 1/2 minutes of your time.

 

Day after day I  became  more and more weary and tired of the constant travelling, driving your own car from location to location and the stress of trying to photographed 30 - 50 families per day. As soon as she got on photographed in at one location I would have to jump in my car and usually drive several hundred miles back to my home in Pennsylvania because the portraits I had shot two weeks prior would be sitting on my front porch dropped off there by UPS.

 

I would usually arrive home between 2 and 3 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Most every Saturday was spent taking care of household chores, car maintenance and paperwork.

 

And on Sunday afternoon it would be time to take the portraits you had shot two weeks prior back to the church to sell them. I would set up a table in each corner of a room and seat a family at each table. Then I’d locate their portraits, pull them out of the box and spread them out on the table in front of them and go from table to table with a price chart writing up the orders.

These were pre-printed packages so whatever the customer bought they carried home that day.  Each package had to be 100% accounted for. The lab would count how many portraits were in each box they sent you. When you opened the box you would have to count, organize and verify what they had sent. You would typically spend three-days shooting followed by a day off and another three days selling each week. But much of your days off would be devoted to doing your paperwork, totaling up all the checks, cash and credit card orders you took and then Fed-Xing the paperwork, money and unsold portraits back to “ Portrait Inc.” headquarters. Then the next day you’re back on the road again. Such is the life of the typical traveling portrait photographer.

To make matters worse the company would quite often send me a brand-new photographer to train and only paid you a token fee for the additional responsibility. A newbie would slow you down so you were always running behind schedule and families will find themselves having to wait several hours for their 9 & 1/2 which would turn into 20 to 30 minutes because it took time to show the ropes and tricks of the trade to your new trainee.

 

 By the spring of 1989 I was again burnt  out as a traveling photographer.  I wasn't happy with the time the job required nor the income I was earning so I started to look for other ways I could increase my income. Then someone asked me if I had ever seen a 3-D photo taken with a Nishika or Nimslo 35mm 3-D camera. The samples he show me just blew me away. The Nishika Corporation had bought out Nimslo and hired a marketing company to promote it’s 3-D camera and prints through a multilevel sales scheme.

 I signed up as a distributor and in my spare time (what little I had) and began to show and sell the camera. One day I took my 3-D camera and some sample pictures I had taken with it and walked in to a pet store to show them to the manager.

 The manager thought they were great. He got not one but two cameras from me. A few weeks later he called me and asked if I would be interested in taking holiday pet portraits with “Santa Paws”.

 The mall management where he was located had given him permission to rope often an area inside the mall adjacent to the entranceway of his “Mr. Pet Man” pet store. Customer's would bring their pet dogs to the back entrance of the pet store, and wait their turn to have their pets portrait taken sitting in Santa Paws lap.

 

Santa Paws was a store employee dress in a red Santa suit with fake furry paw gloves and a big furry St. Bernard's head with a Santa hat. The local newspapers along with radio and television stations thought the idea was quite clever and novel and gave us a ton of free publicity.

  left “Portraits Inc.” and became a self-employed Santa Paws photographer. I used an old instant Polaroid Land camera along with a new “Polaroid Photo Magic” camera to do the job. And I set up a table showcasing all the novelty photo items I had available. Mostly greeting cards, photo coffee mugs, photo key chains, photo buttons and photo Christmas tree ornaments. I’d snap the picture and hand it off to an assistant who would cut to size and snap into one of novelty products. On average each pet owner purchased $30 worth of items and we had more customers then we knew what to do with.

 

They made a ton of money that holiday season and after Christmas took a two-month holiday before the deciding what to do next. When spring came around I took my Polaroid photo Magic camera and became a self-employed roving photographer taking and selling instant photo novelties on the spot. But I treated it more like a hobby than a real business. I would work only when I wanted to and not set anything up in advance.

When spring came I decided to go to work for a large photography company called “National Studio's”. I wanted to photographed for them but they weren't looking for photographers at the time. They were only interested in someone who could pre-sell and book photo sessions for their in store photographers. It seemed good photographers were a dime a dozen but a pre-seller who could keep their photographers booked with photo sessions was golden!  They had a contract with Ames Department stores and again I found myself traveling up and down the East Coast going store to store this time pre-selling and booking in store photography session's all on straight commission.

 

Driving hundreds of miles each week, rushing from store to store, living out of tents and sleazy motel rooms once again and being force to train new employee's how to pre-sell for little extra compensation. After a year of this I decided I wanted go back to photographing.

 

Then a few months later I met the owners of a small photography company called “Capture Memories’. It was owned by “Dennis and Vicki” a husband-and-wife team who had no prior experience with shooting portraits. But Vicki had been employed by a large national photo studio from Trinity North Carolina as a sales rep and she and Dennis were looking for an experienced portrait photographer to show them the ropes. We quickly reached an agreement and I moved to their location in Baltimore, Maryland.  

 

I taught Vickie how to photograph and she and Dennis taught me everything they knew about sales and marketing. Even though it was a very valuable learning experience it turned into just another traveling portrait photography job. But this time I had to book the jobs, photograph them, return with the finished prints and sell them and I was paid by commission only.

 

Again I found myself spending most of my time traveling from town to town living and shooting in motel rooms. But then we discovered how to get all the school and fire Department portrait fundraisers we wanted so my pay went up but so did the stress level. We were generating so much business that I hardly ever had any time off and to keep up with the heavy schedule I had to cut back on my sleep to 4 to 5 hours a night. The stress of dealing with an angry public (due to my falling behind on our tight schedule) who had to wait around for hours past their original appointment times and all the late night marathon interstate drives while I could barely keep my eyes opened began to wear me out.


Driving the busy interstates was a nightmare at night especially during the winter months and in foggy weather. And the tractor trailer drivers were very aggressive and they would blow by my van so fast that they rock it sideways in their wake.

 But during those all night drives to get to my next shoot or sales pass on time I started to envy thoseruck drivers. All they had to do was sit high up in their motel on wheels riding their high horse carriages, shooting the breeze over the CB with all their road warrior buddies or just enjoy listening to the radio while enjoying the drive and not having to worried about dealing with an angry mob of impatient families when their run was done. After all, they were required by law to only drive no more than 10 hours a day and had to log in 8 hours of sleep each day. Sounded like a nice peaceful stress free way to earn a living to me .

 
So I parted ways with Captured Memories and went to truck driving school and became a road warrior because I thought it would be a stress free glamorous life style. Boy was I ever mistaking.

 

My driving detour took me away from photography for 7 years. The pay was great but living over the road, sleeping in your truck, only getting to shower twice a week and constantly being pushed to falsify your log book and drive hundreds of extra miles each day was an accident looking for a place to happen. Too many close calls and as much stress as ever while being pushed to drive well beyond your physical capability to stay mentally alert got me to reconsider what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

 

Being I was always living over the road I had no time for any social life. Again I started to dream of a better life. I thought, wouldn’t it be great to never have to deal with the ice, snow, fog and stress of over the road living. Just find a wife, move to a remote exotic location like Australia or New Zealand and then I would finally be able to enjoy a stress free life. But how was I ever going to be able to escape from my being a prisoner of the highway? I had to come up with a game plan. I quit driving over the road and found a job driving truck locally. The pay was less but at least I had my nights and weekends off and was able to move into a real house.

 

It was at this time that I discovered a great little money maker. One of the constant problems of being a delivery driver is the lack of clearly visible address numbers especially at night. What would happen if someone in one of these places needed an ambulance fast? They could die while the driver was trying to locate the right address. So in my spare time I started painting reflective numbers on curbs. I got started by simply posting sales flyers on the front doors of houses and soon my part time income had matched my full time income. But running a business and keeping my day time again left little time for anything else. And you couldn’t paint curb addresses when the ground was covered with snow. So I kept my driving job and in the fall of 99 I bought my first computer and while surfing the internet I stumbled across www.PetStarUSA.com a national “Pet Photography Business” that claimed their sales average on pet portraits was almost $200 per session.

 Well remembering how well my Polaroid Photo Magic Pet Pictures had gone over 10 years prior it  hit me like a ton of bricks. Here I was working for all these national studios for peanuts when I could have instantly tapped into a profitable goldmine anytime I wanted. But I had been conditioned to work for others instead of trying to do it all myself. In fact – I had just been to scared and lazy to strike out all on my own. That’s why up to then I had dabbled with self employment but had almost always kept my day job for the security it offered.

 But the money that these pet photographers were earning was simply amazing. I picked up the phone and called “Doc” who was the owner at that time and told him my background and how I was amazed at the income he claimed he and others were earning.

 I had paid Doc $5,000 to join the PetStar team in the spring of 2000 plus invested another $5,000 in equipment and started setting up my own shoots. The $5,000 I paid to “Doc” got me a book and some sample pictures but not much more except for the first shoot I did as an official PetStarUSA Photographer. It was for a pet groomer that “Doc” had booked. He asked me to shoot it and told me that “Roger” who had paid him $15,000 for the privilege of becoming a regional manager would help me out. He told me that Rodger also owned a “Glamour Shots” franchise.

 

Well it turned out that Rodger did indeed buy himself a position with “Glamour Shots” like he had with PetStar. But Rodger was not a photographer. He was a business man who hired others to do all the work while he just stood in the background and directed things. So that first shoot was just crazy because I didn’t have the help I thought I was going to receive from Rodger. Rodger earned a 10% commission on all my sales because of his position. I got paid 45% of my net sales for doing the job. That resulted in just over $1500 for a one day shoot!

 

Boy was I ever excited!!!

 

$1500 for one day of photographing pets! On my very next shoot shot over two days I earned over $5,000! Rodger also showed up at that shoot and at the end of it he told me he wanted to hire me as his glamour photographer. I told him that I never did glamour before and he said… ‘Steve, you’re the best photographer I have ever seen”. Now Rodger didn’t say that I take the best pictures because the truth is that good picture takers are a dime a dozen and often a far less talented picture taker will outsell more artistically creative photographers. When it comes to being a successful photographer who can earn a fortune his or her artistic skills don’t mean very much. Skills like marketing and developing rapport with clients is what really make the difference. It still amazes me what  people will buy. Often photos that I’m reluctant to admit I took will be  the customers favourite.

 

Art is truly in the eye of the beholder and when it comes to taking cute portraits of peoples loved ones whether family or pets it’s easy as eating pie if you just follow a few simple rules. And these rules can be learned by simply reading about them and then practice, practice and more practice.

 
Now I suddenly found myself earning at least $1,000 per shoot day and often more. Much more. Soon I had enough confidence to consider leaving my day job of driving trucks. But it led to my bankruptcy. You see, “Doc” had secured a contract with the national pet store chain “Pet co” to do their holiday pet portraits that year. And based on their sales records from the past few years “Doc” estimated that each PetStar photographer should average about $32,000 in commissions over a six week period.

 

So I quit my day job but that was a mistake because the "PetCo" deal did not work out. I’ll spare you all of the details of why. Or go to http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/ripoff4483.htm  to read more.

 

Now I was broke with no job. I went back to see my old boss to get the truck driving job I had back and he said “Steve, the owners just sold the company and we are all losing our jobs. So much for job security but at least we are all getting severance pay. You know if you had stuck with us for just another month you would be getting a check for $25,000.00

 

Instead I ended up going bankrupt. And that was one of the best things that ever happened to me because it forced me to start using what I had learned over the years. And today Susha and I live along Australia’s “Great Barrier Reef” and we routinely make $500 per hour working from home!