How to Start an On-Location Photography Business

Building an on-location photography business takes patience; but if you are a passionate photographer, it is worth your while. Exposure to potential clients is key, but it takes hard work and persistence. You might need to work cheaply or free of charge in the beginning of your endeavor. Like most start-up, small businesses, you might lose money before you profit. But if you follow the steps below and photography is your passion, it is likely that you will succeed. Until such time, enjoy the simple reward of creating artwork.

Things You'll Need

• Be sure to have the basic essentials to any professional photographer. Other than a camera, you should have a detachable flash as opposed to a simple pop-up flash for indoor and outdoor use. Indoors, a pop-up flash causes red eye, and outdoors, it does not emit enough light for your purposes. Indoors, a detachable flash can be used in several ways to light an area. Outdoors, it acts as a fill light, or a light that rids your subject of shadows.
• You should also have a light diffuser that an assistant can use to shield the sun from the subject's eyes, or a reflective light disc that will bounce the bothersome light away from your subject's eyes. If you are taking a picture of a child, the parent is usually willing to hold the diffuser or the light disc if you do not have an assistant.

Instructions

1. Identify yourself with a logo. Ask a graphic designer to create this and send it to you as a PDF file so that any printer will be able to read it.

2. 

   Create business cards with your logo on them. To most, a business card validates your professional role as an on-location photographer.

3. Take complimentary family portraits of friends' families or of the families' children. Your friends will hang your photography on their walls, and it will become advertising for you to anyone else who visits your friends.

4. 

   Photograph an event free of charge for a friend, whether it is a wedding or a family reunion. This is a great opportunity for exposure. Potential clients inevitably emerge from crowds at such events and will ask you for your business card.

5. Build a Web site featuring your best photographs. People who have not seen your work would like to visualize it before they hire you.

6. 

   Create a rate sheet that describes packages if you plan to offer them, and list the cost of individual photographs such as 4- x 6-inch prints, 5- x 7-inch prints, etc. Do not forget to include your sitting fee on your rate sheet.

Tips & Warnings

• Remember that photography is a subjective art, so you might need to be flexible with your style. Maintain a happy demeanor so that the photography shoot is a pleasant experience for the client, even if the shoot involves a child who is misbehaving. Constantly press your shutter button, taking candids in between poses. Candid photography often sells before posed posed photography. If you are working with children, be playful.

• If you are photographing an event, be unintrusive. Guests do not like a photographer who is always in the spot light. If taking pictures indoors, do not focus your lens toward a window. You will create what photographers call a hot spot.