Changing the Portrait Website
Changing to Pet Portrait Photography
I love doing portrait photography and would love to stay doing it because to be honest, I'm pretty good at the form. However, for whatever reason I'm not doing any business with it. This makes me really sad, because I've won tons of awards for my work and have put a great deal of effort into doing portraits. I'm proud of the portraits in my portfolio and would be more than happy to continue doing them. As a matter of fact, I am planning on continuing to do them, but it will be primarily for Instagram posts (if Instagram lets me post).
For the past few years my wife, Mary, has been telling me to do pet portrait photography. I've been resisting because to me it seems like it's not a business model built for success. It's fun to do and I've loved doing pictures of my dogs and the dogs of friends, but have never considered it a thing to do for money and to stay busy making pictures. However, last weekend we were in Las Vegas with some friends celebrating our birthdays (we have the same birthday) and my friend who lives in Chicago and works as a photographer told me about a friend of his who switched over to pet photography full-time.
Mary was all over it and said I need to make the change. I said something along the lines of "change my entire portrait photography website to be pet photography?" She said yes. Mary, who studied medicine at Trinity College in Dublin and was accepted to study medicine at Cambridge and Oxford, is certifiably smarter than me.
So I'm going to give it a go and see what happens. If I do a couple pets here and there then I'll be busier with doing pictures than what's happening right now. I may even shift all of my advertising money away from weddings and over to the portrait site.
The bonus is I've already set up a studio for portraits here and switching over should be easy. There is lots of work to get done making the switch and it will take a couple months to round up pet portraits, figure out the pricing, start getting pets onto instagram, do some advertising and everything else that goes into this kind of change.
Sad to close one door after many years of working to make it happen and curious to see what's behind the next door.
