We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Haley Kuller. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Haley below.
Haley, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?
Success has become a very fluid term for me. As you progress further into your field, you start to realize that your success can be measured in a lot of different ways.
In order to be successful, you have to cherish and recognize the small victories that lead up to the larger ones. It takes an immense amount of patience and optimism to recognize those small victories in the whirlwind of chaos that a start-up can be, but without those two traits, you’re guaranteed to get burnt out fairly quick. I’ve helped build three start-ups from the ground-up and something that has remained true with each of those is that if you separate and celebrate each positive event from the overall picture (despite how stressful or exhausting the overall picture might be), you’re going to maintain a positive point of view about your journey and that joy and excitement you feel is going to propel you to reach even more of those small victories eventually leading to your overall success in your endeavor.
I attribute my success with my photography business, Photos By Haley Nicole, to this mindset. It’s taken years to get to the point where I don’t get so bogged down by the negative events in business that I lose sight of the wins, but I’ve finally gotten to the point where I recognize how much the little things in business mean. I used to believe that you were only successful if you made XYZ money or got a HUGE contract that took months to obtain, but being successful is so much more AND less than that. Being successful is getting a five star Google review or having someone share your business with a friend. It’s making a small improvement is your skill or trade or upgrading your website. Being successful is also taking care of yourself and giving yourself the space and time you need to recuperate and keep working towards your goals. It’s improving your work and life in small percentages that over time will help you reach 100%. One of my favorite things to share with people wanting to reach their goals is the “Principle of Marginal Gains” Essentially this principle means that by getting better by just 1% consistently, those small gains will add up to remarkable improvement. This rule applies not just in business, but health, relationships, and life in general.
It’s cliché, but it’s the truth – success doesn’t happen overnight. If you start a venture expecting to have it all figured out and see HUGE success from the very beginning, you’re going to get discouraged pretty quickly. I think the biggest contributor to overall success is knowing that every stepping stone you reach while heading towards your overall goal are each successful themselves.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
When I was younger, I would spend hours meticulously putting together photo albums and scrapbooks for myself and everyone in my life to enjoy looking through. I’ve taken pictures of just about everything around me for as long as I can remember – my phone actively has 45,504 photos and 5,540 videos on it. Preserving memories has always been important to me throughout my entire life, so much so that one of my earliest gifts from my grandparents was a first-gen digital camera.
For a long time, I’ve done commercial photography for my fiancé and I’s marketing company, but as we began to research wedding photography and get our own engagement photos done, something clicked for me.
I’m a lifelong artist so seeing things creatively has always come natural to me. I always knew I wanted to bring that creative outlook into a career that truly makes an impact. I absolutely love documentary style photos and themed shoots, especially when they’re paired with cinematic music that emanates the same feeling. Really just anything that highlights the beautiful emotions and experiences of being human. My goal is to create that same type of warm, indescribable feeling and connection for others when they look at their pictures. I love creating something that transports people back to some of their best days, gives them confidence, makes them FEEL, and the biggest thing – something that will last for generations to come.
I realized that my entire life I’ve captured so many moments for myself and other people in a casual setting, yet I never thought to carry that into a career. Crazy. So I made the move and here I am today.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
I attribute my reputation to not only my creativity and quality of my images but also the kindness and openness that I try to show to each and every client of mine.
I have had a lot of my clients that book with me say that they wanted me to do their photos due to the way that I present myself. I try my best to humanize myself in business because so many people feel like they have to mask who they are in order to be successful and for me, that’s just simply not the case. I have had people even in my previous sales and marketing roles that really just enjoyed speaking with me because our conversations were so much more warm and enjoyable that most in the corporate world. I feel like if you have to mask your personality for multiple hours a day, you truly start to lose who you are. I was never able to flip that switch, so I went into a career where I didn’t have to. Now people appreciate the anecdotes I share about myself and enjoy my personality and creativity.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?
The biggest roadblock for professional photography is honestly just the fact that most people only have a surface level understanding of photography – which is fine! I wouldn’t expect someone not in the marketing field to understand SEO or someone not in the welding field to understand brazing so of course I wouldn’t expect someone not in the photography field to understand all of the elements that go into it. Most people would assume that photographers just “point, shoot, and send” but that’s simply not the case. So much goes into professional photography that isn’t seen by the client from the beginning of the booking process to final gallery delivery.
Before the booking process even begins, there’s marketing, capital investments, software, accounting, etc. as there is with any business. Once the client books, there’s location scouting and confirmation of the session details. If it’s a wedding, there’s the consultation call, wedding questionnaire/photo checklist, day-of timeline management, last minute adjustments, etc. For any outdoor photography, there’s also weather monitoring. During the session or event, there’s travel time and session styling/posing. After you have the tangible images, there’s culling and editing which can take hours and in some cases, days, depending on the session or event. Editing alone involves so many stages, especially if aspects of your session need to be photoshopped. Photoshopped elements can take much longer than everyday editing (no, A.I. doesn’t always help).
And of course, there’s the most important aspect of them all – which is the time and effort it takes to learn camera and flash operation and how to create meaningful, high quality imagery with them. This also includes the composition, angling, posing, framing, depth, attention to detail, and so much more that a photographer consistently needs to think about during each session.
As with any trade, photography has some serious depth and takes years, sometimes more than a decade to perfect – and at the end of the day, there’s always room for improvement. Creatives are their own biggest critic so the work is never truly done!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.photosbyhaleynicole.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/photosbyhaleynicole/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/photosbyhaleynicole/
- Other: TikTok:
@photosbyhaleynicole Pinterest:
https://www.pinterest.com/photosbyhaleynicole/?invite_code=680835ad0a354ce6979ed97ec710f8bb&sender=1093811965656264025
Image Credits
Photos By Haley Nicole