Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Andy Farra. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Andy, appreciate you joining us today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea?

My wife and I started our company about seven years ago. I was working in commercial real estate and as our demand started to pick up, I had to make a decision and transitioned into the wedding industry full time.

While photographing weddings and shooting alongside my wife Brittney I started to dabble into video and became much more intrigued by the editing process and creativity of video. I remember so vividly working in my good friends garage in Pacific Beach who was proficient in Adobe Premiere, learning all I could about editing software, and transitions. I would take video clips at weddings I was photographing and get back later that night and try to learn about frame rates and different settings while piecing together the edit.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers?

definitely, as mentioned, we started our business roughly seven years ago now which still feels like just seven months ago. Brittney and I began our passion for photography while traveling and exploring on road trips in our teenage years and into our early twenties, just sharing our photos on social media where friends would see them. From sharing photos along our trips, we would have friends reach out that they were engaged and looking for engagement photos, to which our response would be we don’t really do that, one thing lead to another and we found ourselves being referred by other friends and has lead to where we are now.

We now offer both photo & video capturing engagement sessions and weddings. We are based in North County San Diego and find ourselves now shooting in some of the best wedding venues throughout Souther California.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

As previously mentioned I was working in the commercial real estate industry fresh out of college where it is all or nothing. Newly married, and not making much money at all I used my hobby (photography) to start making additional income while working full time. I would write countless blogs to get traction to our website with backlinks to local small and large company sites to try and rank in Google as high as possible. Pinterest was a great space when first starting out as I would pin our images and saw a lot of our early success come from this platform as some of our photos went viral which lead to organic leads.

Each year we have set goals for ourselves and our first official year when we hit 25 weddings I remember how excited we both were. It is pretty cool too look back on and see the steps and progression we have took to get to where we are today. We now have a team of photographers and videographers that help create and capture the moments from each wedding.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

communication In life is everything, we always make sure we are on the same page with our couples whether that be responding to emails, returning phone calls or meeting in person to go over details. A wedding day is often one of the most important days in a persons life, and we approach each wedding day like it is the most important day in their lives. For us, we attend and work a new wedding each and every weekend, but for that couple this is their first time.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.astrayphotography.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/astrayphoto/
• Linkedin: https://www.tiktok.com/@astrayphoto?lang=en
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Astrayphoto
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcxb0T02qNFRvZg4sGIIw5g

Image Credits
@astrayphoto