We recently connected with Ashley Ludwig and have shared our conversation below.
Ashley, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
Photography, for me, started with film and it has affected pretty much everything I do and see. Going into digital work, I watched my gear go from an OG 5D with the low light capabilities of the orange LG ENV phone I had in high school to the 50-100 mp medium format digitals I’ve been researching and dabbling in and R5 / R6 I use daily and edit giant files seamlessly on my iPad.
It’s wild to see the growth in technology the last 13 years, and to know that I’m looking at advances that solved problems that consequently raised me in this industry.
When I first started I edited everything in Photoshop Camera Raw; I didn’t even touch Lightroom until around 3 years ago. I would edit whole weddings by bringing 20-40 raw files at a time into PS Camera Raw. It still blows my mind I did that up to 2020. But while I could have embraced the base preset to custom edits pipeline much faster, it definitely made me a mighty problem solver. Generally speaking, there really isn’t anything I can’t achieve in an image now if I see an issue or a goal because everything I do in Lightroom I’ve dissected and put together manually in Photoshop layer by layer before many times.
I think if I could go back I would have risked full-time wedding work when I had the freedom to fail and fail gently. Of course I could still fail today, but the pressure of what that looks like is far more detrimental. Work is learning, and more learning is more work; I think really protected my mental health from the grind heavy culture in the first half of my career and now that I have had a few years of really wanting to grind more and feeling joy from it, I have a son whose life I need to be there for, so it’s definitely a balancing act.
I feel sometimes there’s this learning barrier I have from not wanting to play into or get influenced by growing micro-industries within the wedding sphere that don’t align with who I am and what I want. I could also learn more and accomplish more if I hired out to stop wearing so many hats, but weeding out good intentions and aligned visions takes a lot of time and often a lot of money wasted trying to just find the right fit and I don’t seem to have patience for sacrificing form for function, haha. I also will often turn down an opportunity I want to benefit from educationally if it seems like it may even slightly impact my client experience. Trying to learn business strategies has been infinitely more difficult and has heavily impacted the learning of the craft, and, in my deeply flawed opinion, I don’t know that you can truly learn the former before the latter. I don’t think you even know what sliver of the business you’re looking at until you find what you love and when you do find what you love, trying to run a business around something you protect with your heart feels like an oxymoron.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Yes of course! My friends usually call me Ash; I’m a pretty nomadic-at-heart girl who made her current home in a small town in northeast Ohio just south of Cleveland. I grew up in Kentucky for about half of my life, but even as a small child I never had a place that felt like home. The closest I come to feeling like I’m home is when I’m traveling solo, which may sound weird knowing I have a husband and a 2.5 year old son, but I promise I love them dearly!
I’ve always been an independent extrovert who definitely still needs shared experiences with other humans, if that even makes sense. If I wasn’t a photographer, I would be everything else. I’m so in love with Earth and the weird stuff humans have created and what nature grants us. I think coffee is an any time of day drink and I actually love box jumps and squats a ton. I’m finally getting back into climbing after some healing work after my son and I’ve missed it so much. I am a huge science fan and wanted to be a volcanologist pretty much my whole life up until senior year when film blew my mind.
I photographed my first wedding in 2010 as a second shooter for a woman named Amanda in my parents’ town. I was 18 and she let me use her extra 5D and a couple lenses. While I was stoked to help her, I instantly wanted to do things differently, and on my own. From then on, it was just me doing this thing and it’s been such a long, and crazy cool journey to be on. The journey has since included way more people than just myself but I’m learning to love collaboration and leaning on other incredible industry professionals.
Having only ever photographed weddings and couples as my niche for the entire 13+ years now has lead to me offering full service packages with an all-inclusive style of photo pricing. There’s certainly a place and a market for bracketed hours and full a la carte servicing, and if it works, it works — but I truly believe the more time we spend discussing the ins and outs of what you’re not getting with a base price and doing mental math, the less time we can spend getting to know if we’re truly matched well to work together. My goal for information-loading my website was to encourage inquiries to come through fully aware of what they are looking at and just ready to learn about each other and what this whole process really is in the minute details.
You know your budget, your personalities and style. You also tend to know a lot more about what you want when you are given the opportunity to read details and react to them. A great match or not quite what you’re looking for, I believe the power of information should be given freely and intentionally.
My wedding coverage currently includes a second photographer, their engagement session, their galleries, full day documentation, timeline building for those that don’t have a planner, the works. Over the years these things stopped feeling like an option or a luxury and just started feeling like a necessity to really bring all the details and small moments together in a story unfolding. I’m actually currently working on adding services to that to truly play into the opportunities we have with physical print albums being included as well as video and photo working side by side with a seamless goal and product. I’m really excited for what this year is unfolding to be.
There are so many ways to do this job and I want to choose intention, compassion, heightened empathy and overtly personable communication. Being professional doesn’t mean cold and technical and using your common voice doesn’t mean you don’t know what you’re talking about. We’re human and it’ll always be appropriate to do both. I feel so proud of what I’ve built this business to be and the life it allows me to live and pour love into. I send Starbucks cards to couples, I message back within minutes and not business days to questions and inquiries, I always include little extras along the way, if I don’t know the answer I’ll tell you I’m researching it first, and I never let people feel alone in this process by automating that away. And ya know, I think that’s pretty dang cool to know.
Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?
I think one of the first people to really change the way i think about what I do as a business was Laurken Kendall, a photographer from Spokane. It wasn’t the first time I thought about wanting to create a deeply personal and also exceptionally high end and professional experience in my business for everyone involved, but it was one of the first time I saw it done and executed so well that all I wanted to do on the daily was get re-married so I could hire her. I had been looking for a cohesive brand that actually worked without caveats, or disconnected corners, or mismatched voices in the copy writing and content. It was just all her. What you needed to know, but also in a way to show who she is without masks and I really admired that.
She has a community called Mother Photographer that has been super helpful with legal resources, back end prep work for clients, one on one calls for business and creative questions, and just a ton more.
I think I learn and become impacted more by people just living their brand and who they are. I personally find most specifically photography educators I come across to be narrow market driven so that when it gets absorbed by people within other markets it tends to not translate and be more of a confusing factor when trying to determine brand and business identity. I don’t really absorb many books, videos, etc on business and management; but I find people who are aligned with themselves and create better brand and philosophical questions that have better answers and therefore better solutions for my client base when answered and served well. The more you know about yourself the more you can better communicate to others; keep asking You questions.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
I think when I became a mother I figured “Ahh yes, I’m having a kid and if I stay in the industry it’ll be hard and I’ll have earned the working mom badge” and that I would feel this preconceived notion that says having a kid and learning to parent and be a business owner is the hardest thing I’ve had to do.
I didn’t realize what I actually meant was that I thought I would be so busy I couldn’t see straight and that’s hard. I didn’t anticipate severe post partum depression sticking around for years. It changed everything I am and not in a way I recognized. I think what surprised me most was in the darkest parts of this journey, I still get in the car and a light switch flips and I’m in tunnel vision. This is it. This is mine and PPD isn’t taking this from me. I suppose it’s just called severe depression now, but more than ever, I fight for love now. It is so clear to me. Some days I feel numb or angry or morose and yet when I leave for work or I’m editing at my desk or get an inquiry, it jolts me awake and I’m me again.
One day I hope this fades and it won’t be the heavy beast that it has been and is, but until then I think it’s important to remember that even when things start really picking up and business is achieving the goals you always dreamed of, the things we struggle with can still be there. Maybe it’s not an easy topic, but it’s real and I’m choosing to stay.
Contact Info:
- Website: ashley-ludwig.com
- Instagram: @ashleyludwigphoto
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AshleyLudwigPhotography
- Twitter: @ashleyludwigphoto
Image Credits
Ashley Ludwig Photo