We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Cory Tapia. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Cory below.
Cory , appreciate you joining us today. Almost all entrepreneurs have had to decide whether to start now or later? There are always pros and cons for waiting and so we’d love to hear what you think about your decision in retrospect. If you could go back in time, would you have started your business sooner, later or at the exact time you started?
I shot my first wedding in 2006. At the time I did not realize that it was my first of many–I had never shot a wedding before or even attended one, had no idea how to charge for my services, no idea even how to really capture them. I just jumped in with both feet. My area of expertise was more in the animation/production side of things, so I still really didn’t invest my time in weddings until a bit later. I received a job offer through SPEED Channel in Charlotte, NC (Now FS1) and moved down to North Carolina in the winter of 2007, where I worked for about 4 years while also working different gigs on the side that were more motion graphics based.
I had another opportunity to shoot a wedding in early 2009, when a friend of mine was getting married and knew that I had been looking to possibly start capturing weddings. I offered my cinematography skills to them for free, and that wedding was really the first time I considered the possibility of making a career out of capturing weddings. It was fun, I was able to get out and meet new people, and I wasn’t stuck behind a desk all the time.
I do sometimes wish that I had found my path much sooner–how much more ahead of the curve I would be if I went straight from high school or college into wedding photography/videography. Things change so rapidly in this field that we are constantly trying to keep up and stay on top of trends, gear, and client expectations, that I think that I really would have benefited from starting earlier to get the experience I needed. My wedding business really started taking off around 2012, when I was able to leave my job as a motion graphics artist and work full-time as a wedding photographer. If I had started sooner, at least in my thought process, I would still have had to burn the candle at both ends in order to be able to purchase the gear I needed to start, but I’d be 5-10 MORE years deep into the wedding industry than I am now (15+ years running).
It takes most photographers awhile to figure out their style, their niche, and their approach. It took me until about 2016 to really feel comfortable in my own skin as a photographer, and these days I am very confident in not just my own ability and what I have to offer couples, but I am also running a team of 8 photographers/videographers, and have been able to network with wonderful vendors all around the east coast that refer us all the time.
Running a business in the wedding industry is very rewarding, challenging, sometimes very stress inducing, and expensive, and I am always working towards learning new techniques, checking out the newest gear, and helping out newer photographers and videographers who may just be starting out. I had mentors when I was first starting out that really helped me, and I have also mentored other artists as well who Ive got to watch benefit from learning under me grow into running their own successful businesses as well. I think if I would have gotten started earlier, I would only be in that much better of a place professionally, creatively, and financially.
Cory , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I have always been interested in art, animation, videography, and drawing.
My first serious career goal was actually to become a comic book artist/illustrator when I graduated high school. The more I got into hand-drawn illustration, I realized how much time and focus it takes, sitting still, perfecting the illustrations–and I found out that I do not have that type of attention span. While I still love drawing and have a ton of respect for people that excel in that craft, I can’t sit still and draw for that long.
The longer I was in VCU’s program, I realized that I wanted to shift gears and get into animation. Specifically, the movie Gladiator actually inspired me to want to become a visual FX artist/animator, so I started working towards that career path. I was able to freelance with National Geographic Channel as a motion graphics animator as an intern in Washington, D.C, for a bit while I was still in college, and then out of college I had a job with a local production studio where I learned a LOT about videography, motion graphics, and production. It’s about that time, around 2003-2004 that I started really getting serious about not just working in motion graphics, but also taking on small commercial gigs on the side. I started working with small startups, university organizations, festivals….really anything I could take at that point to get my name out there.
While I started in videography, it wasn’t long until clients were asking me for both services. I started dabbling in photography around 2009, and once I started to get into it, I fell in love with it. Wedding photography offers many different types of photography–portraits, live event photography, details and macro photography, night/low light photography, and it really challenges me to step outside of my comfort zone and experiment, where as having a traditional 9-5 job wouldn’t afford these types of creative opportunities.
We have been in business since 2006, but ‘officially’ since 2012. We offer wedding/engagement/family photography and videography, livestreaming, drone coverage, wedding films and several other smaller services.
We offer a modern, bold and authentic approach—turning fleeting moments into forever memories.
We are passionate and absolutely love what we do—the love for our work shows in the quality attention to detail and tedious execution. This is why our clients rave about how amazing our service and experience has been for them. We treat clients as people, not numbers, and give them the time and attention that they deserve. We show every client how important they are to us—and that starts with clients trusting that we have their best interests in mind, leaning into our experience to back up that authenticity with great advice.
We are punctual, communicative and provide excellent, professional service every single time. Our clients products will be delivered in a reasonable time frame and with the consistently high quality. Their memories are weaved together in a way that is both captivating and timeless.
We cherish their memories as if they were our own.
Have you ever had to pivot?
This may be a popular pick for this question, but a time we had to pivot hard was during Covid. Not only that, but we also were planning to move in 2020, and my wife found out that we had a baby on the way that March. It was kind of an insane time to begin with, but adding the move and pregnancy to the mix was just bonkers.
2020 we had 43 weddings booked, and were coming out of our best wedding season that we’d ever had. Everything was going really well for Afterglow and I was so excited about where we were headed in 2020. I had started getting business coaching in January of that time in order to learn more about being a more effective leader, and we were just all around in great spirits heading into the new wedding season.
The entire country shut down the week before my first wedding of the season. I was managing 43 different clients, their contracts, postponements, how I needed to approach cancellations (we’d never had a cancellation before this) how to work out postponements because we had already started booking up 2021 as well. Most of my weddings postponed to 2021 or 2022, but it severely impacted my booking season for 2021, because now all the weddings that I had currently already had on the books for 2020 needed to take most of the available dates for 2021.
I was SO lucky at the time to work with a business called ActionCoach (Now Serendipity Coaching). When Covid hit, they stopped charging us for business coaching, and literally had weekly meetings with me and my photographers on how to move forward in business, and how to approach different situations. I dont know that I would have been anywhere near as successful after Covid if it wasn’t for their guidance and I want to make sure they get credit for helping my business out so much at that time. It was so appreciated.
Luckily, when all of the weddings were being pushed back, I had a lot of contacts from my previous work in the production industry that I reached out to and was able to still keep working and going on shoots, and I dusted off my motion graphics skills to reach out to previous clients asking if they needed anything branding-related to be refreshed. I was still able to shoot headshots, we captured a lot of content for essential businesses who needed to quickly pivot to Covid-minded branding, and so I am very grateful that I was still able to get my bills paid in that time frame and didn’t really have to cut back too much.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
The biggest lesson I have had to unlearn was figuring out how to balance my time.
When I started my business, my time was mostly spent on my business and doing everything I could, meaning spending all my time and resources, to make it successful. It’s absolutely true that most wedding photographers do not start seeing a return on investment for at the VERY least, 5 years in the industry. It takes time, especially time away from friends and family, missing family functions on the weekends, energy (when you work a full time job, working on a business on the time off is extremely exhausting) and finances (I had to borrow or rent gear when I first started) because the amount of high-end equipment you need for wedding photography costs thousands of dollars. Everything I had was going towards my business, and I lost a lot of time with family, and my relationships across the board suffered because of it.
Several of the biggest wake-up calls for me actually came fairly recently–when my son was born, I was forced to take time away from my business because being a good Dad trumps everything else in my life, and it always will. My wife took 3 months of maternity leave from her nursing job, and I took that alongside her. Ever since that time, I have had to re-structure my schedule and business model to accommodate having a child. To this day I still “work” 3 days a week, and 2 days I have my son and I spend all day with him. He’s 4 now, so things have gotten a little easier on that front, and I am expecting that when he starts elementary school that I will be able to return to working 5 days a week, but I have unapologetically figured out that family is everything. My Dad passed away from cancer in 2023 at the young age of 62, and that just reinforced how much time that we have here with our loved ones, and we never know when our time is up. I want my son to remember having fun playing and wrestling with Daddy, and that I was ALWAYS there for him when he needed anything. I also always make sure he knows that he and my wife come first, always, and the business comes second.
It’s such a flip from where I was before I had a son, where my life WAS my business-like my business was me, and I was my business. That mindset was not good for my mental health, and in the last several years since my son was born I am learning qualities about myself as a parent that I never knew existed. I love having a business, and I love being a business owner, I love my couples, I love the career I have chosen–but I would give all of it up in a heartbeat for my family.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.afterglowrva.com
- Instagram: @afterglowcreative
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/afterglowcreative/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@afterglowcreativerva
- Other: https://vimeo.com/afterglowrva
Image Credits
Headshot: Tina Take My Photo.
Other Images: Afterglow Creative