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

Hi Debra, thanks for joining us today. Do you manage your own social media?

I handle all of my Social media myself. I have 3 Instagram accounts; one for my portraiture work, one for my Dog and one just for fun. It’s definitely time consuming but I prefer to do it myself. I am happy that my Facebook pages are linked to my Instagram and that is super helpful for my business.

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

I am a portrait & lifestyle photographer based out of Minneapolis, MN. I photograph High School Seniors, Families, Pets & products. I really started to get more serious about Photography while I was living abroad in Dubai, UAE before moving to MN. I was photographing a ton of portraits and travel for the 4 years I lived there and once I returned to the US, I kept up with my portraiture work. When we got our dog, I started to really play around with Fine art dog portraits. I primarily use natural light, with window light specifically to allow me to shoot with very soft light and always at a very shallow depth of field. I particularly love a portrait with a ton of bokeh and I think you will see that with a lot of my outdoor shots. During the pandemic I made the choice to keep photographing what I could and decided to participate in the “The Front Steps Project”. This project got me featured in the Wall Street Journal for my “poochtraits”. While working on this project I realized almost all of my families I was photographing had pets and were including them in their front step photos, so I decided to take individual photos of the dogs as the last image. I just thought that would be a nice memory as well. So I was pretty proud of this. I also decided to document some of what was happening here in Minneapolis during the riots and one of my photos was published in the book “The Year Time Stopped”. Which was published by Harper Collins and Scopio Images. This is something I am very proud of as well! I will continue to push my creativity and am always searching for new projects to work on in addition to my portraiture work.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

The best source of new clients for me have been referrals!! I totally work off of referrals and do not pay for marketing. I believe in exceptional customer service and keeping the communication open with my clients.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

I think this also relates to really good customer service and also putting my clients at ease while I’m photographing them. My goal is to get authentic moments in every shoot I have no matter how long it takes. I try and never put a time limit on my shoots, because how can you??!! I want to get images that you will look at and smile back at and that can take time.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.dbdigitalphoto.com
• Instagram: @indy_puppy / @debrabernard