We recently connected with Fazil Ahmad and have shared our conversation below.

Fazil, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?

The last three years straight, I have been able to earn a full-time living from my creative work. That sounds a little bit too good to be true, it’s not like I am just going out and taking photos of whatever I want and then selling them for thousands of dollars, but I was able to find a niche in the photography world and stick to that and consistently book jobs in that area.

I started off doing all of the random baby showers, birthday parties, events, and an occasional wedding here and there.

One of the main major steps/milestones was linking up with a mentor and working with him on a consistent basis and then from that getting recommended to a marketing company and getting hired full-time. This is where I honed my craft really and learned how to apply photography to business.

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?

I work with Plastic Surgeons and lawyers to help them with their marketing content.

The biggest area that I would say, I am an expert in his lighting, that was a big deal that separated me from a lot of other photographers who are available. I knew lighting and my photos proved it. It is actually quite a hard thing to master it does take some time.

The main problem I saw from my clients is that they all consider themselves very high-end and a lot of times, the current photos they have on their website or for their marketing purposes, do not actually match their level of aesthetic. So I come in as I bring the level of photo and video up to Brand so that when their potential clients see them on the Internet, they aren’t turned away by the low quality of content.

I’m able to really make the client feel comfortable with the images that they put out of themselves so that they can really reach out with their advertising efforts and feel comfortable that the people that they reach will have a great opinion of them. This has converted into a much higher percentage of potential clients becoming actual clients for them.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

When I first started out, I was a hired gun so to speak. Anytime anybody needed a guy with a camera, I would show up. I knew that I had a lot to learn, but I was willing to do whatever.

After two years or so, once I started getting a lot better, I started resenting the way people treated me. It was like they considered me a guy with the camera, but I Didn’t really want that anymore, I wanted to be considered a photographer, an expert.

I Looked around and noticed that most of the really good photographers that I looked up to were experts in lighting.

I couldn’t really afford to buy an expensive set of lights so I just decided I was going to do everything in post production, in Photoshop. I booked, at the time, the highest end shoot that I had booked. I shot it all with natural light thinking I would just deal with it in post. I realize during the 50 to 100 hours of editing of these photos that I didn’t want to spend my life in front of a laptop and that’s when I decided to start learning lighting actually.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

Social media.

I got lucky, and I was a bit smart, when I would go to a shoot for my marketing company, I would make sure that every single person onset followed me. Not all of them stayed following me, but it helped me build a network to promote to. From there, they would repost my photos, and then their followers would see me and follow me also. This built my network up a bit and so most of the time now when I am looking for a job, I just start putting out Instagram content. This somehow always works.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://fazillah.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fazillah.photo
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@fazillah

Image Credits

All Photos by Me