We recently connected with Ignacio Orellana and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Ignacio thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with what makes profitability in your industry a challenge – what would you say is the biggest challenge?
Basically, because of the advance technologies and their use of AI and apps the general people has become to believe that everyone out there needs to be an artist or some sort of unique celebrity.
It is easy to take photos with phones and it is easy to use apps and AI to modified them but that doesn’t mean that everyone with a phone is a photographer or videographer. People today, and I mean business owners value that easy going way of things over the quality and that is how affect us as professionals.
Working sometimes for Doordash or Uber Eats as a food photographer… I have the chance to talk to restaurant owners and 9 out of 10 does not know how to keep up with instagram or TikTok, etc… because they feel that they are getting behind everyone else posting content on a daily basis and as they don’t know how to capture and create good quality content for themselves they feel obsolete in a sense.
The one ones here that are gaining anything are the ones that are coming out with these new technologies and they do that by exploiting the insecurities of the human nature. The rest spends their day trying to learn something that but the time they have learned it… it is already obsolete and they continue learning the next trend.
That is in my view the biggest challenge of this cycle of nothingness.
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?
My business is called My Experience NYC LLC and it came about after years of working as a freelance photographer. I started in 2008 and since then I have worked on weddings, secret proposals, engagement photos, food photography, concert photography, boudoir photography, studio portraits, and I can continue for a while listing things I have done but the idea is clear…. I always worked on every specific style of photography and named it something else separating them from the other so finally I came to the conclusion that i needed it to put them together and that is how I came up with the name for my company and what it does.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
I went to college and after I have gain my degree I realize that I needed to keep studying because technology keeps upgrading and my analog knowledge would only served me as concepts but not practical so I had to learn and relearn everything again to be able to apply the concepts making new mistakes and all of that.
How did you build your audience on social media?
Well, I am just another brink on the wall… meaning that no one has the right answer and every single one has to find the right fit depending on your goal. In my personal case I love social media because of the amount of information that can be absorbed at any giving time but business wise I personally done care too much for a couple of reason, but the most important ones are these, 1 the number of followers and likes does not pay my rent and 2 having thousands or millions of followers that are not from my zip code means that I am not getting hired and I have been seeing by the wrong people, assuming that are real followers. Remember that today the numbers that are shown can be bought so more often than not… those numbers aren’t real.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://iorellanaphoto.com
- Instagram: @iorellanaphoto
- Facebook: Facebook.com/iorellanaphoto
- Twitter: @iorellanaphoto
- Youtube: YouTube.com/@iorellanaa
- Other: ignacioorellana.com
Image Credits
Rodigo Fredes Ciro Guzman Lina Glasir Ignacio Orellana