We were lucky to catch up with Nathan Mitchell recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Nathan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We love asking folks what they would do differently if they were starting today – how they would speed up the process, etc. We’d love to hear how you would set everything up if you were to start from step 1 today.
Starting off as a photographer in the wedding industry is often a matter of realizing that you can make money shooting weddings, picking up a camera, and shooting a friend or co-worker’s wedding. That’s how I started. But it’s a business just like any other business, and so if I were starting over again, I’d treat it more like a business earlier on. I don’t mean sacrificing creativity, I mean setting more goals, managing money coming in, advertising more right off the bat, and networking more with other photographers. It’s taken me 12 years to realize that…I’m just a little slow on the uptake! It’s easy to get carried away just shooting for fun, but you should charge a decent rate for what you’re doing even early on. That way you’re guaranteed to be getting better jobs that are more in line with what you want to be doing. The clients that are willing to pay your rate, whatever it is, are the type that respect you enough to allow your creativity to come through in your art.
There are some things I also believe I did right when I was first starting, that I wouldn’t change. The first and most important is that I never ever stopped pushing myself to make better art. It’s easy to get complacent and say this is a great image and keep doing that same image for your whole career. That’s not consistency, that’s laziness. And what’s the fun in that? And how does that advance the photography industry as a whole? You should be constantly pushing yourself to question your work and ask how you can make better images, even if the ones you’re making now are really good. So always push yourself! The second thing I did early on is learn about flashes and strobes. Learning how to make use of on-camera flash and off-camera flash is a huge leg up on anyone that doesn’t put in the (small) amount of work required to figure it out. It’s not some scary thing. What it really does is teach you about the nature of light, and how to understand and manipulate light is what we do as photographers. To anyone coming up, learn flash. I’m still surprised by photographers I see and work with that don’t understand how powerful strobes can be in almost any situation. Learning flash also has the added benefit of teaching you when you don’t need to use flash. Those are the two things that come to mind!
Nathan, 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’m a full-time Baltimore wedding photographer. I love weddings, and marriages, and music, and parties, and people, and good food, and photography, and so it all kind of lined up for me to shoot weddings! I think it would’ve happened no matter what, but the way it started was that a friend asked me to shoot a co-worker’s wedding with him, and I did, and kept shooting weddings with other photographers as well as booking my own. Within a year and a half I had enough experience, clients, and passion to quit my boring day job in DC, and I’ve never looked back. I’m still feeling good about this decision!
I suppose what’s different about me is that I very strongly believe that every couple I work with is unique and should be treated and photographed completely differently than any other couple. I want their photos to be less representative of me, and more representative of them. Of course it’s nice when someone can recognize one of my photos, but in the long run I want every image I make to be something the client will love and cherish forever, so I have pretty high standards, and that includes images being representative of the couple. It also means that I push myself to create better work and different work even in spaces I’ve shot before. I don’t want to shoot the same location in the same way, so I will go out of my way to try new things in familiar spaces.
I’m an extrovert and I love meeting new people and being a resource for them in their wedding planning process and on the wedding day, so a lot of times I’ll find myself either helping the client come up with ideas for their wedding, or on the day of the wedding being a calming presence. The photographer is the person that the couple will see for 99% of their wedding day. That’s more than their planner, their wedding party, even their families. And so you need to be a person that people enjoy being around. A lot can go not-perfectly at a wedding, and I’m the type of person that helps defuse situations that could potentially turn volatile. I enjoy helping people have a good time in addition to providing them with perfect photos, and that’s really at the end of the day why I do what I do.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
Comparing your work to others seems unavoidable in the current meta of society. Every social media company wants us looking at anything other than our own work and sitting with our own feelings. I’ve had to take serious breaks from comparing what I do with what anyone else does. And that’s been really good for me for the past couple of years as I develop my art. I guess the backstory is that I’ve worked with a lot of great photographers and I always have felt behind, like I’m playing catch-up. I’ve always felt that my work just wasn’t good enough.
What was really happening is that I was looking at others constantly, practically living their lives, instead of understanding who I was and why I do what I do. It’s a hard thing to do when so much content is thrown at you. I was working so hard but not feeling like I was achieving my goals, and it resulted in a panic attack that put me in the hospital before I realized I needed to take a step back and really think about what I wanted to do and if this was worth it.
You see, there’s a difference between drawing inspiration from an artist or work of art and comparing your work to that artist or work. You’re allowed to love the work of a famous wedding photographer, but you should always look for ways that even you might do things differently. Question all art. There’s a lot of techniques for doing this, from “just do the opposite of what everyone tells you” to “practice, practice, practice” and “look within.” All of these are great, but the important thing is to really come to terms with who YOU are as a person, as an artist, as a human. What drives YOU? Turning off or slowing the stream of content coming at you can really help with that.
Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?
There’s a time in every business owner’s life when you realize that you suck at managing money. I found myself about $11,000 in tax debt–not because I wasn’t making enough, but because I wasn’t managing my income. This was during one of my best years artistically but I was really struggling behind the scenes. So I got married! Well that, and I got a budget. When my now wife and I started to go through my budget together and make better decisions about how money was being used, we were able to pull me out of that debt and into positive net income. Within one year of budgeting–ONE YEAR–I was completely out of every kind of debt. I wasn’t making much more, I was just not NOT thinking about money at all. Budgeting is no joke, and I have been anxiety-free about money since then. I encourage absolutely everyone on planet earth to start budgeting, today. It’s a game-changer!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://nathanmitchellphotography.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nathanmitchellphotography/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nathanmitchellphotography
Image Credits
Nathan Mitchell Photography