We recently connected with Zave Smith and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Zave thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Are you 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?

I became a photographer because frankly, it was one of the few things I was good at. I started noticing the poetry of visual relationships when I was just a boy. Creating photographs just came naturally to me.

When I finished college and was trying to figure out how to earn a living it came down to becoming a photo-journalist or getting into commercial work. At the time, commercial work seemed like both an easier path and a more lucrative one. I was also drawn by the creative freedom that commercial work offered. I had little interest in covering sports, crime, or fires. Weddings, not my thing.

I was both talented and hard working so I was able to find work as an assistant to two great photographers in Milwaukee, where I had gone to school. After two years working as an assistant, I was ready to move on and was offered a full time gig in Hartford, CT has a catalog photographer for a department store. Two years later The Franklin Mint gave me a nice offer to move to Philly. I did not last at the Mint very long, after 3 months, the studio boss had me escorted off the premises for reasons that were never made clear.

It was then, with two kids at home that I had to make a choice. Find another full time studio position or start my own thing. I picked the latter option and worked out a deal with another photographer to share his studio but instead of paying a fixed rent, I gave him a percentage of my income. This freed up my cash flow worries, during lean months, my overhead headed towards zero, during flush months, I had plenty of cash to spare and keep him happy.

Once this deal was struck I purchase a list of potential clients and started calling. Success in commercial photography is dependent on three things. Good interpersonal skills, good client service skills and most importantly, the ability to create a unique and compelling photographs. It did not take long for me to develop a decent client base.

Advertising is the art of the shinny new object. Can you show a thing, a place, or a person in a way that is both new and compelling? The other two skills, interpersonal and client service, can be learned and can last a lifetime. The ability to create shinny new objects? That is very hard and even harder to sustain over a long career.

Many photographers, like musicians, can have early successes that only last a few years. After a while they can be left behind by the next new trend. A few, like myself, have the ability to keep the creative juices flowing and learn how to change with the times while still maintaining their unique voice.

Being successful as a commercial photographer long term means also understanding the basics of running a business. You need to master marketing, taxes, and cash flow. You need to understand how to price yourself high enough to earn a decent living while not becoming so expensive that clients don’t find value in your services. You need to think not just as an artist, but also see yourself and your business from the vantage point of your clients.

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?

Zave Smith Photography is dedicated to creating imagery that is both on brand and on budget. We achieve this by developing a deep understanding of our clients brand and how they plan to use our imagery to help communicate their brand’s story. We then bring our artistic skills, expertise, and intuition to help create visual experiences that are both visually compelling and feel authentic.

At times our assignments are fairly straightforward, like executive portraits or video interviews. At other times, our tasks can be very complicated, for example, taking a small local beach in Connecticut and turning into a patio of a high end Caribbean resort where four buddies are telling tall tales while enjoying drinks and cigars.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

I think the issue that non-creatives at times struggle to understand about creatives is that money while important, is not our chief source of motivation. Creative people are driven by the question, “what if we tried”.

I believe that creatives are driven by curiosity. Great software engineers, chiefs, authors, designers, and start up leaders all start with a question, I wonder if I can build…..

I take pictures and create short films because it is a way that I can share what I see and what I have learned. I create photographs because I draw great pleasure from looking at what I have created. Great art often asks a question, then provides answers that only provoke further questions. It is an endlessly interesting dialogue. Art can be a delight to the eyes and a tonic to the soul.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

Marketing is the great mystery of business. No one knows what will catch fire. It’s also a numbers game. I remember one time that I drove several hours to do a presentation at an agency. Afterwards, on the drive home, I thought to myself, “that was a complete waste of time. This agency has no need for what I was selling”. Of course a mere week later they called with a 100k project.

Once I wrote an article about creativity and a few days later someone called me about writing copy for her agency. I told her that I was flattered but I was no copywriter. I knew the difference between writing from the heart about something I know well and writing for a client. She later followed up with one of the largest photo assignments that I ever had.

There have been countless times when I left a presentation thinking that they believed I was able to walk on water and that projects and money would be flowing. Those purchase orders often never materialized. Marketing is a numbers game. You just have to get your name out there, to the right audience, again and again.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.zavesmith.com
• Instagram: zave.smith
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zavesmith/

Image Credits

All photography by Zave Smith.