What I’d Do Differently If I Were Starting a Photography Business Today

Written by Kelsie Pinkerton — after 20+ years of building and running a photography business, photographing hundreds of weddings, and learning quite a few things the long way.

It’s easy for me to look back and see things I’d do differently. Things I’d prioritize sooner. Things I’d spend far less energy chasing. Things I’d understand much better the second time around.

But I don’t think I’d tell newb-photographer me to work harder.

I wouldn’t give her seventeen new things to add to her list.

And I definitely wouldn’t tell her she needed to build the biggest, busiest, most impressive photography business she possibly could.

I’d tell her to get much clearer, much sooner, about two things:

What kind of work do you actually want to create?

and

What kind of life do you want this business to help you have?

Then I’d tell her to build from there.

The funny thing is, some of what I’d do differently is made up of things I eventually did do. I blogged. I built relationships. I used Pinterest. I created styled shoots. I got strategic about the work I showed.

I’d just understand why those things mattered much sooner.

And I’d waste a whole lot less time looking around to see whether everyone else was doing something better.

1. I’d Decide What I Actually Wanted the Business to Give Me
2. I’d Keep My Eyes on My Own Paper
3. I’d Get Intentional About the Work I Wanted to Book Sooner
4. I’d Use Styled Shoots Strategically
5. I’d Be a Really Good Friend to the People in My Industry
6. I’d Make It Really Easy for the Right People to Refer Me
7. I’d Blog. A Lot.
8. And I’d Use Pinterest
9. I’d Take Pricing Seriously—But I’d Be Suspicious of Anyone Who Pretends It’s Simple
10. I’d Build the Client Experience Like It Mattered as Much as the Photographs
11. I Wouldn’t Try to Grow Faster
12. The Pinkerton House Perspective
13. Key Takeaways
14. Frequently Asked Questions

At one point in my photography career, I had a sticky note on my desk that said:

Simplicity. Beauty. Time with your babies ❤️. Help provide for our life.

I needed the reminder.

Regularly.

Because it’s remarkably easy to start a business because you want freedom—and then accidentally build one that demands every ounce of you.

It’s easy to start because you love creating beautiful things—and then spend most of your energy chasing the things that make you look successful.

More weddings.

More recognition.

More followers.

More publications.

Higher numbers.

Whatever cool new thing another photographer is doing.

There were seasons when I got very distracted by all of it.

And sometimes it took my husband or other people who loved me to remind me what I had actually wanted in the first place.

I wanted to create beauty.

I wanted simplicity.

I wanted to meaningfully contribute to our family’s life.

And I wanted to be home with my kids.

Those priorities eventually shaped some pretty significant business decisions.

I raised my prices.

I said no more often.

I added an associate team so the business could continue booking weddings while I could be at games and events.

Eventually, I added education as another source of income.

Those weren’t just growth decisions.

They were decisions about what I wanted my life to look like.

If I were starting again, I’d think about that part much sooner.

Not just:

How do I build a successful photography business?

But:

What will success look like for me?

Because those can be two very different questions.

Oh, the shiny things I chased.

There were many.

Photography can be a particularly difficult industry for comparison because everyone else’s work—and business—is right there for you to see.

You see the photographer shooting the wedding you wish you’d booked.

The person announcing another publication.

Someone launching a new offer.

Someone traveling somewhere incredible.

Someone raising their prices.

Someone whose calendar appears to be completely full.

And suddenly a business that was working perfectly well five minutes ago feels wildly inadequate.

Comparison is a sneaky thief of joy.

It’s also not always a particularly good business strategist.

For example: I spent a season putting far too much energy into getting published.

And I want to be nuanced about that because I absolutely think being recognized in the right publications can be really useful.

I’ve got some good ones in my “as seen in” section. They can build credibility. They give you social proof. They can help someone trust that you’re established and respected in your industry.

But they’re one tool in your trust-building toolbox.

They’re not proof that you’re “someone.”

And they’re definitely not worth twisting your entire business—or yourself—into knots over.

If I were starting today, I’d still pay attention to my industry.

I’d still learn from people doing excellent work.

I’d still notice where the market was moving.

But I’d be much more careful about confusing:

That’s interesting.

with

I need to do that too.

This is one of the hardest loops to escape when you’re building a photography business.

You show the work you’ve photographed.

People see that work and hire you to photograph something similar.

So you photograph more of it.

Then you show that work.

And pretty soon, your portfolio is very good at attracting exactly the kind of work you’re trying to move away from.

I understood fairly early that I needed to change what I was showing—but that didn’t mean I magically had an entire portfolio of the work I wanted.

So I got intentional.

I went back through older work and re-edited photographs that were aligned with where I wanted to go.

I curated more carefully.

I featured the right work more prominently.

And then I deliberately created fresh work to fill the gaps.

I’m such a believer that your photography portfolio should attract more of the work you actually want.

Your portfolio isn’t simply a historical record of everything you’ve photographed.

It’s one of the tools you can use to change the direction of your business.

If I were starting again, I’d use it that way from the beginning.

Styled shoots were one of the ways I eventually broke out of that cycle.

But if I were starting again, I wouldn’t just tell myself to go create pretty things for my portfolio. I’d get really strategic about what I was creating, where I was creating it and who I was creating it with.

The styled shoots that moved my business forward had a very specific aesthetic. They looked like the weddings I wanted to be photographing. I chose venues where I wanted to work and collaborated with planners, florists and other wedding professionals I genuinely wanted to know and work alongside.

And honestly? They were also really fun.

Some of my favorite people in the industry and I got to make something beautiful together—with no client expectations or wedding-day limitations—and then all of us walked away with work we were excited to share.

That work could live on our websites, blogs and Pinterest. We could submit it for publication when it made sense. We could tag and promote one another. The images could keep introducing each of our businesses to someone else’s audience for years.

That’s what I mean by strategic.

Not: My Instagram feed is looking a little boring, let’s make something pretty.

More like: Where am I trying to take my work, and could I intentionally create some of that work now?

You don’t have to wait until someone hires you to begin showing people where you’re capable of going.

This one sounds almost laughably simple.

Treat people the way you’d want them to treat you.

Be generous. Help people. Share what you know. Send someone a client who isn’t right for you but might make their month. Be kind to the planner who’s stressed. Send the florist the photographs. Cheer when someone else gets the opportunity you would have loved to have.

I didn’t necessarily come into the industry understanding how to do this.

The wedding and photography world can feel surprisingly competitive and lonely. There’s a temptation to protect what you’ve figured out, keep your cards close and look at the photographer next to you primarily as competition.

I got really lucky.

When I was starting out, “community over competition” was having a real moment in the Phoenix photography industry, and I had people around me who actually lived it.

Other photographers shared things with me they didn’t have to share. They answered questions. They encouraged me. They let me in on what was working for them. They showed me that someone else’s success didn’t have to threaten mine.

I’m so thankful for that.

And over time, I tried to operate the same way.

Not because I was strategically “networking.” Because it made this whole career a lot more enjoyable.

But it also happened to be very, very good for business.

Some of the best opportunities I had over twenty years came through relationships. And referrals from other wedding professionals consistently had some of my highest booking rates—and some of my highest average bookings.

It makes sense. If a planner your ideal client already trusts says, “You should talk to Kelsie,” you are entering that conversation with something no Instagram post can give you quite as easily:

borrowed trust.

I wouldn’t underestimate that if I were starting today.

One of the most effective things I did to build vendor relationships was also incredibly old-school.

I gave people albums.

Especially in the earlier years, if I’d photographed a beautiful wedding at a venue where I really wanted to work again—or worked with a coordinator I had loved—I would sometimes have a gorgeous album made from that wedding and give it to them.

I was pretty intentional about who got one. These weren’t inexpensive, and I wasn’t handing them out like business cards.

I wanted them in the offices where my ideal clients were sitting down for consultations.

Picture it.

A couple is sitting in the office of a venue or planner they already trust, talking about their wedding. There’s a beautiful album sitting on the table. They pick it up. It’s a real wedding at that venue, or one designed by the person they’re meeting with, and all of the photographs are yours.

The venue or planner gets a beautiful, free tool they can use to show off their own work.

You get your photographs into the hands of exactly the people you want to see them.

Everybody wins.

I ended up on more than one preferred-vendor list at places I really wanted to work this way.

Would I tell every photographer reading this to go order a pile of vendor albums?

No.

The album isn’t really the lesson.

The lesson is to think about the people who already have the trust and attention of the clients you’d love to work with—and find ways to be genuinely helpful to them.

Maybe that’s a physical album. Maybe it’s delivering a beautiful gallery they can easily use. Maybe it’s sharing images quickly and consistently. Maybe it’s creating something helpful for their clients.

Maybe it’s simply becoming the photographer who makes their job easier and takes really good care of the people they send your way.

There are a lot of ways to do it.

The album just happened to be one of mine.

This is one of the things I wouldn’t change.

I blogged wedding after wedding after wedding for years.

And I need to be clear here: I was not sitting down with some brilliant fifteen-year content-marketing strategy. 🫣

A lot of the time, I was simply sharing my latest work.

But those posts accumulated.

Google had more and more ways to find me. Couples searching for a venue could find a wedding I’d photographed there years earlier. Vendors could send people to posts featuring work we’d created together. I had pages and pages of proof that I knew this world and had photographed these kinds of weddings.

And some of those old posts continued to work long after I’d stopped thinking about them.

More than one ultimately led to tens of thousands of dollars in photography contracts.

So yes, if I were starting a photography business again today, I would blog.

I’d probably do it more strategically than I did the first time. I’d learn about search intent earlier. I’d pay more attention to what people were actually looking for. I’d know that I wasn’t simply posting my latest work—I was building a searchable library of it.

But I wouldn’t let knowing all of that make me so precious about SEO that I stopped publishing.

There’s enormous value in simply building the library.

Pinterest eventually became, by far, the biggest source of traffic to my photography website.

So I’d absolutely do that again.

It was such a natural fit for wedding photography because people were already there looking for exactly what I had: beautiful, useful visual inspiration.

And my blog gave all of those images somewhere very intentional to lead.

That combination mattered.

I wasn’t just putting a pretty wedding photograph onto Pinterest and hoping someone remembered my name. Someone could click it, land on a full wedding on my website, see more of my work, learn about me and keep exploring.

A pin I created didn’t necessarily disappear two days later because I stopped feeding an algorithm.

It could circulate.

An old blog post could surface.

A wedding from years earlier could introduce someone completely new to my work.

That’s the kind of marketing I’d want more of if I were starting today: things that have a chance to keep working after I move on to tomorrow’s to-do list.

It’s one of the reasons I think the best marketing strategy for photographers might be the one you’ll actually keep doing.

Not because blogging and Pinterest are automatically the answer for every photographer forever.

They were incredibly effective for me.

The bigger lesson is that I’d pay close attention to the things that could compound over time.

I got two pieces of pricing advice very early on that ended up serving me incredibly well.

The first was: do not start too cheap.

At the time, a photographer I trusted told me not to start my wedding pricing below about $2,000.

Even 20+ years ago, as a total newbie, that was intimidating.

But the reasoning was that if I went too low, I’d start building a client base of people who didn’t value photography at the level I ultimately needed them to.

That advice changed the trajectory of my business.

The second was to raise my prices incrementally as I booked—every few weddings, bump them up a little.

I did that for years, and it worked really well for me.

So clearly I figured pricing out and everything was simple from there.

Yeah, no.

There were some confusing pricing years in the middle.

The wedding market could swing wildly. I watched photographers I deeply respected go from $12,000 minimums to $5,000 minimums in one fell swoop, and I’d be over here trying to figure out what on earth that meant for me.

There was also a price range we used to talk about as the lost middle.

You could get yourself expensive enough to price out the bargain shopper, but not expensive—or well positioned—enough to attract the luxury buyer.

And weirdly, that could make you harder to book.

I spent plenty of time navigating what my pricing communicated, who it attracted, what the market would bear and—most importantly—what pricing made sense for the business and life I was actually trying to have.

I don’t think I came out of twenty years with a magical pricing formula I’d confidently hand to every photographer.

I did come out knowing that price isn’t simply the number on your investment guide.

It affects the kind of client you’re speaking to. It affects your positioning. It affects how many weddings you need to photograph to hit your financial goals. And that affects how much of your life your business needs from you.

And for what it’s worth, I was ultimately most consistent at hitting both my booking goals and my financial goals when I was operating at a higher price point.

That’s something I’d pay attention to much sooner.

If I had to choose one thing outside of the photographs themselves that I think contributed most to the longevity of my photography business, this would be high on the list.

People need to know what to expect from you.

Clear communication. Consistent communication. Doing what you say you’re going to do. Answering the questions they don’t even know they should be asking yet.

Making them feel like you’ve got them.

Because when a client really trusts you, everything changes.

Their experience is better.

But so is yours.

A couple who trusts you isn’t wondering all day whether you’re getting the photographs you need. They aren’t panicking because they don’t know what happens next. They can actually relax into their wedding day and let you do the job they hired you to do.

Over time, I built systems to make sure that kind of experience wasn’t dependent on whether I happened to be having a particularly organized week.

Eventually I used HoneyBook to automate and organize a lot of it. Every client received the same important information. Expectations were set. Touchpoints didn’t get forgotten. People were taken care of consistently.

That became even more important when I built an associate team.

If the Pinkerton Photography experience only worked when Kelsie personally remembered to do all the Kelsie things, I didn’t really have an experience I could hand off.

I needed to understand what made clients feel cared for and then build that into the business.

And the wedding day itself mattered too.

Take care of people.

Take care of their families.

Be calm when something goes sideways.

Be kind to the other vendors.

Make people’s lives easier rather than harder.

Twenty years later, I think all of that mattered every bit as much to referrals and longevity as another beautiful Instagram post ever could.

This is probably the biggest thing I’d change.

I wouldn’t try to grow faster.

I’d get clearer sooner about what I was trying to grow toward.

I spent more than one season wanting to be the best.

Needing to keep up.

Wanting the impressive thing because someone else had the impressive thing.

And more than once, someone who loved me had to remind me what I had said I wanted in the first place.

Simplicity. Beauty. Time with your babies. Help provide for our life.

That was it.

Not the biggest photography company.

Not the most weddings.

Not being known by every photographer on the internet.

I wanted to make beautiful things, have freedom, contribute meaningfully to my family’s life and be there for my kids.

Once I remembered that, the decisions looked different.

Sometimes that meant raising my prices.

Sometimes it meant saying no.

Eventually it meant building an associate team so a wedding could be beautifully taken care of while I was sitting at one of my kids’ games.

Later it meant adding education and letting the business evolve again.

If I were starting over, I’d use those priorities as a filter much sooner.

Does this thing I’m chasing actually move me toward the life I said I wanted?

Because some of the shiny things absolutely did not.

And here’s the annoying part of having twenty years of hindsight:

I’m not sure I actually could have skipped all of the floundering.

Like most learning and growth stories, sometimes you have to try things before you know what fits.

Sometimes you have to get too busy before you understand why you value simplicity.

Sometimes you have to photograph enough of the wrong work to recognize exactly what the right work feels like.

Sometimes you have to chase something impressive and finally catch it before realizing…huh. I don’t actually care about this.

Maybe the goal isn’t to build a business without ever getting distracted.

Maybe it’s to get better at finding your way back.

I spent twenty years building a photography business, and one of the things I understand much better from this side of it is that “more” isn’t a business strategy.

More clients. More money. More followers. More recognition. More growth.

More can be great.

But why?

What is all that growth supposed to make possible?

That’s a question I think is worth asking before you build the website, choose the marketing strategy, set the pricing or decide what success is supposed to look like.

Your business gets to support a life.

For me, the answer was pretty simple—even if I regularly needed a sticky note and the people who loved me to remind me of it.

I wanted to create beauty.

I wanted to help provide for our family.

I wanted freedom.

And I wanted time with my babies.

A lot of things changed over twenty years.

Those things haven’t.

• Get clear about what you want your photography business to make possible—not just how big you want it to become.
• Keep your eyes on your own paper. Someone else’s exciting opportunity doesn’t automatically belong in your business.
• Show and intentionally create the kind of work you want to be hired for next.
• Relationships matter enormously. Be generous, be useful and make it easy for good people to recommend you.
• Build some marketing that can compound. Blogging and Pinterest did that exceptionally well for me.
• Pay attention to what your pricing is saying—and to the kind of workload and life it creates.
• Client trust is a business asset. Clear communication, consistent expectations and genuine care matter.
• You don’t necessarily need to grow faster. You need to know what you’re growing toward.

Before you make yourself a giant list of everything photographers are “supposed” to do, get clear on two things: the kind of work you want to create and the kind of life you want your business to support.

Then start building the pieces that move you toward those things: a portfolio that reflects the work you want, a strong website, a thoughtful client experience, genuine industry relationships and a few sustainable ways for the right people to find you consistently.

I’d start by looking closely at what you’re showing.

The work in your portfolio teaches people what to hire you for. If it doesn’t reflect where you want to go, curate more intentionally, revisit older work that does fit, and consider creating strategic personal or styled projects that help fill the gaps.

I wrote much more about this in How to Curate a Photography Portfolio That Attracts More of the Work You Want.

I think they absolutely can be when there’s a clear reason behind them.

Use them to create work that’s aligned with where you want to go, photograph at places where you’d like to work, build genuine relationships with other creatives and give everyone involved useful content they can continue sharing.

“Let’s make something pretty” can be fun.

“Let’s make something beautiful that moves all of our businesses somewhere we actually want to go” is much more interesting.

They were enormously important in my business.

Vendor referrals consistently had some of my highest booking rates and highest average bookings because the referral came with trust already attached. A planner or venue saying, “You should talk to this photographer,” is very different from someone encountering you cold.

You don’t need an elaborate networking strategy. Start by being someone people genuinely enjoy working with and feel good about recommending.

I would do it again.

Blogging built a huge searchable library of my photography work over time. It gave Google content to find, Pinterest pages to send people to, vendors work to share and prospective clients lots of ways to discover and explore my work.

I wouldn’t necessarily blog exactly the way I did twenty years ago—but I absolutely wouldn’t dismiss the value of creating useful content on a website you control.

I wouldn’t automatically assume that being new means you need to be the cheapest option.

I was advised very early not to start too low, and I’m grateful for it. Pricing affects more than what you earn from one job—it affects who you attract, your positioning, how many jobs you need and ultimately how much of your time the business requires.

There’s no universal number that’s right for every photographer or market. But I would think about pricing as part of the business you’re designing, rather than simply asking, “What’s the most I can get someone to pay me?”

If I could sit down with the version of me who was just beginning all of this, I don’t think my most important advice would actually be about blogging.

Or Pinterest.

Or styled shoots.

Or pricing.

I’d tell her:

Keep your eyes fixed on the things that really actually matter to you.

Tell the people who love you what those things are so they can remind you when you inevitably get distracted.

Write them down.

Put them somewhere you have to look at them.

Put the sticky note on your forehead. 🤪

Because you will need reminding.

There will always be someone doing something bigger or cooler.

There will always be another opportunity that looks impressive.

There will always be another shiny thing.

And twenty years later, I don’t wish I’d figured out how to grow my business faster.

I think I mostly wish I’d learned a little sooner to trust what I already knew I wanted.

Although, if I’m being fair to younger me, I suppose it often takes a little floundering to figure that out too. ❤️