All language subtitles for 1. Gw Commerce

Commerce.

As a photographer,

you sort of start out on a technical journey

to hopefully get to a point that you finally feel

that you've arrived,

that feeling that my camera is an extension of me.

And whereas I sometimes forget which way

to ride the dial to go brighter or darker,

I invariably don't really think that much

about cameras anymore.

It's all become second nature.

What I think about are the pictures.

And then you've got the artistic side,

which is very different skillset again,

apparently a different half of your brain.

So you're already balancing the technical and the creative,

but now you've got to feed

both of those in to the commercial.

You know, a professional photographer

has to balance technology, art, and commerce,

and commerce to me was always by far the biggest black hole.

I never made decisions based on finances

until I was well into my thirties.

Every job I took,

above and beyond keeping my head above water,

was about getting me to a place

where I could do the work that I wanted to do

and to become the photographer

that I thought I wanted to be.

It was never really about money.

What I didn't realize

was that half of being a professional photographer

is being professional.

What we're gonna do now

is talk about how to be professional

and of course not to compromise

the art too hard in the process.

The most commercial thing you can do

if you wanna really make it

is to have a distinct voice in your pictures,

a unique way of looking at the world and to be authentic.

But to get that voice, you have to work

and it's hard to work if no one knows your voice.

It's easy to feel like you're in a chicken and egg scenario.

I love that quote, "Give them what they want

so that you can give them what you want."

They're not necessarily enemies, art and commerce.

They can be friends or at least certainly allies,

but there's a difficult,

complicated balance that you have to find,

you have to work out.

The bad news is that it's incredibly difficult

to become a successful photographer.

Over 2000 students applied for the course that I did

at the London College of Printing, 25 of us got in,

and only two of us are working as photographers today.

If you aren't gonna throw

absolutely everything you have at it, you're gonna fail.

If you don't have thick skin,

I'm afraid you're gonna fail.

You're probably gonna mess up many times

and you're almost definitely gonna have to compromise.

You're gonna have to do work

that may feel a bit beneath you,

and you're gonna have to learn the hard way.

You're also gonna have to work for several years,

maybe earning your living by other means

or living on next to nothing

or be already financially independent.

And if you are, you're a lucky bugger.

The good news is that if all that doesn't deter you,

as it hasn't nearly every working photographer

that I've ever met in my career,

then you're gonna have a lot of fun

trying to climb to the top

of this really genuinely rewarding career.

I was dyslexic as a kid and did bad on my exams.

I left school early.

I was asked to leave school

'cause all I was doing was taking photographs

and I wasn't studying photography.

And there's something interesting about that

'cause I couldn't go to university,

I couldn't get a regular job.

I didn't necessarily have the qualifications to get things.

And what it meant is that I had to make

what I was doing work.

Not having a plan B, as sort of bad advice as that sounds,

it's the surest way of making sure

you're gonna do all you can

to make a success out of becoming a photographer.

So let's get into commercial stuff.

How do you sell yourself?

When I started out, I had a physical portfolio,

and that's what you did,

you walked around and you showed people your work.

Today, the way that we get people to look at us

is through social media and our websites.

So I highly, highly, highly value social media.

I suppose I rediscovered my love of photography

maybe seven or eight years ago.

And it was social media that gave me the opportunity

to show the work that I really wanted people to see.

My dear friend, the creative director Al MacCuish,

has this lovely quote, "Only do what only you can do."

It's one of my absolute favorites

and I say it to myself several times a week.

Only do what only you can do.

I fell in love with showcasing my work

on Instagram back in 2014.

I love the empowerment of editing my own work

and showing the pictures

that I thought were the best pictures,

the ones that I wanted to be seen,

not the ones that the picture editors

have chosen in the magazines that I work for.

If I felt the picture should be black and white,

I showed it in black and white.

It didn't matter that the magazine says

that their readers want color.

That wasn't important to me.

It was important to me

that my Instagram feed presented the world

with how I viewed that world and how I view people.

I did only what only I could do.

And that's what I showed.

And that's an incredibly empowering tool.

They say talent floats.

If you do do great work,

eventually people will find it

and they'll comment and share

and eventually things will grow.

You know, if you're clever about your hashtags

and clever about how you get it to people,

those who like it are going to tell their friends

and they're going to share.

And it's an extraordinary way

to be able to promote yourself as a photographer.

It's the reason why not being a jack of all trades

is more important today than it's ever been,

because there's so much good content out there

that you have to concentrate on one thing,

on laying out your market stall.

There's a lovely quote in the film "City Slickers"

where Jack Palance who plays the old cowboy Curly, says,

"You don't get it, do you? The secret to life is this."

And Billy Crystal goes, "What, your finger?"

And he goes, "No, one thing."

There's this idea that if you just do one thing really well,

you put your life's effort into one thing,

you've got the best chance possible of making that work.

Make sure that your audience

is looking at you for the right reasons.

Make sure that what they're seeing in your feed

entirely represents your brand

and what you're trying to show the world.

I don't wanna go into too much detail about this

'cause I do end up sounding like a Hollywood agent,

but you have to view yourself as a brand nowadays.

I am brand candid authentic moments

with Hollywood movie stars, right?

That's basically what people look at me for.

You may specialize in cars or architecture,

the environment or fashion.

Whatever it happens to be,

make sure that that thing is imbued

into absolutely everything you show.

Then you have your social media

where you build a following of people

who have either a commercial or a human interest

in what you're doing.

And ultimately, you hope that they get shared to someone

that's gonna become a client, right?

Someone that's gonna look at your pictures and go,

wow, that's the perfect visual style

for this thing we're doing.

Let's talk about agents for a minute.

I at one point in my career was with arguably

the biggest agency in the world.

Now, the reality was I was probably too small a fish

for their big pond, but for whatever reason,

it didn't really work for me.

And today I don't work with any agents.

I have a full-time manager, Bob,

who lives, sleeps, and breathes our business.

But when you're starting out,

it's incredibly important that you are your own agent.

And I think you need to understand a few things.

You firstly need to realize that an agent, in general,

doesn't have the same agenda as you, right?

An agent is using you

to earn money for them or their agency.

And when the stars align beautifully,

that works really well.

And I have a number of photographer friends

who've had the same agent for many years

and have a very happy life with them.

It didn't ever truly work for me having an agent.

I think I spent too long, I suppose,

feeling like the business had been taken away from me

and then just waiting for the phone to ring.

And it, in most cases,

just ended out building a certain level of resentment in me

that they weren't doing enough for me.

And in the same breath, I'd lost,

I suppose, control over my own destiny, my own career.

And all I would say to you

is think very hard before you get an agent.

I wouldn't think about getting an agent

until several agents have approached you

and asked you if they can represent you.

And then you're in a position of power when you can say,

what are you gonna do to deserve your 25% of my income?

Until that point, the power's completely screwed,

because what happens, you're going cap in hand saying,

hey, would you represent me?

I need some work. I need some work.

And of course, they may say yes and they may take you on

and then the few clients you've got,

they're gonna wanna put through them.

And suddenly, you're giving them 25% of your earnings

rather than them giving you 75%

of what they've earned you.

And it really is a different thought process here.

So to be clear, once you've established yourself,

an agent could be very, very good for you.

The fact that it hasn't been, I suppose, my path to success,

it has been the path

to many, many of my colleagues' success.

But what I would say is that starting out,

it's absolutely imperative that you are your own agent.

The reason for that is that you need to learn this business

and not sit back, waiting for someone else to do it for you

on the off chance they never do.

So I have a manager today and

I'm still thinking left, right, and center

about the business, because I always have done.

And what it means is that together we collaborate

and we come up with bigger and bolder and stupider ideas

because we're both on it

and it's not just one of us doing that.

But I'm still the driving force of my business

and it's still my name on the door.

So let's talk a bit about what being your own agent means.

What do I do when I'm not taking pictures?

And any environment you put me into,

I start to work that room.

I'm finding out what jobs do people do.

Are there any crossovers with what I do?

What opportunities are coming up?

I'm researching people.

I shoot movie stars, so I watch a film every day, right?

And I'm looking, and then I see someone

that I think is really great,

I'll reach out to them and I'll say,

hey, look, I'd love to take your picture.

I go to film festivals where I meet not only the talent,

but I meet their publicists.

I meet the people at the studios, the marketing departments.

And I put myself out there.

I'd never refer to what I do as networking,

because I suppose it comes to me quite organically,

but I absolutely network and I absolutely work a room

and I absolutely research clients

and I look at adverts and I go,

wow, that could have been shot by me.

Who's that company? What do they do?

How can I reach out to them?

And I'm constantly working my contacts.

I probably got 50 to 100 people that I've worked with

in the last few years.

And I reach out to them and I stay in touch and I'm social.

The other thing I do, which I'm sort of 100% me,

I suppose what you see is what you get.

I'm this sort of big, sort of hairy Viking bear

who's friendly and happy and he walks into rooms.

I've always got a camera on me, always.

There's always a camera around my neck

and people literally come up to me and they go,

"Are you Greg Williams Photography?"

And it's like, course I'm not, my name's Greg Williams,

but that whole sort of persona

of what are you and why are you here.

I go into places that you are not allowed to take pictures

and I have a camera around my neck.

And they say, "You can't take pictures."

And I say, "I won't, but I'm gonna have my camera on me

because that's what I do."

I'm gonna leave here and go somewhere else

and I might take a picture there.

I might take a picture the second I walk out of this door,

but I'm gonna have my camera with me

because that's what I am, that's my identity.

It's amazing how many photographers

put this Herculean effort into our photography

and then zero effort into actually getting jobs.

You basically sit around, waiting for the phone to ring.

Trust me, the phone is not gonna ring.

So outside of your social media,

how is a potential client going to find you?

Let's say I take feel-good photos

of content-looking families.

You think, wouldn't that be a brilliant way

of selling life insurance, for instance?

So what you do is you say, okay,

who are the biggest life insurance companies in the world?

And you look at their ad campaigns

and you see something that feels like you could better it,

or it could fit.

And then you go to the advertising agencies

and you find out who's the art buyer

or the commissioner at those agencies

and you ring them or you email them

or you DM them your pictures,

or you do whatever you can to get them to see your work.

You have to be that proactive.

If you wanna work for newspapers and magazines,

you've got to be sure

that you're not just firing a shot in the dark.

Make sure that your work could be seen in that publication

and then you reach out to them.

And all that information is available online.

It sounds really obvious,

and I'm not gonna go into great details on this,

but trust me, don't wait for the phone to ring.

Nearly all the information you need

to find your clients is a Google away.

It's all there.

What we do as photographers is we spend years and years

waiting for our work to be ready to show.

And of course,

we're always that next project away from being ready.

So we procrastinate, right?

We sit around and the years go by

having to often do other jobs to back this up, right?

And this happens because you're not there yet.

You're not treating your career

as 50% photography, 50% business, right?

You're 2% professional, 98% photographer.

So if you can build that balance

to where you're really 50/50,

then you've got a really good chance

of cracking this and making a living.

It's a little like being a fashion photographer.

They need 50% of what they do to really be fashion

or the fashion business.

All those really big fashion photographers I know

care a huge amount about clothes and style.

A car photographer is likely to be so much better

if he genuinely loves the cars as much as the photography.

I can't stress how important it is to be truly authentic

to yourself about the things that you love,

'cause you cannot bluff passion, I promise you.

If you pretend to care about something,

you'll either get found out or you'll give up

as soon as it gets tough,

because you don't really want it enough.

When you're starting out as a professional photographer,

invariably, you have to support your income

in one way or another.

And I say that as soon as you can get in the mindset

of your work being a nine to five, the better.

Now, obviously you don't have to take it this literally,

but if you're not spending 40 hours a week

either on the art of photography, shooting pictures,

technique, improving yourself, or developing business,

then as far as I'm concerned,

you may as well have another job, right?

And what would you rather do?

Would you rather have a 40 hours a week job

serving in a restaurant

or would you like to have a 40 hour a week job

as a photographer?

'Cause that's what it takes to get there,

at least, at least 40 hours a week.

Now, if you wanna go further on that,

if we're gonna say 50/50 professional photographer

20 hours a week,

you're working the business of photography only.

So you are purely working, establishing clients,

establishing subjects, establishing portfolio, brand,

social presence, all that stuff, 20 hours a week.

In reality, I take pictures for a few hours every week,

but I literally live and breathe Greg Williams Photography.

If I have a day off, I'm on the phone for four hours,

and I generally don't have many days off.

I would say I probably put in

somewhere between 50 to 60 hours a week.

To sum it all up, as you're building your career,

you have to always be your own agent

and you have to always be working.

The good thing about the commerce of all this

is that it absolutely is hand in hand with the art.

If you're gonna be a really successful photographer,

that's gonna be because of the art of it,

because of your unique view,

because you are the only person they can go to

for that one thing.

But 50% of your attention has to be on the business.

Only do what only you can do.