Sometimes, statistics can be scary. If you were to search for success rates for new photography businesses, you would find that the vast majority of them fail within the first two years. I’m not sharing this information to dissuade you from starting your own photography business, but rather to emphasize the importance of putting together a plan (or reviewing your existing plan) before launching your business. In this article, I’m going to teach you how to start a photography business in 10 steps. By the end of this tutorial, we hope to help you craft your very own photography business plan.
How to Start a Photography Business: At a Glance
This comprehensive guide walks you through every essential step of launching a successful photography business, from initial planning to legal setup.
- Business vs. Passion – Deciding if photography is your hobby or career
- Select a Focus – Choosing your photography niche and sub-genre
- Research the Market – Analyzing your local competition
- Identify Direct Competitors – Finding photographers with similar offerings
- Strengths & Weaknesses – Conducting a S.W.O.T. analysis
- Start with Education – Building foundational knowledge first
- Define Your Target Market – Creating ideal client personas
- Values & Mission – Establishing your business compass
- Create Goals – Setting short-term and long-term objectives
- Outline Your Business Plan – Documenting your strategy
- Set Up the Actual Business – Legal requirements and structure
- Frequently Asked Questions – Common questions answered
Understand The Concept of Business vs. Passion
For those of you on the fence between pursuing photography as a hobby or a profession, here are five essential points of comparison to consider and think about before making that decision. Understanding this distinction early on will save you from frustration down the road. A hobby allows you creative freedom without financial pressure, while a business requires you to balance artistic vision with client expectations, marketing demands, and administrative tasks. Many photographers struggle because they enter the industry expecting it to feel like their hobby, only to find that running a business transforms their relationship with the craft entirely.
Consider how you feel about photographing subjects or styles that don’t personally excite you. As a business owner, you’ll inevitably take on projects that pay the bills but don’t spark joy. If the thought of that feels unbearable, photography as a side passion alongside a different career might actually bring you more fulfillment. There’s no wrong answer here, but being honest with yourself now prevents burnout later.
Select a Focus
Selecting a focus defines who you’re competing with and which audience you’re going to attract. You have to compete with the quality work of other photographers who are 100% committed to specific genres. It’s a challenging task from the marketing and business administrative sides as well as from the artistic side. In addition, even within genres of photography, many photographers are niching down even further to sub-genres or very specific styles and aesthetics. See the example below.
The example above shows that even within a niche or genre, photographers compete within a particular sub-genre. There are far too many genres to take on all at once. When you try to be everything to everyone, you end up being memorable to no one. A potential client searching for a dark and moody wedding photographer won’t hire someone whose portfolio is split between bright editorial work, product photography, and dramatic portraits. Your focus doesn’t have to be permanent, but it needs to be singular when you’re starting out. Once you’ve established yourself in one area, you can thoughtfully expand into complementary niches.
How to Choose Your Photography Niche
Start by examining what you naturally gravitate toward shooting. Look through your portfolio and identify which images make you proudest. Consider the practical aspects too: portrait and wedding photography typically offer more consistent income potential than fine art or landscape work. Research what’s in demand in your area and where you see gaps in the market. The sweet spot is where your passion, skill, and market opportunity intersect.
Research the Market
The second step to start a photography business is to research the market. This is where knowing your focus is key because you want to research one and only one market. Start by searching your genre and location and make a list of competitors. Look at who is competing within your focus and area.
Your market research should go beyond a simple Google search. Explore wedding vendor directories like The Knot and WeddingWire if you’re pursuing weddings. Check Instagram hashtags specific to your city and genre. Look at who’s being featured in local publications and blogs. Pay attention to which photographers are consistently showing up in venue vendor lists. This deeper research reveals not just who your competitors are, but also which marketing channels are most effective in your area.
Understanding Local Pricing
While researching competitors, gather pricing information where available. Many photographers don’t list prices publicly, but you can often find starting rates or request information packets. Understanding the pricing landscape helps you position yourself appropriately. You don’t want to underprice yourself so drastically that you attract the wrong clients or can’t sustain your business, but you also need to be realistic about where you fit as a newcomer to the market.
Identify and Study Direct Competitors
From the search results, create a list of your direct competitors. These are people who operate within your genre and offer a product similar to your own. Now, I understand that we all think our own product has no substitutes. However, think of this exercise from your client’s perspective. While your style might slightly vary, to your clients, your wedding photography is likely similar to others in your area.
For example, if you are a bright and airy fine-art film photographer, it’s safe to assume that clients are able to differentiate your work from another photographer who shoots dark and dramatic portraits. In other words, a photographer’s dramatic images will not fulfill a client’s wants for bright and airy filmic imagery. Even if you are both in the same genre of photography, you are indirect competitors. However, another photographer within your genre offering a substantially similar product would be your direct competitor.
What to Track About Your Competitors
Create a spreadsheet to organize your competitive analysis. For each direct competitor, note their pricing (if available), package offerings, website quality, social media following and engagement, years in business, and any unique selling points. Pay attention to their client reviews and testimonials to understand what clients value most about working with them. This information becomes invaluable when you’re crafting your own positioning and identifying gaps you can fill in the market.
Determine Your Strengths & Weaknesses
Understanding yourself and your business is a key step in determining how to start a photography business. Focusing on strengths and weaknesses, complete the S.W.O.T. analysis with at least four direct competitors to see where you are in terms of your product quality, web presence, SEO, and content marketing.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Are we strong/weak in the quality of photography that we offer?
- Are we strong/weak in the client experience and service that we offer?
- Are we strong/weak in our website design?
- Are we strong/weak in our SEO?
- Are we strong/weak in our marketing?
It’s important to be objective when considering and answering these questions. Try to answer these questions from the perspective of a would-be client. For now, let’s focus on strengths and weaknesses within the S.W.O.T. analysis. Within the Complete Business Series, we discuss environmental attributes that are beyond the context of this article.
Being Honest in Your Self-Assessment
The hardest part of this exercise is removing ego from the equation. Ask trusted friends, family members, or even fellow photographers to provide honest feedback. Show them your work alongside competitors’ work without revealing which is yours and ask them to evaluate quality objectively. It stings when the feedback isn’t glowing, but this honest assessment is exactly what you need to identify where to focus your improvement efforts.
Respect Yourself, Start with Education
It is imperative that you respect yourself and start with education in every one of these areas where you’re weak. If you are a wedding photographer and you’re weak in your photography and technical ability, we have a complete training series for that.
There’s no point in doing test shoots before first gaining a baseline knowledge and education. Yet photographers constantly make this mistake. We select a genre of photography and then start planning shoots. Without a baseline educational foundation, your learning process is dramatically slowed as we make every mistake in the book. Sam Levenson said it best: “Learn from other people’s mistakes. Life is too short to make them all yourself.”
Types of Photography Education to Consider
Education doesn’t have to mean expensive workshops or formal degrees. Online courses, YouTube tutorials, photography books, and mentorship programs all offer valuable learning opportunities at various price points. Consider what learning style works best for you. Some photographers thrive with structured courses that build skills progressively, while others prefer learning through hands-on practice with occasional guidance. Invest in education that addresses your specific weaknesses identified in your S.W.O.T. analysis, whether that’s lighting technique, posing, editing, or business skills.
Define Your Target Market
Who is your main target audience? Are they expecting mothers? Are they brides? Are they brides who are slightly more into alternative photography, such as tattooed brides? Are we looking for seniors for senior portraits? Are we looking for actors and professionals for headshots?
We need to understand your target market because we will eventually need to know how we’re going to market to these individuals. In the target market persona below, you can see that we’ve created an artificial profile for someone whose lifestyle represents the basic lifestyle of your ideal clients. We might create 4-5 of these in the process of identifying your target market. We will use these profiles as guides to creating content that is tailored to resonate with your target market. Without a single focus, we have to divide your attention between multiple genres and potential clients.
Building Detailed Client Personas
Go beyond basic demographics when creating your client personas. Think about where your ideal client spends time online, what publications they read, what brands they love, and what their values are. A bride planning a rustic barn wedding has different tastes, budget expectations, and discovery habits than one planning a black-tie ballroom affair. The more specific you get, the more effectively you can craft marketing messages that resonate deeply with the right people and attract clients who are genuinely a good fit for your services.
Create Your Values & Mission for Your Photography Business
You have defined your focus. You know what your competitors are doing. You have a good idea of where you’re strong and where you’re weak. You’ve also educated yourself. You’ve been going through the steps and now you need to start piecing together what you believe as a business. Create your values and your mission statement for your business.
Knowing your core values and mission statement will help guide your overall business. On a day-to-day basis, these statement pieces will guide your every action, the opportunities you take, and those that you leave alone. Opportunities that don’t fall in line with the values and mission for your company need to be ignored! In addition, these statements will be your compass when the waters get rough, and they will indeed get rough.
Crafting an Effective Mission Statement
Your mission statement should be concise, memorable, and authentic to who you are. Avoid generic statements that could apply to any photographer. Instead, focus on what makes your approach unique and what impact you want to have on your clients. For example, rather than “We capture beautiful memories,” consider something more specific like “We create relaxed, joyful wedding photographs for couples who value authenticity over perfection.” Your mission statement should guide decisions when you’re unsure, helping you stay true to your brand even under pressure.
Create Goals When You Start a Photography Business
Once we have determined your core values and drafted your vision and mission statements, we’re going to create your short-term and your long-term goals. While creating goals, it is important to stick to your Core Values and not create goals based on what others have achieved. Another’s success may not be ideal for you if the pathway for attaining that level of success does not correlate well with your values.
Short-term goals should be those goals that are basically measurable and identifiable things that you can get done within the next month. Long-term goals are going to be more tied to your organizational objectives within a year. For example, maybe you want to reach a certain revenue point within five years. Learn to create those goals because you need to schedule and set your time accordingly.
Creating too many goals can be hard to track, especially if they’re convoluted. Instead, here is how to plan for long-term goals:
- 2-3 years in length
- Broad/aspirational
- Designed to steer
- Max 3-5 goals
Breaking Down Goals Into Action Steps
Goals without action plans remain dreams. Once you’ve set your goals, work backward to identify what needs to happen each quarter, month, and week to make progress. If your goal is to book 20 weddings in your second year, calculate how many inquiries you need based on your expected booking rate, then determine what marketing activities will generate those inquiries. This reverse engineering transforms abstract goals into concrete daily tasks that move your business forward.
Outline Your Business Plan
Finally, we need to have a place where we have summarized all of the details covered in steps 1-9 because we need to reference that information. That’s where a business plan comes in handy. A business plan doesn’t need to be complicated when you’re not going out and looking for outside investors, but it’s still a critical piece of information to document your entire plan for your business. There will be other opportunities and distractions that come up, and having quick access to all of the documentation and all the parts of your plan, including your short-term and your long-term goals, will help keep you focused on what you’re doing.
What to Include in Your Photography Business Plan
Your business plan should include an executive summary of your business concept, your market research findings, competitive analysis, target market personas, pricing strategy, marketing plan, financial projections, and operational details. Keep it as a living document that you revisit and update quarterly. Many photographers write a business plan once and never look at it again, which defeats the purpose. Schedule regular reviews to assess what’s working, what isn’t, and how your strategy needs to evolve as you learn more about running your business.
Set Up the Actual Business
Once you’ve made the decision to start a photography business, there are a few important things you need to have in place to legitimize it. Tempting as it may be, you can’t just create a logo, print up some business cards, and create a Wix website (though many do). If you want to be a legal and legitimate business, here are five things you need to do before you book that first client.
Choose Business Structure
When you set up your photography business, one thing you need to determine is your form of business. What you choose will have legal and tax implications, so be sure to do your research. Will you be classifying your business as a:
- Sole Proprietorship?
- A Partnership?
- A Corporation?
- An LLC (Limited Liability Corporation)?
- An S Corporation?
The most basic, and the one most people choose, is the sole proprietor. This is when you and you alone own the business and are responsible for all the liabilities and assets. Depending on your type of business, find the one that works best for you. The U.S. Small Business Association is a good starting point and gives information on each structure to help you decide.
Why Many Photographers Choose an LLC
While sole proprietorship is the simplest option, many photographers eventually transition to an LLC (Limited Liability Company) for the liability protection it offers. An LLC separates your personal assets from your business, meaning if something goes wrong at a shoot and you face a lawsuit, your personal savings and home are protected. The cost to form an LLC varies by state but typically ranges from $50 to $500. Consult with an accountant or business attorney to determine the best structure for your specific situation.
Get a Business License
Many states require licenses or permits to operate a business. Check with your local city and county clerk to inquire about your specific state and city requirements. California, for example, requires a business license which costs about $120 a year. If you operate out of a studio or physical building, you may need various permits for zoning, fire safety, and more. If you’re running a business under a name not your own (example: Awesome-Sauce Photography), you’ll need to get a Fictitious Business Name (FBN) or Doing Business As (DBA) statement. If you have employees, there will be more permits, and you get the idea.
Each city and state may have different requirements, so be sure to do your due diligence so you don’t miss anything.
Get a Tax Permit
Understand your tax permit laws and check with the board of equalization. In many states, when you offer products like albums or prints, you’re probably charging sales tax, so talk to your accountant about your pricing structures and what can and cannot be taxed. It can get very confusing and varies by state, but in any case, you’ll likely need a tax permit from the State Board of Equalization. You can usually apply for this at your local city hall as well.
Get Insurance
As with everything, there are a few different types of insurance to choose from and purchase. There’s insurance for your equipment, liability insurance, and if applicable, property insurance, disability insurance, and more. You may be tempted to skimp or skip this part, but don’t. You never know when your gear may take a dive into the ocean or get stolen from your car. Many wedding venues, for example, require a minimum amount of insurance for you to shoot on their property, too.
Essential Insurance Coverage for Photographers
At minimum, most photographers need general liability insurance (protecting against accidents and injuries) and equipment insurance (covering theft, damage, and loss of your gear). Professional liability insurance, sometimes called errors and omissions coverage, protects you if a client claims your work didn’t meet expectations or you failed to deliver. Companies like Hill & Usher, Package Choice, and Full Frame Insurance specialize in photographer coverage and can help you understand what protection you need.
Get Your Contracts Ready
It’s a lawsuit-happy world these days, and you need to cover your assets as best you can. One way is through a solid contract, agreed upon and signed by both parties. Having a contract between you and whomever you photograph sets expectations and protects you and your subject. Ideally, you’ll want this document to stand up in court, and therefore, consider getting a lawyer or someone who is up-to-date on legal jargon to draw up your contracts.
The LawTog is Rachel Brenke, who is a photographer with a law degree. She has many resources for all types of photographers, including contracts, business planning tools, tax advice, and forms. Everything you need to get your legal paperwork in order for your new photography business.
Key Elements Every Photography Contract Needs
Your contract should clearly outline the scope of services, deliverables and timeline, payment terms and cancellation policies, usage rights and licensing, liability limitations, and what happens if either party needs to reschedule. Don’t copy a contract template from the internet without having it reviewed by a legal professional familiar with your state’s laws. The small investment in proper legal documents can save you thousands in disputes down the road.
Frequently Asked Questions About Starting a Photography Business
How much money do I need to start a photography business?
Startup costs vary widely depending on your niche and existing equipment. At minimum, budget for camera gear (if you don’t already own it), a website, business registration fees, insurance, and marketing materials. Many photographers start with $3,000 to $10,000, though you can begin with less if you already have capable equipment. The most important investment is often education and marketing rather than buying the most expensive gear available.
Do I need a degree to become a professional photographer?
No formal degree is required to start a photography business. While photography programs can provide valuable technical training and portfolio development, many successful photographers are self-taught through online courses, workshops, and hands-on practice. What matters most to clients is the quality of your work, your professionalism, and your ability to deliver results that meet their expectations.
How do I price my photography services?
Calculate your cost of doing business first, including equipment, software, insurance, marketing, and the time you spend on each client. Research competitor pricing in your market and consider your experience level. New photographers often underprice their work, which leads to burnout and resentment. Price to cover your costs, pay yourself a fair wage, and generate profit for business growth. As your skills and demand increase, raise your prices accordingly.
How long does it take to build a profitable photography business?
Most photography businesses take 2-3 years to become consistently profitable. The first year often involves significant investment in equipment, education, and marketing while building your portfolio and reputation. Expect income to be inconsistent initially. By year two, many photographers have established referral networks and repeat clients that provide more stable bookings. Patience and persistence are essential during this growth phase.
Should I quit my day job to start a photography business?
Most successful photographers recommend building your business on the side before making it your full-time career. Having steady income reduces financial pressure and allows you to be selective about the clients you take on. Consider transitioning when your photography income consistently covers your living expenses and you have several months of savings as a safety net. Rushing into full-time photography before you’re financially ready often leads to desperate decision-making and burnout.
Conclusion: More Information on How to Start a Photography Business
This is a small sample from our Complete Business Workshop Series on SLR Lounge. It’s a 40-hour course that acts as a complete roadmap to launching and creating the photography business of your dreams. This series is the complete operating manual for Lin and Jirsa Photography. It’s a roadmap and guide that we can promise will make you money. Give me your time, attention, and effort, and I will return you a successful and thriving business.
