Happy New Year to you all! I hope that you have had a wonderful holiday season and are all ready to start 2026 off with a bang! For me, Thanksgiving hasn’t even happened yet. It is the twelfth of November at the time that I am starting this entry. Why so early you ask? Well, I don’t know what the rest of 2025 holds for me and I wanted to get ahead of the program. These year-end reviews usually take me a while to type out, and I suspect that this one will be no different. I will try and keep it a little more concise this year because I have been getting longer and longer winded with these entries. Fortunately, not a whole lot has happened through 2025, at least nothing ground breaking.
I keep notes through the years in my phone of things that I think are worth talking about at the end of the year. It is a way to share with you some of the things that happen between the treks and some things that might shape who I am as a photographer. Most years, I have a couple of pages of notes to look through but this year, I’m looking at about 2/3 of a page. Most of what happened is pretty much a footnote with a couple of more significant things coming into play later in the year.
I might as well start this off at the beginning with the first image of the year. As per my usual, I went out for a bit of a trek on New Year’s Day to set the tone for the rest of the year. The weather wasn’t great, but I knew a place to go that I could take advantage of what I had to work with. It wasn’t anything great, but it was a chance to get out with the camera and get the first frames of the year. I had no idea that this was going to be one of those years when the treks just kept coming and I found it hard to put the brakes on with the momentum that I was developing. Of course, this was a wonderful change from the doldrums of 2024, when I just wasn’t motivated at all to get out and shoot. I think that it is safe to say that I broke that creative slump and came back as a much better photographer.
I actually went out two different times for treks at the beginning of the month as we approached Toni’s and my anniversary when we had a scheduled trip to Carolina Beach. We spent a few days on the coast while home got blanketed with snow for the first time in a while. It was actually snowing as we were leaving town, and we had wintery weather all the way to the coast. While I didn’t get any snow photos from the large Winter storm, I did get some really strong photos for the Coastal Gallery which I don’t get to update too often. That was really the biggest news during January because it was a travel trek which brought about a three-part blog series to really get the year going. Actually, I ended up with more multi-part blog entries this year than I think I ever have before. Who knows, maybe I set the tone just right in the first month of 2025.
While January was more or less just going out and getting photos, the beginning of February saw a pretty big achievement in my photography. You see, for a number of years, I’ve been trying to locate the owner of a property in the area of Traphill and Hays. I’ve knocked on doors and left cards but never got anywhere with it. On the second of February, I stopped by once again knowing full well that I was wasting my time. Only, this time, the owner was at home and gave me permission to shoot the cars on the property. Not only did I get permission to work there, but she also gave me locations of other potential subjects. This time, I didn’t leave disappointed, I left with enough photos to make another multi-part blog so that I could share what I had captured.
I really think that it was this month that I was catapulted out of my creative slump and ended up in a very creative place where I just wasn’t able to get enough of photography. This was the time when I started to go out as much as I could and I found more and more new locations to photograph. It was almost like a kinetic force had taken over and the more I created, the more I wanted to create. I was finally starting to feel like a real photographer again and it seemed that all was right in the world.
As if it wasn’t going good enough, I had the proverbial cherry placed on top when I received a message from a long-time follower of my work, Maxine. She was interested in scheduling a mentorship session to learn about how I found the places that I would photograph. As I talked with her about what she was actually wanting to learn, it was brought to my attention that she really just wanted to meet me and talk with me about photography. This was seeming like less of a mentorship session and more like just a friendly meeting. I appreciated her being willing to “pay for my time” to talk with me, but that was completely unnecessary. We just figured out a time when she would be able to get out this way and Toni and I had her over for a little chat. It was a very fun meeting and I enjoyed our time talking. We discussed a lot of her own history with photography which included photographing the Winter Olympics years ago. These days she drives around aimlessly like I do, searching for barns to photograph and interesting little towns. She made it a point to remember to come back and explore Cricket which was just down the road from the house.
It might seem like a simple thing having somebody want to come and meet you based on your artwork, but this absolutely made my year. I love when I can talk with someone who I have inspired, or that just enjoys my work. It is far too easy to find myself in a vacuum chamber of sorts going out and finding these locations, shooting them, processing the photos, and putting them online. Sure, I get likes and comments on social, and an occasional email, but those don’t usually feel like real people. Having somebody take time out of there day to come and meet me was something well out of the ordinary and it let me know that real people do enjoy what I am creating as well as valuing the one that has made the photos.
One thing that didn’t make my list of events for the year was a mishap that Toni had on the way to work. As tends to happen during the Winter months, she had a time space conflict with a deer early one morning. This did not lead to a fun chain of events, but there was a silver lining to the whole thing. I ended up taking her to and from work for a while until we were able to get a rental car sorted out and that put me in a position to get some really nice sunrise photos of the rural Surry County landscape like the photo above. There were plenty of other treks that stemmed from me making the drive out in the mornings and in the evenings. It gave me the opportunity to explore an area I don’t really get into that often. While I hate that the end result was Toni having to get a new car, there was some good that came from it.
As March rolled around, I had found myself back in the rhythm of the Traphill area which always seems to provide many treks in a row with lots of great photos. It is one of those areas that no matter how much time I spend out there, I always find more and more as I dig further into the back roads. Of course, each stop usually gives me clues for several more locations that might have similar subjects. I ended up going on three treks right at the beginning of the month which each yielded a three-part blog series. I was essentially, going out, getting the photos, writing about those photos and going out again to repeat the experience. It was all happening in a rapid fire fashion like I had never seen before.
One of the locations was another one of those spots that I had been trying to get permission for over the last several years. I finally made contact with the owner by way of a phone call thanks to a neighbor to the property. Once I got the needed permission, I started on what would turn into a full day of working more cars than I would have imagined looking in from the road. It was truly a magical experience that fed into my passion for decay photography. In fact, I was starting to really surprise myself with how many new subjects I was finding in what I would consider a local area after working these communities for the better part of five years at this point. I couldn’t help but think to myself how I had once thought that finding these old cars was nearly impossible as I would just see one every now and again. These days, I can decide to go into an area and know that I’ll find at least two locations that have potential subjects to shoot. I guess it is just years of practice in looking for the clues that have led me to all of these great places.
Speaking of working the area for a number of years, it was also in March that I received a message from a volunteer with the Wilkes Geological Society in reference to one of my photos which had been shot back in 2020. He was looking for more information on a photo of a church that I had shot that day. Even though this had been some time earlier, I recalled the photo and knew exactly what he was talking about. He was looking for a cover image for a small book that the society was going to put out about the Reddies River Church membership. He had my attention because as you know, I do enjoy having my photos on the covers of books. There have been two previous covers, with one of them being a client shoot for the book itself. Here we were talking with somebody else about having one of my previously shot images appear on the cover of another book. Yeah, I was interested in talking with him further about this.
We scheduled a time to chat on the phone about the details and see if we could work things out. My intention was to figure out what the intended circulation was going to be for the publication, and how much they were wanting to charge for it. This would give me an idea of what to charge for the licensing, because I do license my images for use in publications. However, after talking with him at length, I realized why he was a volunteer and that there was just no money in the budget for the society to pay for licensing. The books help to fund the organization while essentially organizing the historical documents that they maintain for the area. It is primarily made up of the older generation of folks in Wilkes County and the gentleman that I was talking with came in as a volunteer to help them make the documents and photos more accessible by placing them online and in small books.
Maybe I’ve just grown soft in my own old age, but I believed him and really appreciated what he was trying to do for this organization and for the county as a whole. I got a good feeling from him and with this being a 501(c)3 organization, I decided to license the image to him free of charge. It just felt like the right thing to do, and a great way for me to give back to the community that has given so much in terms of wonderfully photogenic locations to work with. He was very appreciative, and I got the file to him as specified along with the license agreement. He did his magic on the book and now it is up for sale on their website, which was also created by the guy I was talking with. The cost of the book might seem to be expensive, but this is basically covering the price of making the book. After looking into self-publishing a book for my photography, this is about right, so I still trust what was said when the deal was made. To this day, I still feel pretty good about the whole experience and would do it again.
April brought the beginning of the workshop season. I had scheduled two different workshops for the Spring, and it was time to get the first one underway. After finally getting a photo walk workshop to pan out and be a really great success the previous year, I scheduled another one with some altered aspects again in the Spring. It would be at the same location in North Wilkesboro which I’ve found to be an excellent location for this type of photography. Months went by with nobody signing up, though eventually I had two participants wanting to experience this workshop. Both of these participants were veterans from previous workshops, and one had done this very workshop the year before which was great!
As the date of the workshop approached, I started to see a problem developing in terms of the weather. We were supposed to do the workshop on Sunday because the foot traffic was going to be less, but there was a good chance of rain throughout the day which would put a damper on things for sure. Since I had worked with both of these guys before, I figured they would be willing to change the date to Saturday. I made sure that it was fine with them and then officially changed the workshop date for the first time in all of the workshops that I have done. I really try not to do this out of respect for those attending because they might have travel plans around the workshops. It turned out to be no problem in this case, and we met Saturday morning for what turned into a good portion of the day walking around and getting photos. This was only designed as a half-day workshop, but it was early afternoon before it completely wrapped up.
There was yet another glitch to this workshop that I had to figure out after having everything set up. Part of what I was doing with my workshops since the previous year was doing an image review/critique online about a week after the workshop. This allowed everyone a chance to cull through their images and get the keepers edited. We would then talk through about three to five images from each of the participants. It was a great addition to the workshop experience and while years ago, I had used Google Meets for sessions like this, they had ceased the free versions past an hour duration which forced me to go to Skype for video conferences. This worked well through 2024, and that was what I had planned on doing for 2025. However, I got word early in the year that Skype was going to be discontinued and Microsoft was pushing users to Teams which was a paid app.
I searched for a while to find a free solution to keep my overhead down for workshops since I don’t use video conferencing regularly enough to justify the expense of keeping a subscription. I looked right up until the time that I had to have something in place for the workshop and caved in. I signed up for Teams and got the account that allowed me to use it for more than an hour and for a workable sized group for what I anticipated needing it for. I’ll end up using this for mentoring as well as workshops, so it was a decent investment for me. It sure solved the problem of doing the image review after the workshop which was what I needed it for right then.
Speaking of workshops, I had my second one scheduled for the following month in May. This was the one that I was most excited for because it was my decay workshop. This is the workshop that I have put on the most, and there was one year that I did it three times in a row. It has come close to selling out many times in the past and I’ve been able to do it during sunny days as well as a pouring rain. It has always been a crowd pleaser and one of my most highly regarded workshops. I was really counting on this one to sell out because I had been doing so much decay work through the first part of 2025 that I figured the attention was right there on the rust.
Well, as the months ticked by, I wasn’t getting much interest in the workshop. I was promoting it at every chance that I could just as I had the earlier photo walk workshop. There just weren’t many conversations about it and it seemed that interest was faltering in this workshop. As we got closer, I started to get folks signing up. At first it was another veteran from a previous decay workshop, then it was another veteran of many workshops and mentorships, followed by a third who had also done a previous decay workshop and had joined in for the photo walk workshop earlier this year. You can see the trend here with my workshops. They are pretty much attended by the same core group over and over. This is fantastic from my perspective because it means that what I am offering has value, and enough of that value to keep them coming back for similar workshops year after year. On the other hand, I am finding that it is increasingly difficult to attract new participants to these workshops which leaves me thinking that I’m just spinning my wheels doing the same things over and over.
I had three in attendance for this workshop and that a good thing. They were all attending at discounted rates because they had done workshops with me before, but I was still making enough money to justify the time and effort that the workshop entails for me. It was going to be a good time, I was sure of it.
Then I got word from the first one to sign up who let me know that he was having eye surgery a little while before the workshop. He should be fine before then but wanted to let me know in case. I greatly appreciated that consideration and kept checking with him during and after the surgery. He ultimately wasn’t able to attend because of balance issues after the surgery, which I understood, which left us with two participants. Oh, and the weather was looking like rain off and on during the day which was not going to be fun.
The workshop went off without too much of a hitch considering the rain that plagued us for the first part of the day. That rain gave way to bright sun in the afternoon, so we had a lot of different conditions to play with during the day. It was a great workshop and the image review afterwards went very well as well. Despite having such a small group for this workshop which is designed to handle as many as eight participants, I was stoked and wanted to come up with another workshop for the end of the year. I knew that I wanted it to be a landscape workshop as I haven’t done one of those in a while. I needed it to be after the hot months, so I was looking at the Fall, but as of this point in the year, the places that I would consider hosting the workshop were still closed off to the public for repairs. I was going to have to think on this and do some research to find a place to do this upcoming Fall workshop.
As we will see, this year took a few odd turns for me, and May happened to be one of those times. As you will recall, Toni ended up having to get a new car after the incident with the deer earlier in the year and that car turned out to be a Lexus IS350. As with all of our new cars, I did a full detail on it when it came home and did a few little modifications to it as well. She had been after me to do a photo shoot for her Accord for the past year or so which I hadn’t gotten around to. It was now too late, and she was already wanting me to do a photoshoot with the new car. She wanted trees in the photos, but I needed something else to make the images work for how I was seeing the photos. It turned out that our driveway was the perfect spot to do a quick session with the car. It actually happened over two different days between washing it and her going to work the next day shortly after sunrise. It turned out to be a nice reminder that I could shoot things other than landscape and decay since pretty much everything that I had shot during the year had been primarily decay.
While I had shot a few waterfalls around this point in the year, I was obviously looking for something a little different to capture since my main focus had been so much on decay. I also knew that I hadn’t really used my studio space for much of anything all year long. I decided to have a studio day and photograph a chess set that Mom had made when she was in school. I was really just wanting to get the studio lights out and make sure that they still worked after being stored away for so long. I ended up using gels and the optical spot as well to create some rather interesting photos of this chess set.
This session did a couple of things for me. First of all, it gave me an opportunity to realize that I was missing the studio work and working with the strobes. This is a very creative form of photography and is very different than finding a scene in the existing lighting that looks good. In the studio, I get to create every part of the photo. I realized how much I missed doing that. It also really opened my eyes to using gels which I haven’t really done that much with since starting with studio photography. I have plenty of gels but just haven’t had the mental bandwidth to really figure out the best use when dealing with portrait sessions. I was going to have to do more with gels because I really liked how they looked.
When June rolled around, I was feeling pretty good about my photography. I had been absolutely rolling with treks and now had something like 200 photos in line to share on the socials even though I was sharing two a day, every day. I had started doing some off the wall things like the chess set and some architectural photography earlier in the year. I was still thinking about that upcoming workshop and needed to get more traction on social media. I hated the thought of that because on Facebook alone, I have over 14,000 followers on my photography page, but thanks to how Facebook was doing things, most of those followers never got to see my posts in their newsfeed. I get comments all the time about how a person missed seeing me and wondered where I had been. They hadn’t seen any of my posts in months even though I was making at least two posts a day with photos and blog links.
I had been posting helpful comments in several different photography groups which I had noticed was pumping up the stats to my website. In fact, I was seeing web traffic numbers higher across the board for the entire year thanks to the extra comments with links that I was leaving in the different groups. I decided to grow on that around this time of the year and started doing my “blog from the past” posts. This is where I look back through my old blogs to see what I was doing on that day in the past. I would then share that blog post and link for others to check the archives out when they might not have ever seen those blogs before. It was a great way of recycling older posts that have just been sitting there in the archives.
That took off and I saw web traffic climbing through the roof for much of the month. I was also seeing much more interaction on FB as more folks were seeing my posts, and I was getting that much needed traction that I would need to market my next workshop. Things were really looking up, and I thought that I might have figured out how to battle the dreaded algorithm which always limits the views that you get unless you pay $42.00 a day to promote your individual posts which promises up to 122 more views of that post. Need I remind you that I have over 14,000 people out there that want to see my posts and have followed my page, but because of the silly algorithm, they aren’t seeing my posts. Yeah, I’m going to pay anything at all for 122 more random views!!
At any rate, I was getting that traction that I was wanting, and so much so that Facebook was now offering to pay me based on my views. It would change nothing at all with how my posts were displayed, but I was now considered a “valued content creator” and I would earn money based on viewership. I signed up because up to this point, my sales figures and income had been absolutely abysmal. A check for $20 looked pretty nice at this point. Signing up for that program seemed to have an unintended effect of increased views and I was seeing much more interaction online for a while. It was a really nice change and all I could think of was that I never wanted to be a content creator or a social media photographer, but here I was with income coming from that source when everything else had dried up.
In hindsight, I think that it was Facebook really pushing me to buy extra reach and ads within the platform. They had given me a little bit of a boost, then paid me for the increased viewership. It was all going great, and I was enjoying the extra interaction for a while. After a couple of months, those views started to drop as did my monthly payment from Facebook. That was when they hit me with a whole new series of solicitations for ads and increased exposure to my posts. They wanted me to see what they could do, and then they pulled it away. Nice strategy, but I’m still not falling for it!
The second half of the year saw a slight shift in things from a business standpoint. I was contacted by two different clients who were in need of my services. One happened to be from one of my early portrait sessions a few years prior. Since that time, she had gotten married and was about to celebrate a one-year anniversary. I’m not saying that my portrait session had any effect on her finding love, but the evidence kind of speaks for itself, don’t you think? Anyway, she was not all that happy with how their wedding photos had turned out and wanted to hire me to do an anniversary shoot with them where they wore their wedding attire. They also wanted to have a more casual look portion of the shoot. I was all in, and we decided to do a studio session which would give us better flexibility with styling and lighting would be easier.
I talked with them at length prior to the shoot and figured out the wedding colors and just what they were looking to achieve with the photos. They wanted to have a timeless look and something that could be displayed on the walls in their home as well as being passed down through their blended family. I was all in with that because I love the idea of my photos being on display as a large print. When we got everything worked out, I got the two sets built based on the colors and overall concepts. The shoot went pretty smooth except for one slight hiccup that forced the client to pause for about an hour. This is one of those reasons that I won’t book two different shoots in a day. When you book a portrait session with me, you have me for the whole day. I don’t want to rush you, nor do I want to feel rushed. There are things that happen which are out of our control, and I want to be able to roll with those punches and still deliver great photographs.
In addition to the anniversary shoot, I was also contacted by one of my corporate clients about doing some more headshots for their employees. This client happens to be located in Huntersville which is about an hour and a half South from here, so whenever I go out there to do the headshots, it is a pretty big undertaking in terms of time between travel and setting things up. They are a great client of mine and I don’t have any issue doing it though. I was told that I had two different people to photograph which wouldn’t take any time at all once I got things set up. We set the date, and I was all ready to go out there when I was made aware that one of the two wouldn’t be able to make it. We discussed options that included me going out to where she was to get the photo which I was willing to do, but I think when I reminded him of the space I would need, that quickly fell through. The alternate plan was for them to come by the studio at a later time as they had family in West Jefferson which was about 40 minutes North of us. As I said, this is a great client of mine and I was willing to do anything for them. I waived the session fee for the “extra” session so that it didn’t cost him any extra since I wasn’t having to drive all the way back out to Huntersville again. I thought it was a win-win arrangement.
Around the time that I was doing the anniversary shoot, I still hadn’t heard from the employee, and it had been a week or so since I had done the other headshot for the company. Not wanting anything to fall through the cracks I started reaching out to the company to get things scheduled for her. I finally got in touch with her, and we scheduled her headshot for a few days after the anniversary session. That meant that once I was done tearing down the two sets from that shoot and processing the photos, I had to get things set up for the headshot which was scheduled.
I will say that this went faster than any other headshot that I have ever done before. She arrived, and I was able to get a test shot done to check the lighting, one real shot that she loved, and one for good measure that we both liked even better than the first one in roughly five minutes. Literally, I had three frames and I was happy, as was she. We chatted for about another 10 minutes and I found out that she had a son and daughter-in-law that were expecting their first baby later in the year. She wanted to know if I would be willing to do a maternity session for them based on how well the headshot had turned out. This was something that I had been wanting to get into and had one scheduled about three years ago, but she ended up canceling at the last minute. I gave her my card and asked her to have them give me a call so I could find out if it was something that I could do for them or not. After about 20 total minutes they left…and Toni came downstairs and asked when my headshot appointment was going to be showing up. She was surprised that they had come and gone and I had the photo already. Yeah, it was that fast!
It was also around this time that things on the Blue Ridge Parkway were starting to open up. I found out that Doughton Park was now opened after Helene and road construction which had been taking place. There was only access from the North through Sparta, but it was opened at least. This was where I had wanted to do my landscape workshop and it was looking like that was now going to be a possibility. I went into the website and altered the description that I had already put together the year before and published the workshop. I promoted it every chance that I could and shared the information online as often as I could. I was determined to use my newfound airplay on Facebook to my advantage. I mean, traffic was way up, and I was getting more and more new names showing up liking my posts. The same was seen on my website. I was all set to make a huge splash with this workshop, and I was excited about finally getting a workshop together with more than a couple of participants.
At the end of July, I saw a post on one of the Facebook groups where a young lady was asking for a birthday photo session. She gave a few inspiration photos that she wanted to do, and I answered up that this was something that I could do in the studio. I do this pretty often and know that the vast majority of my comments will get lost in the mix because everyone and their brother will comment and ask to be considered. As it turned out, this time, she reached out to me and we started talking. She was looking for a certain style of photo with a specific kind of lighting and look to it. I told her that it was something that I could do and we set up a time for her shoot to happen.
There wasn’t a lot of time for me to get things ready, but I had everything that I needed, though I really wish that I had a roll of white seamless paper instead of the white muslin. At any rate, I was able to set things up for what she wanted, and we did about a two-hour session. Her mom was there to help her out and proved to be very helpful for me as well as we attempted to get the expressions that she wanted from the shoot. The session was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot more while doing a bit more creative style of photography. While this was very much a portrait session, there was a bit more flare to it, and a bit more style. It was something that I wanted to do more of, and that was what led me to the next phase of things which I had no idea would impact the latter part of the year as much as it did.
Something that I had been discussing with Toni for a while was posting on one of the local Wilkes County Facebook Groups looking for folks interested in doing a photo shoot. This wasn’t so much advertising as it was looking for test shoots. I know it seems counterproductive for me to look for test shoots, which are basically free sessions when I am looking at a year with little to no income. I looked at this as an opportunity to practice some things that I hadn’t been able to do while making contact with folks in the area which might lead to some paid gigs down the road. I didn’t have anything specific in mind and figured that I would see who responded, and what they might want to do so that they were as invested in the photos as I was. It would be an opportunity to update my portfolio which was sadly very outdated at this point. I only share and post photos from those who I have signed model releases from, and I don’t get those done for the majority of the shoots that I do because they are paying me for a service and I don’t want to take advantage of that by then using those photos for my marketing as well.
It was time do something though, because I was at the point where I was starting to look at all the gear that I had tied up for doing portrait work that I just wasn’t using that much. It had been over six months where this gear had stayed pretty much inactive in the studio, and it was feeling like a drain on my finances from a business standpoint. The few sessions that I had during the Summer got me thinking how much I really wanted to stay in the portrait game. I mean, the entire year up to that point had been rolling with decay being the main theme and I was very happy with that. Portraiture was something that I had brought into the mix to make more income through photography and to explore a different kind of photographic skill set. Business had fallen off there as well, and I was really looking at pairing down the equipment that I had which would mean selling off an entire camera system as well as all my lighting to bring a little money back into the business fund. I needed to really give that a hard look before making the commitment though. The best way would be a series of test shoots with local folks where I would use the photos for my marketing to see if I could have a realistic future in portraiture.
With all that going through my mind, I made a quick post on one of the local groups about looking for subjects for several upcoming test shoots. I didn’t think that I would get much response, but I did it to see if there was a chance that I could save the portrait end of my photography. Almost immediately, I started getting comments with people that were interested. To keep things simple, I sent out messages to everyone that was responding to make contact with them and find out what kind of session they might be interested in. I was busy doing this for the next few hours and quickly realized that I was getting in over my head. I think there were something like 100 responses to that post by the end of the first day.
I spent some time culling through the folks that responded and eliminated those that didn’t respond to my messages and then disengaged from those that were just interested in a free photo shoot of their kids, or other types of shoots that weren’t quite what I was wanting to get involved with. Since this was for marketing, I wanted to stick with those shoots that I would actually like to do in the future because I was going to use these as examples of what I could do going forward. After a couple of days, I had the responses culled down to about a dozen folks that I thought might work out. This brought me to the next phase where I wanted to talk with them over the phone, or in person to see if we would be a good match for a session. I set up several appointments and ended up eliminating several more out of the group from those that flaked out on the appointments or just never got around to scheduling anything.
What I was left with was a phone call with one lady who wasn’t sure what she wanted to do but was open to anything. There was another lady that was celebrating a birthday in the Fall and was also two years into her recovery from addiction. There was one other lady that I had spoken to via email at length that was really wanting to do a creative session and had sent me examples of previous shoots that she had done. She appeared to be quite talented with makeup and hair, as well as being able to play a character. We ended up meeting in person after a couple of weeks to discuss the possibilities. This was the contact that I was most interested in because of the creative aspect, and I was looking to do a test shoot about once a month which she would give me plenty of possibilities during that time.
It was also during the time of scheduling the meetings and looking at shoot dates that I was contacted by the maternity client that I had been introduced to through the headshot session. They were looking for mid-October for their session based on the pregnancy. Their schedule was tight which meant that they were only going to be able to do this on a weekend. Well, the preferred weekend that they wanted happened to be the weekend of my Landscape Workshop that I had been promoting heavily for about a month at this point. There had been no response to it as of yet, and nobody had really talked to me about it. I tentatively scheduled the maternity shoot for either the Sunday after the workshop or the following weekend. We also talked about location, and they wanted it to be outside and a natural setting. As I talked with them to decide what kind of places they liked, Doughton Park came up as a favorite place and a place that they have gone throughout their relationship. With the park now open, and with me being very familiar with it, there was no reason to look any further. That one was set, and I just had to worry about the workshop at this point.
Most of September was spent working through four different photo shoots that were now starting to get scheduled and the particulars worked out. I’ll get into those in a minute. During September, it was also brought to my attention that the Waterfall Keepers of NC were able to revisit Eastatoe Falls in Rosman, NC. This waterfall is on private property and is no longer freely accessible to folks. Thanks to the Keepers, there are two dates each year that the property owners will open the waterfall up to visitors who have to sign up for the privilege. A friend and client of mine, Bill Neagle, had signed us up for this opportunity last year, but the hurricane forced that to be canceled. Now that the area is recovering and opened back up again, they were doing it again. Bill had signed us both up once again the day that the opportunity was open. I hadn’t been convinced that I could go because of all of the photo shoots that I had planned in the near future. The waterfall day was going to be at the end of September, and I had the first of the portrait shoots scheduled for the beginning of October and there were several sets that I was going to need to build out which would take time.
It was a hard decision to make for a number of reasons. First of all, it had been a while since I had really gone out and photographed a waterfall, or landscapes in general. My attention was now on people photography, and Eastatoe Falls was a few hours away from home and our time slot was in the early morning. The right thing to do was to go out there the night before and stay which would mean more time away from home. I also wasn’t sure what the weather was going to be doing which could make or break the trip. I literally went back and forth with myself over this until two days before the scheduled time. With Toni’s prodding, I rented a hotel room and went out there for a chance to photograph a beautiful waterfall that was only accessible twice a year. You can read about how that trek went in this multi-part blog series that starts with that first night in Brevard.
To make a long story short, I was very happy that I went. Bill and I had a wonderful time, and the conditions were nearly perfect for the full day as we got several other waterfalls shot. When I came back home, I had a ton of photos to process and blogs to write, all leading up to my first of four portrait sessions that were coming in really quick succession. In fact, it was the following weekend that I had my first session, and I wasn’t done with the blogs until the middle of that week. I also had a meeting with my maternity clients the day after I got home from Brevard. Things were starting to ramp up and if you have been following the blogs, this was about the time that the blog entries started to thin out with very few treks on the books.
Let’s start to talk about the portrait shoots since those didn’t really end up as blog entries. The first one that was scheduled was for the first weekend in October and was actually the first person that I was able to talk to on the phone after the Facebook post in August. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do but was up for anything. I talked with her for a little while to learn more about her in an attempt to help narrow down some choices. One of the things that struck me about our conversation was that she was going through a divorce and was really wanting to get her confidence back. This was one of those primary reasons that I have seen boudoir photography chosen by folks. Having only talked with her for a few minutes, I felt very hesitant to suggest that kind of shoot, so I put forth all kinds of disclaimers before blurting the suggestion out to a complete stranger. To my surprise, she was not only willing to do this kind of shoot but had wanted to do one for a while now. OK, this just escalated quickly!
Boudoir photography is something that I offer, and it all started with a session that I did for Toni years ago when she felt really empowered and said that I should look into doing this for other women as well. I started to do my research and eventually put together some basic things that I would need to offer it and then did a test shoot with one of my workshop clients. This went well and it was something that I really wanted to do more of, but I needed to up my game. I reworked one of my sets because Toni had said that there was a classmate of Her’s from school that might be interested in doing a boudoir shoot during the Summer. I remade an entire set and changed things out to make it much “prettier” than the concrete walls would suggest. That shoot never happened, and the set just sat there for a couple of years unused and untested.
Now, I was looking at an opportunity to use that set for a boudoir session and put to use some of the techniques that had remained dormant since that time. While discussing the overall look of what my client was wanting, I found that she was into the Boho vibe which was certainly not what this set was designed for. This session was about her and what she wanted in the photos, so I started to look at doing a Boho designed theme and altered another set that I had built out for Toni a couple of years prior. The basic photos seemed to interest my client and that formed the basis of the main set that we would concentrate on. She did like the idea of the set that I had designed around a bed and was willing to work with that as well. There was also a third set that I built to work with a baseball jersey that she decided she wanted to use. It was all coming together and there were going to be three total sets that would be used.
The day of the shoot, my client wasn’t feeling well so we ended up rescheduling for a couple of days later on. I try to remain flexible for my clients in case things were to come up. This is one of the benefits to not being a volume shooter, and generally I keep my scheduled sessions to one a week to avoid any potential scheduling problems. When Sunday rolled around, she was feeling much better and ready to do the session. We ended up shooting for around four hours, but that time just flew by. Toni was there to help out with wardrobe adjustments and for some creative input. During these shoots especially, I want my Photo Wench to be present for all the assistance that she can provide.
In the photo above, you can see how the one set with the concrete walls has transformed and turned into something quite a bit softer and more fitting for this type of photography than what it started out as. I’m not really able to show the set that I spent so much time building because I don’t have the permission to share those images. In case you were ever wondering, I do value my clients’ privacy and will only share those photos that I am cleared to do so and with a signed model release. I have many client shoots under my belt that will never see the light of day on my end because I don’t have the permission to share the images, and that is perfectly fine by me. When it comes to my client work, these photos are for them, not for me. This is especially important in the boudoir realm, and I take it all very seriously. In fact, I have the ability to make prints here so that I don’t even have to outsource to a lab to create physical prints if that is a concern for the client.
Before the rush of a great studio session was calming down, I had another portrait shoot scheduled from another one of the contacts that I had made through Facebook. This one was completely different and developed in a slightly different way. It all started with the consultation over the phone. My client wasn’t sure exactly what they wanted to do but were interested in doing a shoot for their birthday coming up at the beginning of November. In an attempt at figuring out what kind of shoot would fun for them, I asked a little about who they were. Jenn gave me a quick overview, and I keyed in on the part where she said that she was a recovering addict who had medically died once before. I asked if she felt comfortable going into more detail about that, and she was very willing to describe what can only be referred to as an amazing story of personal strength, fortune, and faith. I think I just blurted out that I wanted to capture that story in a photo, or series of photos. She was all in!
Over the next month or so, while working on other shoots that I had planned, I put together a storyboard for Jenn’s life so that we could capture that aspect in photos. I spent a lot of time deciding on a location to shoot this at because I really wanted there to be sense of decay and some natural ambiance to it. I tried several different potential locations but was unable to get the permission that I was needing. It almost blindsided me when I thought about Doughton Park and the old lodge that I had shot before. It had the right vibe, and Jenn was willing to go out there for her shoot.
After scouting the location, I found that the area that I really wanted to use was closed off due to some safety concerns with loose masonry. I was able to work out some other ideas that would serve the same purpose and also realized that I was going to have to use a mix of ambient and artificial light to really get the story told the way that I was wanting. This is a technique that I had only used once before, so I had to refresh my memory on how I needed to do that during a session. I wasn’t really worried about it until the week of the shoot, after I had put the boudoir session behind me. Now, with this storytelling session right around the corner, I had time to build up the nerves about whether or not I would be able to pull this off.
By the time that the shoot was scheduled, I had packed away a good portion of the studio with different props and lighting modifiers to help tell the story. To add difficulty, I had to shoot the series in reverse chronological order to take advantage of the decreasing light at the end of the day. I could easily do an entire blog on this one shoot because it was probably the most emotional and epic session that I have done in the realm of portraiture. Jenn did amazing at emoting the different phases of her addiction and life, and the lighting that I had planned for the whole session worked amazingly well. Take for example the photo above. From the looks of it, this was shot at night, but in actuality, this was still a good 30 minutes before sunset and the ambient was quite a bit brighter. By bringing in a studio strobe and a softbox, I was able to take control of that ambient light and make it look like early evening. The lantern was actually a converted porch light with a speedlight in it to provide real light rather than relying on post processing to get the effect. That’s right, I don’t do the AI thing and what I am capturing during a session, you can see in real time on the back of the camera so that you know exactly what we are creating.
The experience here opened up a whole different kind of photography to me and one that I think that I am really going to enjoy. I’ve created a page for Visual Storytelling and Conceptual Photography based on this shoot. For me, this is kind of like playtime because I really get to be creative with my clients to build up a photograph that illustrates a concept. It can incorporate so many different elements of portraiture but in a cinematic way. As we will see in a bit, this type of photography can be done on location as with Jenn’s shoot, or it can be done in the studio depending on what is required. A quick consultation will usually show the right path to start on for the end result. I knew from talking with Jenn during the consultation that we were going to need to do this on location because I needed more background to the photos than I could get in the studio. It could not have worked better!
Because of how emotional this entire session had been and how well I thought that the photos told the story, I decided to do an in-person reveal of the photos. Jenn and her husband were invited to the studio where I was able to present the photos in the correct chronological order for the story. As I had mentioned, I shot everything in reverse order, but there were a few instances within the subsets of chapters where I shot in the correct order to get the real emotions as they developed. This made it difficult to really see how it all unfolded. For the reveal, I did a slideshow in PowerPoint with all of the images correctly organized. The end result was a very powerful hour spent looking at how the photos had turned out. She was beyond happy with them and said that the photos were so much better than she had imagined they could have been. It felt really good for me to see the honest reaction from Jenn because so many times, I never really hear the true reaction from the photos since they are usually digitally delivered for the client’s convenience. This might be changing in the future, and I might start doing in-person reveals, or at least a virtual meeting online for clients.
That had truly been an epic photo adventure that was shot on a Friday, with the final images delivered on the following Wednesday. That left me only a few days before my next session that was scheduled for that Saturday. This was the maternity session that had developed from the headshot client that came into the studio a couple of months before. I had spoken with the family and found that they had a great connection with Doughton Park which is where I had just shot Jenn’s session. I loved the idea of using Doughton Park when we set it up because I was so familiar with it. However, now that I had just gone through a very dark and emotionally heavy session there, I was wondering if I would be in the right frame of mind to be able to capture a maternity session at the same place with only a few days to clear my mind.
That was when I decided to go back to Doughton and do some landscape photos as a type of palette cleanser. The weather wasn’t exactly fantastic, but I was able to get a good many photos with the lighting that was there. By the end of editing the photos, I was in a much better mental place to capture the joy of a maternity session. Having been out there the day before, I kind of knew where I wanted to concentrate my time based on the forecasted weather. Just in case I ran into lighting issues, I decided that I wanted to bring a single strobe just to help out with balancing the light. The problem was there was going to be hiking involved which meant that I would need to bring my wagon. However, the gate wasn’t wide enough for the wagon to fit through. I didn’t want to be bogged down with equipment, so I decided to pack a small light stand and a small softbox as a modifier. I keep two different Speedlites in my bag so, that would be easy enough to carry with us.
I arrived about an hour early to scope things out with the existing lighting which was harsher than I had anticipated. The areas that I had planned on working with were largely not going to work because of the sun. The forecast had been suggesting that there would be a thin overcast which would have softened the light, but the reality of it was the sun was bright and without any clouds to diffuse it. That left the only option to start with as the open field which turned into a great spot to get rolling. As we moved up through the meadow, I found other areas in the shade that worked well as the sun was dropping, and then we got to the point where I could bring in the artificial light to drop the ambient light to make it more to my liking. These worked out well, although, I really wished that I had the power of my studio strobes for this portion of the shoot. The Speedlites were just barely up to the task trying to fill a 24″ softbox. The other problem was the terrain and the wind that was starting to blow. I had been using my camera bag as a weight for the light stand, but a good gust of wind decided that wasn’t enough and the light stand fell over. Nothing was damaged, although my light completely reset itself while turning off due to the impact. I spent a few seconds trying to get it back online but wasn’t able to get it to work in quick enough fashion. I pulled out my spare light and slipped it into the softbox and continued on with the shoot. It’s experiences like this that make me comfortable referring to myself as a professional photographer. I had a pretty significant problem but calmly dealt with it and kept the shoot rolling. Problem solving is what you pay a professional to do more than anything else.
One other thing that kind of came up last minute was the idea for a dress toss. This happened a couple of days before the shoot when my client sent me a photo of the dress that she was going to wear. I immediately saw the flowing nature of it, and I felt that it would look great with a bit of a toss. Now there wasn’t enough material in the skirt part to do the toss, but I had a plan. I found a window sheer that matched the color of the dress (salt, by the way), and planned on doing the toss at sunset when the colors were nice and soft. She had wanted to do a silhouette shot as well at sunset, so this gave me another alternative for that fleeting light. As it turned out, the clouds covered the sun and that just left soft colors in the Eastern sky. It was the perfect time to do the dress toss. With a quick tutorial on how I wanted the husband to toss the dress, we were all set. I was amazed at how well these turned out and it was the perfect end to the shoot.
In a matter of two weeks, I had done three very involved and wildly different sessions and had processed around 225 photographs for delivery to the clients. Each of these shoots had a good deal of planning before the sessions which had started back in August. As you can imagine a lot of my creative energy and time had been spent working through these client shoots. For those that have followed the blog, you will know that during this time, my treks started to really fall off. This was in no way an indication that I wasn’t feeling motivated to go out and shoot. Far from it actually, I just needed to focus on preparing for these different shoots and in some cases build out sets. I still had another session that was in works, but we hadn’t landed on a date to do the session just yet. I’ll get to that momentarily, but there was another pretty big event that happened during this timeframe.
While working out the scheduling for the maternity session, I had to work it around my latest workshop offering which was the landscape workshop at Doughton Park. I’ve talked about how excited I was to finally be able to get back out there for a workshop, and even though it was going to mean spending a lot of time on the road back and forth with the portrait sessions at the same location I was all ready to make it happen. The initial plan was to have the maternity session scheduled for the Sunday after the workshop, or potentially the following weekend as an alternate. We didn’t want to push it out any further than that, and she didn’t feel like she would be ready any earlier. With maternity sessions I do kind of have to work within nature’s schedule more than my own.
Fortunately, in a way, I was still seeing no interest at all in my upcoming workshop. I was still promoting it and trying to get it out there as I really wanted to do it. It just seemed that it was falling on deaf ears and I started to realize that I was pushing to do a workshop that was going to overly complicate this maternity session. With a couple of weeks left before the workshop was supposed to happen, I just pulled the plug on it. I don’t think that anyone actually noticed that it was no longer being offered, and that brought up another concern of mine.
For the last couple of years, I’ve really been looking at my workshop offerings. As you have read plenty of times in the blogs, most of the participants are return guests and many times they are participating the same workshops over and over. While I love the repeat business, there comes a point where I feel like I need to offer them something different. While I can tweak the workshops to include more advanced concepts, that is hard to do when planning one months ahead without knowing who will be attending. I’m left altering the content of the workshop after one or two folks sign up. While I don’t mind doing this, I don’t think that it is a great use of resources. If I’m going to tailor an experience for one or two participants, I would much rather build that experience from the ground up to address exactly what they are wanting to learn. I can also do a one-on-one mentorship much more efficiently than a workshop that is scheduled for an entire day. Feeling that my return clients would be much better served with a mentorship experience, I started to really look at the workshops that I have been offering.
I really think that there is a lot of value to the workshops and they are a great teaching opportunity but going through the effort for one or two participants for each workshop is just not worth it. I end up blocking out the calendar for a day or more, months in advance on the hope that somebody will sign up. I have missed out on client shoots, other photographic opportunities, personal appointments, and most importantly family opportunities for these workshops. While all of that would be worth it for hosting a well-attended workshop, the fact that pretty much all of my recent workshops have been for one or two people is just not realistic or sustainable for me. As I mentioned, at this point, those few that have been attending my workshops would be much better served through a mentorship arrangement.
With all of that in mind, I have finally made the official call that 2025 was the last year that workshops will be offered, at least for the foreseeable future. Now, this doesn’t mean that I don’t want to put them on and will always be happy to put together a custom workshop for a camera club or even a group of friends that would like to have a workshop experience with me. I still think that they are excellent teaching tools and have a lot of value for the participants. I just can’t keep planning them only to cancel them due to lack of interest. I hope you all understand, and I do want to thank everyone that has been a part of my past workshops because you all have made them very memorable for me.
That was a pretty hard pill to swallow since I have been doing workshops since 2018. I didn’t have time to dwell on that for very long as I had yet another studio session in the works and we had landed on a date for when it was going to go down. This was a shoot unlike anything that I had done in the past. It was fully creative, and it wasn’t one where I was necessarily looking at the rules of portraiture as much as I was looking to really stretch some creative boundaries. After meeting with Sabrina months before, I had figured out some of her strong points which included creative and theatrical makeup, the ability to play a part very convincingly, and a talent for getting into awkward poses that reminded me of a puppet on a string. That made me remember a video of Gavin Hoey’s that I had watched a while back where he had done a creative shoot dealing with a puppet theme.
I talked with Sabrina about the concept and shared the video with her. She was in and just as excited about the idea as I was. She just needed to source some costume elements, and I needed to figure out how to build out the stage. She also suggested that I use a smoke machine which I didn’t have. That did get me thinking that smoke would be a great addition and I ended up purchasing a Smoke Ninja Pro specifically for this shoot. Ironically, this was going to be the easiest set for me to put together, and we were only looking at a single set as opposed to the earlier boudoir session that had three different sets with one of them being used in three different ways. I really figured that this was going to be a pretty quick set to put together and should be a pretty quick shoot. I was wrong on both counts.
It actually took a couple of days to build out the simple set as I had to make some creative changes to how I thought it would look best. I didn’t figure out that the gray backdrop that I had planned on using was going to be too bright until I started testing the lighting. I ended up swapping that out to black while keeping the purple curtains. Those curtains also took two days to get the right drape to so that I could keep some interest in the background. Of course, I knew that for many of these photos, the background would mostly be in the shadows. After two days of putting the set together and working out the lighting, I was ready for the session.
The session went off without a hitch and it was far from a fast session. I had really thought that it was going to be a couple of hours at most, but Sabrina and I were both willing to shoot until we were exhausted. That took somewhere between four and five hours. It didn’t feel like that long, but I think that we both hit the same wall at the same time at the end of the session. By the end of that experience, I had worked through more lighting techniques than I can remember, and finally used smoke in a very meaningful way. The gels that were added in during the session proved to really ramp up the photos, and I even found ways of incorporating the actual lights into the frame. I learned more about lighting and creating a mood in the studio from this one session than I have in full years of shooting. The part that surprised me the most was the post processing phase. I’ve been known to spend three days on a session to produce 70 or so photos. This session had something like 320-330 RAW photos and I ended up fully editing 128 of those as keepers. I was done in two days. This wasn’t because I rushed through these. Actually, it was because there was little to no retouching needed and for the most part, I only did a couple of local masks if anything, keeping most of the edits global. The lighting, makeup, wardrobe, and set just worked and the photos straight out of camera were amazing. The only thing that I really did to the photos was change the color grade and clone out the twine that was holding up the dowels Sabrina was connected to. I also had to remove a couple of labels off of the light stands that I had in the frame. That was it, and the whole process went by incredibly fast.
It was around the time of this shoot that I was starting to share the photos from the previous portrait sessions on my Facebook page hoping that the newfound reach was going to put my photos in front of tons of potential clients. The problem with that was the algorithm which had given, was now taking. My reach was back to the low numbers even though I was still doing the same things that I had to build the reach. I was seeing only a handful of responses to photos that I was sharing on my main page, and I was seeing that there was next to no response on the portrait page. What was gearing up to be a fantastic marketing moment in my portrait work was falling on deaf ears no matter what I was doing. The lack of social media reach was also impacting my website which was seeing lower than normal views during the course of the weeks. It was still better than in previous years, but it was nothing like it had been during the Summer.
I’m sure that going out on treks with the blog entries that would follow would have increased views on my website, but I was actually quite drained from all the activity that I had been engaged in since August. I needed to spend some time catching up on things at home to get ready for Winter. This meant that I kind of took an unscheduled vacation from photography after Sabrina’s shoot. Sure, I went out a couple of times here and there, but it was nothing serious, and the photos were not anything spectacular. I guess I was still really enjoying the photos that I had been doing in the realm of portraiture and the landscape and decay work seemed less exciting due to familiarity. It almost felt as though I was at a loss for direction after doing so much work with people as subjects.
The idea had been that after doing these test shoots and sharing what I was capable of as a portrait photographer that I would start seeing my client work increase. In a way that had happened, as I already have a family session penciled in during the Spring based on the maternity shoot which had just been done. That was pretty much it though. What I had hoped would be an opening into doing more portrait work, turned into a lot of effort for not much benefit for the business end of things.
The unintended result of posting that test shoot solicitation on Facebook has been forcing me to question yet again, does my photography matter? You might call this imposter syndrome, or a creative slump, but I often start to wonder about the real importance of my photography. When I look back at 2025, I have seen a creative tempo that I have never really experienced before. I have created more photography this year than any other without a doubt. I have had one of my photos grace the cover of another book, I have had a fan of my work go out of her way to come and meet me. I’ve helped other photographers learn things and be better able to create the images that they want to create. I’ve shot some absolutely amazing portrait sessions with one of them being a very powerful story. Yet, I’m here at the end of the year looking back on things as a business and seeing that my income doesn’t even cover my cost of operation for the year. I’ve had to end my workshops due to lack of interest, and even my mentorships have slowed down. There have been no big orders from Hamton House for large prints for their commercial clients. This year has seen more web traffic than I’ve had since 2022, yet it seems that everything that I have done has been reduced to being a social media photographer. Even that has fallen off after Facebook tried to bait me into paying to maintain the reach that they allowed to promote their monetization. I’m left wondering here at the end of the year if I am just a hobbyist photographer after all.
I said that the test shoots were going to be a way of determining my future with photography and whether or not I start to reduce my overhead. The results of that little experiment are not really looking like they are going the way that I would have hoped. I’m sure that you can tell from the blogs that I write that I am passionate about photography and I do get a lot of enjoyment out of it. I hope you also realize that I made the decision in 2019 to make this a full-time career, so I have to look at it like a business venture, at least in part. As of the end of November, I have brought in just at $2,200.00 gross for the year. That is by far the worst I’ve seen since starting this venture, even before I decided to go full-time. Not only is that not a sustainable income, it doesn’t even cover the overhead for photography in a year that I didn’t buy a single bit of gear. I’ve bought some props for the test shoots as marketing expenses, but most of what I have spent has been for things like business insurance, software subscriptions, business property taxes, and travel which adds up to nearly $800 more than I brought in for the year. It doesn’t take an accountant to see that I’m losing money for the sake of this business.
Looking at all of that after being creatively exhausted from a very busy year of photography is probably not the best combination of thoughts. I’m left asking myself what was it all for in the grand scheme of things. There will most certainly be more thought given to this in the coming months, but honestly, I’m starting to think that my time might be better spent in other directions. Each year I think that if I hold on just a little longer, that things will change and I’ll finally reach that point where I’m going in the right direction. All too often artists, and photographers in specific give up right before things would have changed for them. I’ve been nursing my photography along for many years after Covid took the wind out of the sails of this brand-new business. I just don’t know how much longer I can dedicate the time that I have to this when it is getting more and more obvious that there is just no reason for it all.
Wow, this really took a dramatic turn, didn’t it? I knew that not much had been going on this year and had accepted that. I also knew that some of my best work in the realm of portraiture had all taken place in the second half of the year which was a bright spot for sure. It wasn’t until I really started to look at the bottom line from the year that I realized just how much things had slid from where I expected them to be. Now, I’m the first one to say that photography is a luxury purchase for folks, whether it is fine art to hang on the walls, or professional photos of yourself or loved ones. None of that is a needed purchase, and for that matter, neither is paying to learn photography. There are plenty of videos on the topic and lots of online forums where you can get all kinds of tips and tricks for free. Everything that I am offering is a luxury and when the money is tight, those luxuries are no longer that important. The thing is, I have bills related directly to my photography business that are not considered luxuries and have to be paid so that I can continue with my operation. I have to look at all the numbers each year to see where I am positioned as a business. I’m barely treading water, and that is not a good feeling. Fortunately, I have had several very good years, and I have a nice reserve in my business account, but I can’t continue to rely on previous profits to sustain a business with reduced profit potential.
As we start 2026, I realize that I have some serious thinking to do. I honestly don’t know where things will go from here. I know that I’m an all or nothing kind of guy when it comes to my interests and when things stop working out the way I want, I will typically abandon the entire thing. I don’t know how to do photography as a casual hobby. I’ve tried that and still end up right back in the same business patterns. Maybe, just maybe, after 20 years of doing photography, it is time to retire from that career as well.
I realize that the narrative here has taken a sharp turn, and to be fair, this last little bit I am actually recording in real time as the final days of the year are sliding by. You are getting the raw emotion of what I am feeling as it comes. Since I have last been writing in this entry, I have been contacted by a couple of folks which might be too little, too late, but it is still a sign of sorts. The first contact was from a local guy here in Wilkes County who was in need of a headshot for his business. I don’t get many opportunities to do single headshots where I get to figure out the look around a single person since usually my headshots are done on a corporate level or done in a way that fits the aesthetic for an employer. This headshot was going to be something that I had complete creative control over and that was a lot of fun for me. From the first contact to the delivered photos was less than two-weeks and was at the earliest time that the client could get into the studio. It really felt good to do some client work based off of a lead from a Google Search. It is nice to see some of my marketing working for me.
The other contact that I had received was through an email about some of my photos and if I offered them as prints. This turned into a conversation where I found out a lot about the guy and his wife since they were originally from Wilkes County. They are looking for some photos for memories from the area and that has grown to include an overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway where he proposed to her some 40 years ago. We are still going through the catalog of images as they begin to pick out what they are going to want, but it is another pretty strong sign as to whether or not I should stick with this on a business level.
These bits of good news prompted me to go back and look at the comparative numbers over the last few years to see just where my income has been coming from. There are three main sources of income when it comes to my business which include, print sales, education, and portraiture. As we know, the portraiture is the newest addition to the business and probably the one where I have the most expense in getting things up and running. The print sales have been the main focus since I began in 2005, with education becoming a valuable part of my offerings in 2018 after some conversations with Singh-Ray Filters. There are other sources of income through affiliate relationships, but those are nearly non-existent these days. I also have my Facebook monetization which has been dropping off since the Summer, so I don’t really count that either. My main sources are just those three primary streams, and I can look back over the years to see just how much impact each has had. I was actually quite surprised at what I found. I knew that print sales are kind of reserved for the big orders through Hampton House, but they account for 90% of my total print sales. This year, I have filled no orders for them at all which happens from time to time. That left print sales as pretty much a negligible source of income for the year. Education income which is through workshops and mentorships is also down this year compared to the previous years which is why I have chosen to eliminate workshops in favor of spending more time with mentorships. All of this tracks with the bottom line for the year, but what I wasn’t expecting was that my main source of income for this year was portrait work. Well, I expected that since my big clients were all for portraiture. The surprise came from looking back over the last few years and finding that portraiture has been my biggest yearly income producer since 2022.
That kind of puts a wrench in my thoughts from earlier. I had been looking to see if I could expand my portraiture reach by doing the test shoots which I presented on Facebook in the Summer. The idea was after those shoots were over, I would see if I could see any increase in that business to justify keeping the studio and all the gear that I have bought to do people photography. While I haven’t seen a huge boost in business from that venture, it is still kind of early to accurately determine. However, if I see no increase at all, my gut had said to sell the people photography stuff which ties up quite a bit of money as well as several regular fees that I have to absorb each year. I was actually prepared to sell off a lot of my equipment and downsize, but looking at the past years’ books, I would essentially be clipping nearly half of my income with that one modification. Yes, you are mathing correctly. I have three main income streams with just 33% of those streams accounting for a bit over 50% of the income. I’ve reduced the chance of income from another third of that equation which leaves print sales as my other primary source. That has historically been my weakest income stream and the one that costs me the most in time and effort through the year.
Now I have a conundrum of monumental proportions. I can eliminate the newest leg of my business and bring a lot of liquid assets back into the business account, which is nice short term, but I would be losing what has been a constant source of income since I’ve started with it. I could kill off the part that yields the least income which is print sales which makes my trekking kind of pointless but would allow me to focus more attention on portraiture. This would also tank my educational opportunities because I am not ready to teach portraiture yet. If I keep on plugging along as I am, am I just beating a dead horse? It has been a rough year from a business standpoint and I’m really needing to make some hard decisions. I still love photography, but I have never wanted to be a social media content provider, but that is pretty much where I am at this point.
I don’t like ending the year on a sour note, but the life that I have created for myself has photography as a business. For it to be a business, I need to have an income stream, and when that stream dries up, I’m left with a very expensive hobby that takes time away from other things that I would like to be doing. I’m open to any input from you as to what you think I should do. If you would like to see me continue with photography, do consider purchasing a print, hiring me as a mentor, or booking a portrait session with me. It really is that simple and you can have a very profound affect on my photography going forward.
In order to end on a more positive note, I would like to talk about the last photo that was shot during 2025. As it turns out, the last trek of the year was kind of similar to the first one. I went out with the intention of photographing a barn that I had done before and pretty much knew what to expect from it. I picked a day that had some clouds that were giving way to sunshine which should have given me a little bit of variety in the sky. I wasn’t really aiming for much other than a chance to take advantage of the conditions and to get something pretty simple to shoot and process.
As it turned out, one of the property owners dropped by to check on me, and after realizing that he knew me from Facebook, he granted me permission to access the property for both the barn and the house. This was a turn of events that I had not expected which easily doubled my time at the location. As the sun was getting too harsh for the barn, I moved to the house and started to look for some isolations that I could work with, especially considering that I was kind of looking forward to working with more isolations and abstracts in the months ahead. What you see above, is the last image that I shot during 2025, and it is one that kind of marks a progression in my photography over the course of a couple of years. It is in black and white which is something that I worked on for a large part of 2024, and it is a bit of an abstract view of the house that links the natural elements as well as the manmade structure into a single cohesive composition. This was not the image that I intended to close out the year because I still had another week left in the year. However, with the holidays and a few other things that popped up, I just didn’t have the time to go back out for any more photos during the year.
I’m not complaining at all though. This will go down in history as one of the most active years that I have had with the camera. I’m sure that I have shot more photos this year than in any other year on record, and I’ve definitely produced more keepers than in years past. While that is exciting, I am actually looking to reduce those kinds of numbers in 2026 and focus more on really being selective as to what I shoot and how I go about it. It is easy to just do the same things year after year, but that is not the way to grow. My goal is to really start to see things differently while I’m also exploring different genres along the way. We will see how things go, and I’m also hoping that business picks up substantially through 2026 because if it doesn’t, I’m pretty sure I will be even less active than I am forecasting at the moment.
There is a whole year to see how this plays out though, and I look forward to having you along for the ride.
I wish everyone a very Happy New Year!!
Until next time….
