Ok it’s time to get real with you guys today! I’m going to go over my 3 biggest mistakes that I have made in my photography career. Are you ready for this? Sometimes, it can suck admitting your mistakes because you don’t want to feel like a giant idiot like duhhhh, why didn’t I know this stuff? But I didn’t and that’s ok. I learned from the mistakes and now it’s my goal that you don’t go through the same hardships I did because of these mistakes.

My first mistake: Naming my photography business.

Ok, so originally I named my photography business Brooke Photography right? Well, Brooke is my middle name so naturally people would call me Brooke. Eventually I just started going by Brooke full time because it was just the easiest thing to do. Lucky for me, I prefer that name so no big deal.

The next name change came when my (now ex) husband started shooting with me. I named the business with our names together. NOW, this was a major problem for a number of reasons. At the time I thought it would build credibility with my company because he was just as good as I was. So my thought process was well, if I’m going to book him out on sessions and weddings, I want the people to know he’s just as good as me. If you book him, you’re getting the same quality. That theory worked pretty well. Until the next thing happened. I went into ONE MESSY divorce. You can only imagine how that went over. It was a big ordeal. Went back to my original name and by that point, I looked like a hot mess changing my name every 5 seconds.

So, lesson learned. BE VERY CAREFUL what you name your photography business. Seems obvious. But if you’re working with a partner or even your husband, things don’t always work out. So be mindful of that.

My second mistake: Contracts were not in place for everything.

I know, I know, we are creative people. We don’t want to worry about contracts and this and that. It’s kind of awkward to ask people hey sign a contract so that I know I’m not going to be screwed later. BUT WE HAVE TO DO IT. Now, I always had contracts so I was good about that but my thing is not knowing what to properly include.

How could I have known? I had no idea what type of things could possibly happen because I was just starting out. I never thought about, hey what if I start throwing up non stop at a wedding and can’t get it under control? I never thought hey what if there’s a giant flood in the town and they keep the wedding going on, even though these conditions are TERRIBLE. I never thought… what do you do if they cancel the wedding THE DAY OF? These are all things that real life happened and I was not prepared for.

So if you’re reading this and you do not have contracts in place. STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING… GO TO THE STORE, GET YOURSELF SOME OF THESE CONTRACTS. RIGHT NOW. Don’t do anything else. From now on, you have every single person, business, partner – SIGN A CONTRACT. Now, I’m not an attorney, I’m a photographer. So you will need to show this to an attorney that’s in your area to make sure you’re following the rules and regs of your location. WHEW! Got that out of that way. Moving on.

My third mistake: CRASHING HARD DRIVES.

I don’t know how many times I can say this but if you’re storing your work on hard drives, stop everything that you’re doing. If you don’t have that unedited session or event somewhere on a cloud, then it’s not BACKED UP. These are the things that nightmares are made of people. Because the worst has happened to me I’ve lost session and an event when my hard drive crashed about a decade ago and you do not I REPEAT DO NOT want to go through the dark hole of despair when this happens. Luckily, after a ton of money they were able to get some of it back, BUT NOT EVERYTHING. This was a terrible point in my career. I always thought that hey, I put it on my hard drive, it’s safe. NO.

First step, DO NOT ERASE IT OFF YOUR MEMORY CARDS until you have it edited and delivered. That was my personal rule. Because I wanted it in three places. I want that session on my memory card, on my computer and on a cloud. I don’t even mess with hard drives after this whole issue, there’s too much that can happen. Save yourself some trouble. If you’re just putting them on your computer and deleting them of your memory card. THIS IS NOT OK. Stop doing this. Because sooner or later something is going to happen.

SO SAVE IN 3 PLACES. If you don’t have enough memory cards, that needs to be your next investment. Please please please, go ahead and start doing this. You will not regret it. When something bad happens, it’s still going to suck that you lost some stuff but it’s not going to be client’s images and you’re going to be forever thankful!

So there you have it my newbie mistakes I made. I hope you have learned some valuable lessons from this. All I can do is be transparent with you and my journey to hep you with yours. Do you have any mistakes that you’ve made in your career? Share with us in the comments section. Have a question for me? Let me know in the comments !

Happy shooting!

Brooke