Helen T Boursier - Marketing and Selling Black & White Portrait Photography

A MHERST M EDIA , INC . B UFFALO , NY

Copyright 2000 by Helen T. Boursier
All rights reserved.

Published by:
Amherst Media, Inc.
P.O. Box 586
Buffalo, N.Y. 14226
Fax: 716-874-4508

Publisher: Craig Alesse
Project Manager: Michelle Perkins
Senior Editor: Frances Hagen Dumenci
Assistant Editor: Matthew A. Kreib
Copy Editor: Paul E. Grant

ISBN: 1-58428-015-8
Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 99-76253

Printed in the United States of America.
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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded or otherwise, without prior written consent from the publisher.

Notice of Disclaimer: The information contained in this book is based on the authors experience and opinions. The author and publisher will not be held liable for the use or misuse of the information in this book.

Helen T. Boursier has operated a portrait studio on Cape Cod since 1983 with her husband of twenty years, Michael. She works exclusively with black and white portraits of families and children. Her trademark look includes lightly hand colored wall portraits on artist canvas. Helen has authored a dozen other photography books, and has lectured on photography across the country and around the world.

It takes much more than a love affair with black and white portraiture to ensure business success. Your passion sets the mood for success, but your basic business practices ultimately determine whether or not you succeed.

Boursier Photography opened on Cape Cod, Massachusetts in 1983 to photograph weddings using color film. By the late eighties, the studio had gradually evolved to photographing families and children using only black and white film.

To successfully make the transition from one very different specialty to another, we applied sales, marketing and business skills. This ensured we could photograph the black and white images we love while also earning a living that would make our hard work worthwhile. As I have said to my seminar audiences for years, if you cannot figure out how to earn a decent living doing photography, you should give it up and find a real job that inevitably is a lot less work but pays a lot more money.

Marketing and Selling Black & White Portrait Photography will show you how to take your passion for black and white portraiture and turn it into a profitable business. You will be happy to earn a living doing the work you love to do. Also, your clients will be thrilled that you are professional enough to keep your business successful. When you know what to do to keep your doors open for business, your clients benefit by being able to hire you year after year for the beautiful photographs that you love taking and they love buying.

Like attracts like simply means that people are comfortable with others who have similar interests, styles and tastes. You can see this selectivity evolve in your own children. Preschool children are happy to play with everyone in the classroom. They just want to play!

As these children grow up, they gradually choose friends who share like interests. By the time they are in high school, they have formed strong cliques and will rarely look outside of this tightly bonded group.

In fact, during our sons senior year, he wrote a thesis paper on the importance of these cliques in identifying peers. Attraction to similar likes does not stop when you mature into adulthood. With limited resources of both time and money, the only possible way to go through life is to spend both where you will enjoy each the most.

The logical response to the like attracts like rule is to design your studio to attract the types of clients you want to attract. When we opened our first studio in a classy office condo complex, some photographer friends said they would never feel comfortable coming to us as clients because the studio decor was too fancy. But, of course, the reverse held true for us. We would not have gone to their studio because it was too casual.

We designed our studio to take advantage of the simple fact that customers like dealing with successful businesses because, they rationalize, if the business is successful then it must be good. Being successful does not automatically happen the first year you hang your sign out and declare yourself open for business. That is where the fake it till you make it philosophy comes in handy.

Humble beginnings our original home studio was in the ground level of our split floor ranch home. No matter how you worded it, the studio was crammed into a small basement bedroom.

The office condo location looked like a home on the outside because of the Cape Cod shingles and building style (above), but the inside was a crisp office environment (right).

When we moved back to a residential location, we combined the professional look from the office condo with a relaxed feeling provided with a home setting.

Put your money where your clients see it. We often lecture to photography conferences across the U.S. and around the world. When we were visiting Italy, one of our host families had furnished their home with designer names. Even the lamp was crafted by a famous artist! When we visited their studio the next day, located in the heart of a busy shopping district, I was surprised to discover that they had put all their money into their home and none into their studio. It was as if they had put all of the leftovers from the house at the studio.