“Show Notes”
The first Shoot to the Top Webinar is on the 2nd of April and it’s all about getting higher value clients for your business. To find out more and book click here.
After school, Andrew worked for an advertising agency. In2002, he bought a camera, having hardly taken a photo since he was young. That camera rekindled his interest. But he said that he still had a fear of taking photographs of people. And when he went to a local camera club recently, he found that was what they were afraid of too. He found a course by Annabel Williams and did a one-day course with her. After that, he found out he had some clients, got a grant, and signed up for Annabel’s course for a year. Andrew says his pictures were images which people were a part of, rather than a photo of them. He loved Robert Dawson’s work. And Willy Ronis. He likes the way they present people in a big scene.
Sam asks about repeat clients as he seems to have lots of them. He talks about a client where he keeps going back and doing portraits as the family grows. He went to the house recently and it was full of his pictures. Andrew says the main thing he likes is photographing people, for personal or commercial use. Sam brings up that Andrew has several websites with different brands and asks how he manages this. Andrew says that he is found online regularly. He says this is because he provides relevant content to the relevant audience. He says that his specific websites only have relevant photos. He then also has landing pages for all of the relevant local towns. Andrew is also blogging a lot on all of his websites. Andrew’s other routes to market are networking. He says that this is a slow burn, but he gets work because he gets customers who have a connection who know, like and trust Andrew. He also uses artisan makers as a route to market. Hesays customers at artisan makers markets have money to invest in things they like, which could include photography.
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You can connect with Andrew on LinkedIn here
“In today’s business world, a great headshot is essential for personal branding and making the right impression. My team of assistants, makeup artists, and stylists work with me to ensure every client looks their best and feels confident in front of the camera.” – Andrew Collier
“Show Transcription”
Sam: Hello, Marcus. How’s everything with you?
Marcus: Oh, things are good. Thank you, Sam. Yeah, enjoying life, as they say. And we’ve got a guest on today.
Sam: Excellent.
Marcus: We’ve got a guest. Are you going to tell us?
Sam: We have. And before that, we also have our webinar coming up, Marcus. 2nd of April, we’ll give more details at the end of the show, but definitely something to be involved in. But sorry, guest, Marcus, you were saying.
Marcus: So who have we got on today? We’ve got a photographer from up north of England called Andrew Collier. Andrew, hello there.
Andrew: Hello. Good to see you, Marcus. Good to see you, Sam. And thank you for inviting me on.
Sam: And you, Andrew.
Marcus: My pleasure. Oh, our pleasure. That’s right. Thank you for joining us. Andrew, just to kick off the show, let’s just hear about, tell us about what you do and the old cliche, how did you get to do it? How did you get to where you are now?
Andrew: Oh, right. Well, I’m a portrait photographer predominantly, but there are times of the year when business is really, really quiet, where I would gladly photograph the opening of an envelope because it pays a few bills.
Marcus: But as long as it’s not an envelope, it’s a tax bill.
Andrew: No comment. Yeah, I’m a portrait photographer. I think like many of us, we were fascinated with cameras and photographs as kids. I was no different. And my brother very kindly gave me his old camera, which was a Minolta SR1 SLR, no light meter, none of that stuff. It had something that sat on the top and I loved it. It’s great. And then I left school.
I worked for an advertising agency and I was surrounded by all these brilliant creatives. And of course, my work was terrible because at that point, I’d not developed anything. I hadn’t had any training and I didn’t really know what I was doing. And in those days, there wasn’t quite the inspiration that’s available that there is now. So I tended to shy away and I put my photography away, probably for 20 plus years. And then 2002, I bought a little Fuji, fairly compact digital camera. It’s designed by Porsche. It’s an absolutely beautiful piece of design. Just a nice thing to have, which I’m starting to sound like a camera enthusiast now. But it was a beautiful thing to have and I took loads and loads of pictures with it and that rekindled my interest in photography. And I think like many of us starting out, always had a bit of a fear of photographing people. I spoke at our local photographic society recently and the idea of sitting somebody down in front of your camera to take their portrait was their idea of hell. It’s really, really very uncomfortable. Most people like doing landscapes, nature, wildlife, candid street photography, like basically all that stuff where you don’t actually have to talk to the subject. And in 2003, I took redundancy from a job and set up my own little marketing consultancy because that was my background, marketing and design. And B2B marketing and design, so it’s like heavy industry and civil engineering and tunneling and stuff like that, which is good fun. Good fun, very niche. And the clients didn’t understand why they needed to get a photographer in and like, well, why couldn’t I do it? I was the marketing guy. Now, if you actually look at the words marketing and photography, you find there are very few letters in the two words that are actually the same.
Marcus: That’s a good way of looking at it.
Andrew: Yeah, there’s not a lot of similarity really, two very, very different things. But it relit the fire. So I started to train and I wanted to learn how to photograph people doing things and occasionally photograph people. And I couldn’t find any courses. They were all about where to put the lights, what f-stop to use, all that technical, all the technical stuff. There was nothing about how to engage with the subject. And that is the key to great portraiture, is to be able to engage with the subject and let them drop their guard.
Sam: So what did you do to gain the experience for that?
Andrew: I had aspirations, so I was reading professional photographer. I don’t think any professional photographers actually read photographers. It’s just for aspiring people like me.
So I saw an article by Annabelle Williams, who had a training business up in Cumbria at the time. And I went and did a one day course with her because I was like 42, entering midlife crisis territory. So off I went and on a very, very wet Cumbria day where the cloud base was about 100 feet and it was just like grey flag and drizzle. And I came away with an amazing set of photographs because I stuck the camera on f4, cranked up the ISO as whatever it would stand and was shown how to use a silver reflector properly and how to talk, how to engage with the subject, how to make them feel comfortable. And that was in 2008, late 2008, just around about the time of the crash. I came back from the course and I found that I got like five clients who decided that they no longer wanted to spend money on marketing.
And I had a little bit of money in the bank and I managed to get a grant from the local training agency and the government, you know, these quangos that give out money. So I signed up to Annabelle’s course for a year and every five or six weeks, trek off to the Lake District for two or three days and learn about the art and the business of photography, of portrait photography. And weddings, because you kind of got to do weddings because it teaches you how to deal with rude idiots. I was never big on weddings, but I loved portraiture and what I really liked was being able to present that in a way that it looked like a stunning piece of wall art. A picture you’ll have seen if you look at a lot of my stuff, they’re pictures that people are part of rather than just being a picture of them.
Marcus: And who were you drawing influence from there, Andrew, at that stage? Any particular photographer?
Andrew: Quite a few, yeah. Annabelle, obviously, because we had all ended up with Annabelle’s book, 99 Portrait Ideas, which was extremely good and demystified it and said, well, you don’t need to worry about technical stuff, just do this and concentrate on talking to the subject and learn some basic rules of composition. But also, Robert Doisneau, I loved Robert Doisneau’s work. I had Robert Doisneau’s work hanging in my house, oh, at least two decades before I ever thought about being a photographer.
Marcus: Yes. I went out with his granddaughter, funnily enough.
Andrew: Sorry?
Marcus: I went out with his granddaughter.
Andrew: Oh, right, okay, okay. She was in Paris when I worked in Paris, yeah. I’ve never worked in Paris, nothing so glamorous, or put me. But I like the way that they presented people doing things in a big scene, that wonderful photograph of the little boy on this tricycle in a barge on the Seine that Willy Ronas did. It’s brilliant. And that, to me, was inspiration. Hang on.
Marcus: The classics.
Sam: We’ll put a link in the show notes. This isn’t video. Andrew’s trying to find it for us now while we don’t, oh, we’ve got something. Oh, that looks like the Peak District.
Andrew: It is. And I said to this guy, how far does your garden go? He said, well, it goes all the way up there. But this is a great exception, not far, it’s not far from Stanwich. I can’t remember where it is now. It’s above Macclesfield. But the idea of producing a photograph of a landscape or cityscape or whatever that the subjects are part of is something that I’ve always loved doing. One of my favourite, I’ll call these up to have a look at, but one of my favourites is the two girls sat in a bus stop chatting because they didn’t want to be photographed. So we’ll go and sit in the bus stop and chat to each other and I’m going to stand back way over here. And in colour, it’s a disaster. But in black and white, it’s magic. Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely magic. And that was kind of where I started. And inevitably, we all have to do the grinny stuff because that’s what clients often want. But if you can inspire clients to do something different, then you have an opportunity to create something magical for them. And I don’t, you know, look, people of a certain age don’t like to see too much detail. So then being part of a bigger scene is just…
Marcus: A little Vaseline on the lens.
Andrew: Well, just stand well back, you know. And I love producing things like that. It makes me happy. It’s fun to do. It fires my enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is infectious. You get the right reaction out of the client. You get a great picture.
Sam: Amazing.
Marcus: I’m sure Sam is dying to ask something about marketing. I can just see his marketing brain going. And I’m sure… Sam, you’ve got a question there.
Sam: Well, the first one was about you when we were chatting earlier. You were saying you have a lot of clients that keep coming back. So do you think that’s kind of linked to those pictures you do and they like them and they kind of want to refresh them from time to time?
Andrew: Yeah, I went to see a client earlier in a few weeks ago. Her daughter is now 10.
And I think I first photographed her when she was two.
Sam: All right.
Andrew: Then I photographed her christening. Then I photographed her again during COVID. We sneaked out into the field at the back of her house where we could just about legally meet up. And…
Sam: As long as you didn’t do a close up, all was OK.
Andrew: No, it’s all right. We did. Well, she’s 10 and, you know, rope swinging in the garden and a horse and whatever. So, you know, every prop that a photographer could dream of, really. When I went to their house the other week to do the latest shoot, where she bought nine framed photographs, I couldn’t believe how many there were. I think there was over two dozen examples of my work all around the house.
Sam: Oh, wow. Yes, that’s amazing.
Andrew: Yeah. And one of them, it was framed 10 by sevens in two rows of all landscapes, landscape shaped in two rows of five. And the brief for the second time was some more photographs, but we had to have another row of five to go below the first two, because the first one, the first row was the first shoot. The second one was.
Sam: OK, yeah.
Andrew: And then we got this third one.
Sam: I think I need a big wall by the time she’s 20, 21, aren’t they?
Andrew: They’ve got a big house. It’s fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ve got we’ve got we’ve got a big house. There’s plenty there’s plenty rooms as long as we don’t make them too big. OK. And that was that was interesting.
Sam: Yeah. And then your portrait photography is kind of looking at it. You do both commercial and kind of domestic. It’s not the right word, is it? Commercial social family portrait. Well, social social.
Marcus: Social is a good word. Social is a good word. That’s an old fashioned word we used to use for it.
Andrew: Yeah, well, I think it’s that I’m still trying to work out what lifestyle means. I’ve been using it myself for 17 years and I heard of it for quite a long time before that. But I don’t really understand what lifestyle means as a word. It’s one of those non words that describes all sorts of stuff.
Marcus: It is. Yeah, it’s a lifestyle. It’s branding these days. Lifestyle photography has transformed into branding photography.
Andrew: Brand photography. Yeah, well, that’s just commercial commercial photography at 25 percent overcharge, isn’t it? Yeah.
Marcus: Yeah. I’m very good value. I’ll have you.
Andrew: I’m looking at I’m looking at your pictures right now, Marcus. I think they are definitely worth the money, however much it is. Even at West Coast US rates. Yeah, I do have clients who come back. But this mix of commercial and and family or domestic, I like taking photographs of people.
Sam: Yeah. So the key is the people, whether they’re at work, whether they’re at home, whether they’re with a horse, it’s the people.
Andrew: Yeah, it doesn’t really it doesn’t really matter. What you’re trying to do is bring out that character and that personality and show who they are.
Sam: So actually, I mean, is that different depending on whether that’s for more commercial edge or for more personal use or effectively trying to bring out those same traits either way?
Andrew: I don’t think so.
Marcs: No, I mean, you get more time. I think you’d probably get more time with a social, you know, a family portrait than a commercial one tends to be. You know, you can sometimes you get minutes to have a commercial portrait.
Andrew: Well, yesterday, yesterday I went to one of my regular headshot clients not far from here and we shot everything on a white wall because the meeting room we booked where I would set up a background had been taken by somebody more senior. And the secondary room, somebody filled with a load of junk. And the third area that we used last year because we couldn’t get the first two. Somebody put some desks in. So we were literally in a corridor and now the white wall. So there was no room for a background. But fortunately, nobody damaged the wall. It’s great. But I photographed 15 people in, I don’t know, maybe an hour. But it was good. But they didn’t want to be photographed. So there’s no point in dragging it out and making it painful. Get them in, get them happy, get them done, snap them, get them away.
Sam: I guess the key is to stop them looking like a kind of petrified rabbit in the headlights, isn’t it? Relax them enough.
Andrew: Absolutely. There is no value at all in a technically perfect photograph of somebody looking terrified unless it’s a poster for a horror movie. And nobody wants to be in a poster for a horror movie, particularly unless they’ve been paid a gazillion dollars to do it. Go back two weeks, I spent a day doing some brand photography and some headshots for health and safety advisor. I can see you’re blazing over already, but she was really, really good fun and easy to work with. And she got some clients on board and we set up all sorts of things.
But we produced quite a body of work that she can use for different things. And that was quite interesting because, you know, oh, we’re in a different place and we’re now going to do a different version of what we’ve already done four times.
Marcus: So you have a range of clients that you work with, Andrew, it sounds like, and a range of different styles to cope with that, no doubt. How do you manage all that, all these different things going on?
Sam: Can I add to that as well, Marcus, because I think, can we talk about the website stuff as well? Because I website design always, but notice one of the hours before we had the meeting with Andrew, I’m looking and you’ve got quite a lot of websites, haven’t you? Which is quite interesting as we talk, you’ve got like a one for, I found three, one for family, one for headshots, one for commercial, they’re quite different with different names, different, completely kind of separate. How do you manage that having different brands?
Andrew: How do we manage that? Well, I think probably if a marketing consultant were to look at it, they’d probably say that I manage it badly. But the whole thing about being found online, I do get found online regularly, is offering appropriate, relevant content to the audience looking for it. And I think, Sam, you might agree with that.
Sam: Yeah, yep. So you’re an SEO expert without knowing it.
Andrew: I have a very good book on SEO, which I’ll share with you later, written by a friend of mine. But the whole point is to be able, anybody who’s looking for commercial photography or brand photography needs to see examples of brand photography. With the best will in the world, they don’t want to see new baby photographs or a picture of a dog on a beach or whatever. If you’re looking for weddings, you don’t want to see welding. And if you’re looking for family…
Marcus: Weddings and welding, I like what you did there.
Andrew: Yeah, you’re good at that, aren’t you? And conversely, if you’re looking for, you know, I did an inquiry yesterday from a lady who wants me to do a portrait for her mother’s 80th birthday, which she thinks will be of her and her siblings and maybe the grandkids.
And grandma is actually just wanting pictures of the grandkids because grandma’s only want pictures of grandkids. They’re not interested in their kids at this point. So she found relevant content online, local to her, and then made an inquiry. And I’m a great…
Sam: So you’re kind of taking two approaches there, aren’t you? You’re kind of taking the approach in terms of getting found in the SEO that the websites just talk about one thing. So the commercial headshot thing is just headshots, headshots, headshots. And then once people have found you, then once they’re looking at the site, they’re then seeing what they’re looked for. So if they’re looking for headshots, they’re seeing lots of examples of headshots. As you say, there isn’t dog portraits mixed in there or weddings.
Andrew: That’s right. If you look at just headshots.photo, small plug there for my website, I’ll say that again, just headshots.photo. I have landing pages for most of the towns within an hour’s drive of where I am. So I will get inquiries from Liverpool, Preston, Chester, Wrexham, Nantwich, where I live, Warrington, et cetera, because I’ve got relevant content and that’s the key. And I’ve also got on my andrewcollierphotography.co.uk website where you can see examples of my family and pet work. I blog a lot. I do on all my sites, but I blog regularly, put up some new content, talk about the place where I did it or the industry did so that we’ve got relevant content. And I think that’s really, really important. And sticking up a website with relevant content, relevant keywords and relevant phrases is really quite simple. And you don’t have to go too mad. I stick up a blog post every month or two.
Sam: We’re not talking to owners. We’re not talking every week. Oh my God, must write six more blogs. But you are talking about making sure you do do presumably you are doing it every month or so and you’re keeping on top of it.
Andrew: I also have another route to market, which is I have two others. One is networking.
I’m a firm believer in networking and building relationships with people. It’s a slow burn. It takes time to develop. That brings in good quality work because people want to work with you because you are somebody that somebody they know knows likes and trusts.
Marcus: So what kind of networking do you do, Andrew? Sorry to butt in there, but what the normal, the BNI, whatever.
Andrew: BNI is a good training ground, but it doesn’t fit in with my business because I don’t have time for it. I run a solo business. We just about touch six figures across the spread and that’s in pounds, not dollars or Italian lira or whatever it might be. And I work long days and I work hard, but I’m having a lot of fun. So I don’t actually do any work at all. It’s not work. It’s a way of life. When we finished here, I’m going for lunch with a long term client. She is a music teacher. She’s 70. And we’re going to talk about her new brand photography and headshots, which is mainly focused around her and her piano. And she has a really, really interesting backstory. Her mother was a child who came across on the Kindertransport in 1938, et cetera. So there’s a lot of stories that we talk about all that, none of which actually need to know to take photographs of them, but it just helps you understand who the person is and what their life’s about and so on. And I find life stories fascinating. And then I’ve got a meeting with another client about some fine art stuff that I’m doing for another part of my business. So if you go to andrewcollier.photo, you can see examples of my limited edition fine art photography. We’re doing editions of 10. They’re ridiculously expensive. One day, if I’m famous, they might be worth a fortune. So I think it’s probably marginally better than buying a lottery ticket. But at the moment, that’s where it is. But there is room for improvement and we shall. And then my other route to market, believe it or not, our artisan makers market.
Sam: Okay. In terms of what you’re photographing the artisans there?
Andrew: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Right. So artisan makers markets tend to be appeal to what we used to call in marketing many, many, many decades ago as AB1 type people. People who’ll spend eight quid on a punnet of olives or six pounds on an artisan pork pie. And have three cockapoos at foreground to go. Have money to indulge in things that they like. And one of the problems with online marketing, everybody’s like, oh, you must be on Facebook. You must be on Instagram. You’ve got to do TikTok. You’ve got to do this. You’ve got to do that. You’ve got to do the other answer. No, you’ve got to do stuff which will reach the audience that wants to buy what you have to sell. Simple as that. Don’t need to do anything else. There’s no point in doing anything else. So if I get my phone and put a post on Facebook and you look at your phone and you see a two inch picture, it doesn’t make any sense. A two inch picture of what I do doesn’t make any sense when an original might be three foot, four foot. So what the artisan markets allow me to do is have a store that ridiculously cheap money and I have examples of my work. That one I showed you before will be on my market store, the Nuts and Makers Market on Sunday morning. You can see the real thing. You can see the glass. You can see the paper. You can see talk about how I print them. You can talk about sustainability. So people can see the real thing and talk about it and talk about what they want to do and we can bounce ideas around and that’s really hugely productive.
Sam: Very cool. That’s an interesting approach because it makes perfect sense with what you’re saying with the target market. The right people are there.
Andrew: That’s right.
Sam: To buy olives, the right people are there. You catch their attention and they’re the people who could well spend a few thousand pounds on a photo shoot without much of a problem.
Andrew: That’s right and they do. Somebody picked up my card at the Christmas market and when it snowed a few weeks ago, Saturday afternoon, a phone call. Any chance you could come and do family portraits tomorrow morning before the snow melts?
Sam: Wow. Yeah.
Andrew: It’s like January. I’m not busy. Yeah, of course I can. I think she spent a couple of thousand on some really nice big statement pieces and my head shots. Everybody does head shots cheaper than me. Absolutely everybody does cheaper than me but we’ll do three, four, five outfit changes, numerous background changes. We have homemade cake. I have a make-up artist who works with me. My sessions are fun. They’re different.
Sam: If you get cake, I’m tempted already.
Andrew: Yeah, that’s right.
Marcus: It’s always coming down to cake.
Andrew: Absolutely. Sugar and caffeine every time.
Sam: Perfect. Which is ironic really.
Andrew: I’m diabetic so I can’t have it.
Marcus: Great stuff.
Andrew: It works really, really, really, really well and all I would say on marketing is just find the right way to the audience that you want to talk to. It doesn’t necessarily mean to say it’s the latest thing and if you’re told by somebody to go on Instagram or Facebook or whatever, the chances are it’s because they want to get you to spend some money with them to show you how to do it properly. So it’s in their best interest to get you on rather than your own, a little bit cynical.
Sam: A little bit but yes, the principle of find where you’re, fish where the fish are as somebody often says to me.
Andrew: Yeah
Sam: Find where your target market is and no point looking elsewhere for them.
Andrew: That’s right.
Sam: Don’t go fishing on the road. You’re not going to find much. Cool, our market is already going to be took. Marketing long enough.
Marcus: When am I going to talk about cameras? We’re done, the show’s up.
Sam: Thank you for joining us Andrew. That has been really, really interesting and in all sorts of unexpected directions there I have to say that we weren’t expecting but very interesting ones. So thank you so much. We do have a shoot to the top webinar coming up, don’t we Marcus?
Marcus: We do indeed. Are you going to tell us about it?
Sam: We’ll go on then. So Wednesday 2nd of April and it is about how you can charge more for your photography. How can you become more of a premium photographer, come across as a premium photographer so you can get those higher paying clients in every time. It’s completely free, we’ll put the link in the show notes for how you can book on or just go to the shoot to the top website and you will find the webinar there in the menu.
Andrew: I have some thoughts on that. I have some thoughts on that, if you look too cheap people will walk past you, you lack credibility. Obviously if you’re too expensive, you’re too expensive but too expensive for who? People who want a cheap photographer aren’t your target audience.
Sam: I remember years ago my dad was a wedding photographer and he had to put his prices up to get more customers.
Andrew: I think that’s something that terrifies most but usually what we do is we see a price, you know, somebody asks how much you did, you see a price in your head and you think oh bloody hell that’s a fortune. You knock a hundred quid off it, they don’t know whether to expect you to say 600 pounds, 700 pounds, 800 pounds, a thousand pounds. They’re not expecting, they don’t know what that number is so their reaction is probably going to be oh that’s a lot, whatever the number is. And really if people are coming to you to find, you know, the classic one is I want some family portraits, how much is it? My headshots are not so bad, how much is a headshot? Come to one of our sessions, it’s 195 and you get all this. If people are going to start from the point of view of how much is it then they’re probably not the people you want, you know, the ones you want are the ones who say I’ve seen your work, it’s absolutely gorgeous, I would like something like that or I’ve seen that hanging in Diana’s house, we’d like something for us but we haven’t got as much money as them. Is there something we can do, you know, and yeah price comes into it but I think, you know, be brave, start high, you can always come down.
Sam: Sounds good, excellent. Right, Andrew, so we’re going to rope Andrew into the webinar, I think. Yeah.
Andrew: second of April, I put it in the diary.
Sam: Thank you for joining us, Andrew, that has been brilliant, loads and loads for our listeners and Marcus, I will see you next week.
Marcus: Thank you, Andrew and see you next week, Sam.
Andrew: Sam, Marcus, thank you very much, really enjoyed it, love to come on again sometime.
