How I turned my source of frustration into a business

As an avid consumer of music and being a dude who likes to craft images, shooting musicians doing their thing sounds pretty damn cool. In fact as a young guy trying to kindle his passion for photography this is probably a very good field to get started. Not only because you learn to actually work out what images work for a band and so forth, but because you actually get properly motivated.

The amount of applause I recieved for my early (honestly bad) work either on social media or by artists themselves still amazes me. I guess you could say I fell into the cathegory of those people in the creative market that accepted 'exposure' and more simply put 'attention' as payment.

But once that buzz wears off things can go south pretty quickly. Therefore everyone I know who has worked in the field of music photography for more than a year has been frustrated with the scene and the market or both at some point...

Once you want to make this a business, because your work isn't that bad anymore and you worked out one or two good deals before etc, the tone definitely changes. Joke's kind of on myself, since I definitely educated people towards not paying me, rather than the opposite. The tone can change from 'Hey, you met this guy? This guy is AWESOME, you need to have pictures taken by him! ' to 'Do you really think your work is worth that money? You know I can get some kid to do it for free'. Or even worse. However I have signed an NDA saying I won't talk about it... that's how far this kind of thing can go. Managements cornering you legally, so you don't speak out about how massively they have blackballed you for simply asking money for your work. I think that is indicative for what sort of scumbaggery you sometimes have to deal with.

Obviously that whole motivation you got before can turn into a real grudge or at the very least frustration. Since I am not the type of person that likes this sort of self inflicted unhappiness, I looked for a solution. Where can I sell the skills I learned in music photography, possibly making it a really good business model? The answer is so embarassingly simple: you sell your images to people who sell the shows. Not the promoters, not the managements, definitely not the fans (that's super wrong, bro). You sell to the people that actually do the work, the guys that set up the sound system, that think about how the show is lit, the dude that unloads tons of heavy gear... or actually his boss.

Since then I have worked an awful lot with production companies, more precisely: event production companies. It's always a gripping experience documenting a projects progress from sweaty people unloading flight case after flight case to the finished setup and the sometimes glamorous guests.

Production companies more than often do not care about having good images of their product and/or often run into issues with licensing other photographer's images for their marketing uses. Ultimately they face the problem of not having images with that 'wow' effect that can inspire a client to make a decision to another design or different elements. It's kind of hard to explain some things even. Sure, there is rendering software that shows how something will look... but never how it will feel.

Taking my skills I picked up when shooting live shows and the experience I gathered working as a stage hand myself I work towards delivering a set that makes my clients go 'WOW' and helps them give that feeling to their client.