Feeling undervalued as a photographer or creative? I get it. We’ve all been there. And you know. It sucks.
I recently had the pleasure of meeting a new friend who made a big move across the country about two years ago. She’s recently rebranded and now is facing a lot of criticism from her audience that she is not WORTH paying.
UM WAT
I was so sad to hear that she’d been dealing with this and so I sent her a DM on Instagram to dive in a little further. While we didn’t take a super deep dive, I gathered a few pieces of information from here.
1. She’s not appealing to the right audience
2. Her work is beautiful and deserves to be paid
Being Undervalued as a Photographer Happens
It’s the truth. We all feel it sometimes. But why are we being undervalued? Let’s take a look not at our audience, who is obviously the wrong audience, but at ourselves.
Value Comes from Self-Knowledge
We have to love to ourselves and believe in our product. But it’s hard to do those things when we don’t even know our why.
When we begin to know our why, it allows us to continue growing and that leads us to building our brand.
Our brand is rooted in what brings us joy
By understanding why we are being undervalued as a photographer, we can then begin to realize our why. Our why allows us to have the joy that we all want to experience on the daily as self-employed entrepreneurs. And once we’ve ironed out our why, we can build our brand around these things.
Once our brand is solidified and we know we can talk about these things. We build content around these things, exclusively.
And from that content comes….
AMAZING CLIENTS WHO LOVE US and VALUE US AS PHOTOGRAPHERS (AND CREATIVES).
A solid brand creates trust. Trust turns into perceived value
Instead of feeling sorry that we can’t grow our businesses, let’s take a step back and ask ourselves “why do I feel undervalued as a photographer?” From there, we can then begin to move forward again and to rebuild our business.
Instead of continuing to blah blah blah about this, take a listen over on my podcast, which I recorded exclusively for this reason.
To learn more about building value with your audience, check out this blog!
New Adventure Productions is owned by Nate Dale, a Lafayette, Indiana wedding and elopement photographer. We travel nation and worldwide to capture beautiful and intimate weddings and elopements while providing a guidance, love, help along the way.
He is married to the love of his life, Felicia with their two doggies, Pika and Princess.