Wedding photographer and WPPI speaker Vanessa Joy shares her wisdom and knowledge on what it took to get to the top and what it takes to stay there.

Some people think that my life is super easy now that I’ve “made it” and assume I don’t have to work that hard to get clients. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Actually, I think I have to work even harder and spend more time and money getting the right clients than when I first started. The journey hasn’t ended for me—I’m still on it. It’s been a hell of a road so far.

A Long Career in Portrait Photography Means Selling Printed Products

When I first started dabbling in photography, I was in high school and my photography teacher at the time shot weddings on the weekends. After I graduated, I worked for him while I went to school thinking that I, too, would be a teacher—although a teacher of Spanish and not photography—and worked weddings on the weekends. I had no concept that you could be a full-time photographer. It was sort of just a dream.

I vividly remember the very first time I went to a photography trade show a few years later—PHOTOPLUS in New York City. I couldn’t help but be in awe at just how large this photography thing was. It was all I could do to not skip through the aisles of the trade show floor like a kid in a candy shop. 

I remember looking at the photos of people at the Canon stage and somebody mentioning to me that these people were Explorers of Light. I knew right then and there that the title was something to be not only revered but would eventually be a goal of mine as well.  

Photographing Children with Creative Light in Three Artistic Setups

A friend of mine, Kenny Kim, encouraged me that I could be doing this for myself. I laughed when he suggested it, but I took his word for it anyway and started my own business while still working for that same photographer and starting my first year as a Spanish teacher. To say I was busy would be an understatement. 

Two and a half years later, I got so busy with weddings that I had to leave teaching in the middle of the year. Absolutely no one in my school system was happy about me abandoning my post mid-year, but I truly never looked back. Every September I do a happy dance that I’m not going back to school!

I decided to take the jump into being an educator in the photo industry when I had gone to a few different trade shows and wanted to learn from these same photographers that I had always looked up to. I went to the classes and, while they were amazing photographers, they didn’t necessarily know how to teach a concept—business, photography or otherwise. Because I was a college-educated former teacher, I thought, I could do this. Not only do I understand photography and run a very successful business, but I know how to teach a concept to a class of students, no matter what the topic is. I decided to give it a try and asked a friend of mine who was helping find speakers for a local organization to set me up with one of those spots.

She did, and I can still remember it to this day. It was a small diner in New Jersey: the Peter Pank Diner. Since then, I’ve been working really hard at getting as many different speaking jobs as I can and more recently, been teaching quite a bit outside of the photography industry. It’s absolutely another full-time job. 

Sage Advice from a Marketing Expert on Creating a Long-Term Work-Life Balance

It’s always been my motto since then that I didn’t want to become just an educator, but make sure that photography continued to be my main source of income. Not that I think you can’t teach photography if it’s not your main source of incomes; it’s just that I think you become very irrelevant, very quickly. 

From the outside, it might seem like I was only teaching for a couple of years and then got scooped up by Profoto and scooped up by Canon, but trust me, it wasn’t that simple. I worked at building relationships in all those different places. I would speak on platforms that some would say wasn’t worth it. I even occasionally lost money speaking in places where the expenses outweighed the speaker fee (though I think every experience is always worth it). It’s a constant effort to balance the life of a wedding photographer while being a full-time educator as well.

I was recently asked the question, how did I manage to rise as a female in the photography industry in a male-dominant market? I’m probably going to have a very unpopular opinion here, but I’m going to tell the truth. 

When I first started as a photographer, it was absolutely male dominated. I remember the first time I walked into my local photography meeting. There were only two women, and one of them was me. To be honest, I found the fact that I was a female to be an advantage and not a disadvantage. I was in weddings and I could relate to brides better than any man ever could. I easily stood out in the crowd of male photographers. 

Leveling the Playing Field as a Female Wedding Filmmaker

I saw my female minority status at the time as a strength instead of a weakness. I looked for ways to use it to stand out instead of hurt my career. Maybe it’s my perspective or maybe I’m naive, but I’ve found that being a very hardworking woman in a male-dominated industry, or previously male-dominated industry, has typically given me an edge. Have I been harassed in the photo world? Sure. Have I ever had colleagues belittle my work and intelligence because I’m a woman? Yeah. But those moments fueled my fire.

My advice to anyone trying to break into the field of either photography or education would just be to not give up. I could write articles and articles about all the different times I’ve gone wrong. But if you really love it, then that’s what you have to do. If you don’t truly love it or you find photography or teaching or anything that you’re doing more frustrating than rewarding, pursue a different career. You have to love the journey and never hope to reach the end.