01. Find Your Weekend
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Welcome to the Find Your Weekend podcast! I am your host Hannah and I’m so happy you guys are here with me. I am a brand and product photographer currently living in San Francisco. I just moved here a few weeks ago from Atlanta and I am here to talk all things business, pivoting, and really finding your weekend.
In the last two weeks that I’ve been here, I’ve gotten such a taste of what life is like when you have more time, spend less time working, and more time living your life. I am here to help you guys do the same; how to find your weekend, how to get the most of the time you do spend working, and how to work smarter not harder.
Backstory About Me
I started doing photography professionally in 2015 and I started with weddings, families, and engagements. After a couple of years, I went full time as a wedding photographer and left my corporate job. I was living my best life, I really thought wedding photography was going to be my end all be all and I was so happy. I loved, loved, loved what I did. But I quickly realized that while I was really enjoying myself, I was missing out on a ton of life experiences. I basically spent zero time with my then boyfriend, now husband, and never got to hang out with my friends on the weekend. I was working every weekend and it was absolutely exhausting. It would be fine if everyone in my life also worked a similar schedule where they were working Saturday and Sunday but they had a couple days off during the week. But I was alone in this and I was tired.
Working as a Wedding Photographer
Weddings are not easy work. They are 8 to 10 to 12-hour days, not including travel time and then you come home and you backup your photos. You cull, you edit. It’s just a lot. It’s a lot, lot, lot of work.
When you come down to think of it in terms of your hourly rate, yes we’re getting paid a substantial amount for one day, but when you calculate how many hours you’re actually spending on wedding photography, a lot of wedding photographers probably don’t even break minimum wage. The time it takes to get to and from weddings, the time they’re there, the time they take culling, the time they take editing, communication, just everything is a lot of work and I think a lot of people don’t realize how much it really is. When you first get into it, you can get caught up in the glamour, and the beauty of weddings, and it’s an amazing day and an amazing subject to photograph but I realized there was more to life than working every single weekend. And during the week, I was spending weekdays working as well as doing lifestyle, brand, etc.
After about two years of this, I got married myself and I think it was after my wedding was over that I kind of realized, okay I need to take a step back from this industry. I can figure something else out, I can figure out where to pivot. I was getting a little disillusioned by the industry as a whole because I was stuck between price points so I wasn’t a budget photographer but I wasn’t a luxury photographer either. I was kind of missing that sweet spot of getting a lot of clients and it was super frustrating. I felt like all my inquiries had dried up and no one wanted to hire me. I was feeling very distraught by the whole thing, especially after taking the whole month of October off for my own wedding and honeymoon, which was usually my busiest month and I didn’t have any income for that month.
Making the Shift in My Business
Towards the end of 2019, I was going into a new year with maybe two weddings on the books and I was just kind of hoping and praying that people were going to come my way and clients were going to find me. I was advertising on some popular wedding sites and I was starting to get more inquiries but people weren’t converting and then 2020 happened; COVID hit and I have never been so grateful to have all of my inquiries dry up than I was in March of 2020 when I saw my wedding photographer friends canceling weddings, having clients cancel, going through lawyers trying to figure out what was covered and how much money they could keep and what to refund, etc. It was absolute hell for these people and I had one cancellation and two reschedules for that year and in the grand scheme of things, it could have been so much worse if I came into the year full of weddings.
Prior to 2020, I was shooting between 25-30 weddings a year and somehow, someone was looking out for me and I found my opportunity to pivot industries at the exact right time.
Making My Pivot
When 2020 hit, of course, COVID happened and for a little while I wasn’t working too much but I was able to still make the same amount of money I made in 2019 even though we were in the middle of a pandemic. This was absolutely remarkable and I was expecting that my income was going to tank and was worried about how I was going to replace the income I made with weddings when I wasn’t shooting weddings anymore. Everything worked itself out.
In 2021, we were still dealing with the pandemic but I was able to make more money than I ever made in my entire life. I think that I can completely contribute this to my ability to pivot, my ability to change industries when an industry was no longer serving me, and that is why I started this podcast. I know there are so many people out there who are doing something right now that their heart is not in but they feel obligated to do it because of a comfy income cushion. I am here to give you the tips and tricks that I used to get myself out of that to do something that I really love and I am so glad you guys are along for the ride!
Follow me on Instagram at @hannahlozanophoto where you can find everything about me, get to know my photography, ask questions, and send in ideas for episodes. If there’s anyone you’d like to hear on the podcast, let me know, I am all ears!
