Aspire Part I

~backblip~

As some of you may know, since I've finished my PhD I decided to give this old photography lark a go full time. Beats the dole! Now photography I know a little bit about, business - I know nothing. So off I trotted to the Lake District for an Aspire CPT (formerly Annabel Williams CPT) course, The A to Z of Photography and Business, four days of pretty intense training with five other wannabes :)

I learnt so much this week, about business, sales, customer service, suppliers, IT, accounting and more, it really was brilliant. Highly recommended to anyone starting out, the trainers Catherine Connor and Jane Breakell have trained some of the best in the business and it's easy to see why. Writing this 2 months later I've still only put a fraction of what I learned into action, and that's with working 12-15 hour days most days! I can see now how much work goes into starting a business, anyone can give up their job and call themselves a "professional photographer" but to build a successful business is going to take *a lot* of work.

On the second day of the course we had some children come in to model for us, and lifestyle and wedding photographer Ian Scott showed us how he goes about his child photoshoots. Another real eye-opener, and I picked up some useful tips. Here he is with our first model of the day, little Skyla (3). You can read more about the course and see some of my pics of Skyla on my blog.