How I Started a Photography Business Without a Camera

I studied photography at college straight from school and spent a year assisting at a large commercial studio before setting up my own. I had the passion, I had the training and I had the drive. What I did not quite have at twenty years old, despite coming from a family of entrepreneurs, was the business sense to match. The studio had real overheads, rent, equipment, running costs, and after a few years I made the decision to step away when I became a mum.

12 years passed. Then I moved myself and my 4 children from the west coast of Scotland to the east, to a city where I knew nobody, as a newly single mum who needed to support her family. For context, crossing Scotland is nothing like crossing America coast to coast, but for me it was a completely fresh start in every sense.

So I started again. No equipment, no premises, and the remnants of a rather good but very small portfolio from my previous life as a photographer. There was one more complication. The world of film photography I had trained in had gone. Digital was everything now and I had to learn it from scratch, teaching myself computer editing at the same time as rebuilding a business.

When my first commission came in I borrowed a second hand camera from a local camera store, delivered the job within 12 hours and took it back the next day. I did that 4 times until I had enough in my business account to buy my own camera. It was not new.

What those years taught me is that it was never about the equipment or the perfect conditions or the right moment. It was about knowing enough to get results and knowing enough about business to keep going.

That is what I bring to Mabel & Møøse Education. Not just the technical knowledge but the understanding of what it actually takes to build something real when the circumstances are far from ideal.