My Biggest Photography Regret

My photography regret sounds like it’s gonna be pretty huge, huh? Like I stepped on the back on a bride’s dress and left a footprint? Or accidentally insulted a client by calling them someone else’s name when I met them? Thankfully, neither of these things have happened. My photography regret is little in the scheme of things. It’s business related, and one of those, “Dang it, I wish I hadn’t done that,” kinds of things.

It happened slowly and quietly. My photography regret lurked and waited. Things were going great, and I was blogging all my photo sessions. My clients had been happy to see their posts, and share their links with friends and family. Since all was going well, dumdumdum…I got complacent. What is it that’s in us that has to thrive on a teeny bit of drama, even if it’s self made? I created my own problem. Cue the Beastie Boys “Sabotage” song. Self sabotage. I got lazy.

Then, we relocated to Kentucky and I took a bit of a break from photography (why??) and I quietly, shamefully…didn’t renew my blog domain name. By the time I shook off my complacency, it was too late. I couldn’t renew the name, or recover the blog.

You ask what’s the big deal? Well, all my hard work posting weekly and driving traffic to my site, therefore, creating new business, came to a grinding halt. I no longer had the internet presence I used to. No one knew who I was. But worst, and this really is the worst part- I felt like I failed my clients. They had their photos and their prints-their orders were long ago completed. But that link that they had to an online snapshot of memories was taken from them.

No one has ever complained of this to me (I know some really nice people)! It might even matter more to me than to anyone else-photos were delivered, so everything’s all ok. It’s really all me-my sense of shame for not wanting to pony up $18 to Go Daddy to keep my business online.

The takeaway, my friends is this…even if you are having a moment of self-doubt, want to quit photography, or just think you don’t actually need that website (you do, you really do, trust me), just hold on. Pay the small fee, and then make your decision. Once that website is gone, so are all the memory snapshots for those who were a part of it.

And always backup your images. This, I am proud to say, I do regularly and I’m happy for my image hording ways. Because even though my old blog is gone, I could recreate it today because I keep my clients’ photos for much longer than I probably should. Silver linings and lessons learned. I can definitely say I now backup my blog regularly, and amswphotography.com will be around for quite some time.

Thanks for hanging out with me.