And we're recording magic.

Yay.

Yeah, we had to get a few things set up. Sometimes the techie side of this is a little weird, so hi, Sarah. Thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me. Nice to see you again.

Yeah, you too. So we met at the Family Narrative last month in Palm Springs, which was a ton of fun. It was like the first time I think I really gone anywhere or done anything in a while.

First time I've done anything for myself in a long time. Yeah, it was great.

Did you go to other family Narratives?

I did the online one back in 2020. That was my first introduction. I kind of bummed that I missed out on the other in person one now that things have changed, but yeah. Glad I made it to Palm Springs for sure.

Yeah. If you're listening and you don't know what we're talking about, it was a family photographer retreat, conference, gathering, whatever you want to call it, put on by Posey quarterman and anomy tonkin. And they've been doing it for a number of years, but I just also found out about it. And the weird intersection I had was that even though I'm a family photographer of like, twelve years, they were like, would you like to come and read Tarot at the event? And I thought, that's two of my favorite things ever. So that's how we got to know each other better, which is a really cool thing. Actually. When I've been reflecting back on it, I realized that it's so nice to have had that time to really chat with new people and make new friendships, but go, like, really deep really fast, which is something that I think Tarot somehow facilitates just really well. I don't know what your experience was.

I feel like within five minutes you basically nailed everything about me and everybody I've spoken to who met with you felt the exact same way. So everyone had really positive experiences.

That's really cool. And even though I'm sitting here hearing you say that, I'm also incredibly amazed and in awe of that tool all the time because it works, and I don't necessarily even understand how it works. Obviously I have some agency in the whole process and how it's conducted and stuff, but it really is pretty magical how Tarot can really get to the heart of things. Have you reflected on your reading? We don't have to talk about personal stuff, but just curious on a general overview level. Have you?

Yeah, I feel like the experience really kind of put me on the track I've been looking for. I feel like, I don't know, just with the pandemic and everything, I feel like I kind of lost track of my personal work and just the reason I got into photography to begin with. After coming back and trying to reprioritize that side of myself again, I bought a new camera.

Oh, nice.

Yay. So I bought a Fuji, so it's super small and portable and I am back to carrying a camera with me everywhere, which I used to always do that and then I stopped and so that was really great. And then I signed up for Summer Murdoch's Magic of Light.

Right on that.

I just started last week and it's amazing. So I feel like all of these stars are aligning and it's all like making sense. The next steps I want to make for myself. The past month has been very eye opening for me in a lot of different ways and definitely very inspiring too.

That's so cool. Yeah, summer's work is stunning and I mean, everyone there. It was really cool to be part of a gathering where I think the I don't think it was necessarily a prerequisite, but it was really encouraged that you had experience as a photographer. It wasn't like a beginner's thing. It was really like folks that have been in it a long time. When did you start?

Almost five years ago. That's when I started my business, actually.

Yeah. Cool.

That's awesome.

Well, yeah. Tell me a little bit about that. What brought you to the place where you were like, I'm going to start a business? I know people listening are often in that boat where they are either trying to figure out if they should quit their job and go full time or maybe their income is supplemented in other ways and they just want to really have a side hustle type of thing but are really feeling pulled to photography. And I think it's just interesting to hear how people came to this place.

Yeah, I feel like for me I was in kind of a transitional place. My kids at the time when I started my business were two and five and a half or something, so they were little. We just moved from San Francisco to Oakland and I worked for a long time before kids and went back to it when my son was little. I was an early childhood special educator, so I had that part of my life. And then when we moved to Oakland, it just was daunting to try and start that business here because I actually had my own business. I worked at different nonprofits and different places over the years, but ultimately had my own business in the end and doing family coaching and training and working with kids in schools and just not having the same connections of therapists and knowing their schools to recommend families. I just kind of felt like I was in this place of what do I want to do next? And I had gotten into photography when my son was now ten was he was probably about a year old and I just felt I wanted to not miss anything and so it started off as just an interest to document life and then quickly became more for me and started taking classes all this stuff. So I had gotten to the point where I was shooting a manual and wanting to keep learning more, and then friends started asking me to take photos. So I started thinking when we moved, well, maybe I can start a business and the kids get a little older. And I reached out shortly after we moved to Oakland. I reached out to a local photographer here that I really respected and admired. And so she's like, let's meet up, and I'll take a look at your work and just talk and see what you're thinking. I can tell you a little bit about how I started my business. So we met up in a coffee shop, and she looked at my photo, and at that point I was thinking maybe like a year from now, she's like, you need to start now, go for it.

I met with her a couple of times. She was super helpful. Also, she was at the family narrative too. And so it started it evolved from there. I created a website, and pretty quickly I was busy. It was amazing. I wasn't quite expecting that. That's awesome.

That's so great.

Yeah, it was good. So then I was trying to manage now I'm starting this business and wasn't expecting it to grow so quickly. And my kids yeah, it was great.

That's really cool. I think, first of all, like, reaching out to folks that are established in your area. I did the same thing 1213 years ago. I was just like I sent some emails out and said, I'm really interested in this. Would you want to meet for coffee? There's a fine line there, too, where you don't want to suddenly latch on to that person as your mentor without acknowledging that it might be something you'd want to pay them for or something. But really, that initial meetup is huge. It's a great thing to do if you're looking for a support system, and that advice, and I was just talking about this regarding a totally different thing I'm doing. But that advice to just start, it just comes up all the time, and I think people don't feel like they're ever ready. I really don't know if there's such a thing as really feeling ready. Maybe a little bit, but you just kind of have to if you have and I think this happens with a lot of creative folks who want things to look nice and be pretty and everything ready to go for their clients. But if you have a reticence to not want to change anything or mess up, this is going to be a hard road for you. Because really, it's about starting and iterating and iterating and iterating I mean, it never ends. So it's like if you don't feel totally ready to jump in, that's okay. Because the stuff that maybe needs a little needs a little tweaking, needs a little work, maybe entire packages, maybe your entire brand even changes from like newborns to pets or something.

Whatever. But you just have to start somewhere or you're never going to know the answers to those things. So I think that was really good advice just to start dive in. Did you make a website before you did anything or did you kind of network and just sort of show up and do some photos and then kind of build from there? How did you sort of get everything pulled together? Were you using photos of your kiddos or what was that sort of I think this is something I get asked a lot in my mentorship stuff is like chicken or the egg. What do I do first?

For me, I had taken a ton of pictures of my kids, but no one's going to hire me just for the photos of my two kids, right? And so I reached out to at the time, my son had been in a preschool and so I just reached out to some families that I knew who I thought would be open and would, you know, at that point I was trying to find my way in my style too. And so families who I felt like I knew I didn't want to do pose photography and I wanted people to play and really building on my early childhood background. And so I kind of reached out to those families who I felt like would be more open to that idea. And then I had a friend I wanted to also get into newborn work and I had a friend who just had a baby, so I took some pictures for her. And so actually I had taken pictures for her. That was a year before. And then her daughter was older, so they had a family session. Oh, nice. One year old. So I just built it that way. And the advice that was given to me is really you only need like 20 to 30 pictures for your portfolio on your website. And so I try to just find some variety and I think for me too, I'm kind of a goal oriented person. And so I started slow and small and I also did a bunch of research and figuring out the best website service, the best CRM, the best gallery service that would work for me. And some of those things evolved now and changed.

And I started off doing being all inclusive so I didn't have to deal with prints and any of that because that felt really overwhelming for me. I do that now, but I only started doing that. So I kept everything really simple and just to see what would happen. Because when you jump in, you don't really know, are you going to be successful? Are people going to hire you? Are you going to totally fail? So I also don't want to put a huge investment in everything.

Sure.

So I stuck with the camera I had and it wasn't until maybe six months in that I was like, okay, I'm ready to upgrade my camera. A lot of this was advice given to me, too. And at the time, also, I took a couple of business classes through. They changed the name. Click photo school. So I don't know if those business classes are still around, but they were really helpful in talking about SEO. Like, all these things I had no idea about.

Yeah, I love that advice. We've talked about this on the show many times. But just starting with the camera you have and doing your best, maybe you need to get, like, one more lens so you have a couple of things to play around with, but just learning with the basics, or even when it comes to business in general, I think it's and I do this. I mean, I have essentially, like, three businesses. I have my Tarot business, I have photo business help, and then my photo business. And they're all by choice, kind of separate entities. But it's tempting when I, for me personally get an idea or I see a website or like, a brand that's really put together, like, you want to have it all in place right away. Just like, I want this really nice menu, and then I want to have an opt in, and I want blog posts that are really pretty, and you can get overwhelmed so fast that you don't do anything. And I think that that is something to be really mindful of, because just starting simple, starting with what you've got, doing some research, like you said, is so important, but just kind of getting a basic foundation in place if you haven't started yet. And then knowing that you can as I already said, you can change that stuff, but you can build on it from there. You don't want to decorate the house before the sheet rock goes up.

Yeah, and I feel like because there's so many pieces of starting a business, keeping it simple is grounding. You start trying to do everything, it can feel just too overwhelming. And I have friends now, local photographer friends, who are redoing their websites and spending lots of money. And I see that, I'm like, maybe I should do that, too. But then the same time, my website I did all by myself. And I'm not a tech minded person. I'm really proud of myself that I did it, but I think it's proof that anyone can build a website. But I feel like I've been telling myself, I get to the point where I feel like it would make a huge difference for my business. I can upgrade it, but at this point, I feel like I have enough work and I'm in a place I want to be. And so why change it if it's working?

Yeah, that website piece is a really interesting one because I think, obviously, the tools since when I started have gotten way easier. Squarespace really put a lot of websites in front of people that were easy to make. And I still use WordPress with my profoto plugin, which I absolutely love. But I also taught myself how to build all of my websites and it's something that if you are listening and you're not sure if you should hire somebody or if you should do it yourself, definitely experiment with that because I find I just did this yesterday. I was putting together a new page for something, and for me personally, the ability to go in and change colors, change fonts, move stuff around, see what it looks like on mobile, and.

Have.

The knowledge and ability to do that myself versus and I've done this as well, emailing somebody and saying, do you think we could try a bigger letter H at the beginning of that first paragraph so that it looks and you end up with this. The amount of time it took me to iterate with someone else and for them to get back to me and then no, that's not quite it yet. Can we try this? Versus me just doing it in 2 seconds on my own has paid off. So even though it seems like maybe a big scary learning curve to try and do it yourself, I think, again, it's less scary. But I also think and again, my personal opinion, it's way easier to be able to do it on your own because as artists, we really like to be creative and try new things and make it look pretty, as I said. And I think that's cool that you did that because I love being able to do that.

Yeah, I definitely like being able to make my own changes and things come up. Like I did school photos, I needed to create a page for that. So yeah, it's like things that sometimes it's on my timeline and I need to get things done. Well, nowadays there's so many website options that you can buy a package and you can still design it yourself. I think there's even five years from when I started to now, there's been so many changes with it. Yeah, I use Squarespace too and I think it's great and it's easy, it's very user friendly and it may not be as flexible as other ones, but I feel like with more options comes more complication. Simple is better for me.

Yeah. And if you're not tech minded, that is a great way to go. So I've tried Squarespace and again, I've been doing the WordPress thing forever, but Profoto has been they've been on the show and I have a relationship with them, but their product and their interfaces, like now that I know it, I know it even better than Squarespace. So it's really I think you're going to hit a learning curve no matter what. But there are certainly things that make it a little easier if you don't know what's going on because WordPress can have a little bit of an overwhelm at first as well. But I'm curious since you're five years in, which is a really interesting period of time, there's a lot of I don't know, there are articles, podcasts, discussions about this sort of curve of people dropping off after the first two years and then hitting kind of like a four or five year kind of stalling point. And you just mentioned that you're kind of reengaging with your creativity again, doing the workshops and stuff like that. But what would you say has been sort of like your biggest hurdle either recently or sort of in general as you sort of reflect on these first five years and where you're at?

I feel like what I've come to just recently realized is that I love my work with families and babies and kids. It's something I've always done. I've always worked with families and kids in my other work too. And so I'm so happy to be doing that. But what I've come to realize is that while I can be creative sometimes during the sessions, it doesn't fill my creative bucket. And so that's really the part that I have been missing for the past couple of years. Because when I stopped picking up my camera all the time, what I've also realized is I've been really good recently about carving out time for exercise and making that a priority. But I haven't made that other part of me a priority of really the creative side and saving time to go on photo walks or to edit my personal photos. And so I feel like that's been a big hurdle for me, is just balancing because you're in a career doing the thing that you love, but then it becomes a job too. And so while I wouldn't want to change it, I also don't want to lose that part of myself either. And so I feel like it's taken me a while to kind of figure that part out. And it's a journey. Everything in life is a journey, right? I feel like I've also been thinking about my kids who really initially were my inspiration for photography, and now they're older, and they're like, don't take my picture. They're just not as interested.

And so I've been like, okay, well, what's my next thing going to be? Am I going to be get into macro photography or street photography through workshop and summer's class? I'm realizing I don't need the next thing. I just need to be open and to be inspired by the things that I see and just have my camera with me and just make sure that I save time for that part too. I feel like I'm in a good space again. That's been an internal struggle for a while for me. And now I feel like that I've been able to identify those two parts of, like, my bucket for families is full with my client work, but then making sure that that other bucket is full.

Yeah, no, that's great. And creativity is such a finicky thing because you can be as you said, you can be creative in a family session, for sure, but there's something about maybe the redundancy or the client expectations that we, in the back of our mind, always have kind of there. We want to make sure that we get photos that we know that they'll love and can sometimes build a little bit of a distance between that space and what we might want to do. I've said this before on the show many times, so longtime listeners will have heard this, like, probably too many times. Laura, who's a local photography photographer here in Minneapolis, came to one of our meetups, and we were discussing creativity, and she said, I just make sure that in every shoot, I shoot something for me, like the weird, the wild, the blurry, the messy, whatever I feel like calls to me. I think almost for. And so I've adopted this, but almost. Especially when you think, like, oh, the client probably won't like this, but I want to do it. There's that weird space that crops up where you are questioning if they'll like it, but pushing yourself to do what's calling you, I think is really, really important.

Yeah, I've been trying to do that with some family. I feel families out for who will be more open to that. And working with toddlers, too, it's also like, you can factor in time if there's the opportunity for that. But I've been trying to incorporate I love using lens baby lenses, and so I've been trying to incorporate some of those into my sessions. And it's interesting because what I've found is a lot of families really love those shots because they're different and unique, and you don't typically see lenses like that in regular family photography. And so it's been reinforcing to me to try and do that more. And I feel like for me, too, it's like, I guess because I have been feeling kind of down about the creative side of me. I hadn't been pushing myself in that same way, but I used to have kind of more that mentality, and so I'm getting back to that, just making time for that, because I think families do sometimes enjoy something different.

Yeah. And I think it can surprise them as well, where they're like, whoa, I didn't realize that you caught that moment, or whatever. And obviously, as photographers, and it's only.

A small portion of what I do. It's not like I'm going to be yeah.

And as photographers, we're so often seeing things completely differently, as we all know, when we have a family that's like, can we go stand over by the I don't know, whatever, in the middle of summer, noon sunlight with a terrible background, and they, you know, like you're just like, no, let's not let's not do that. But they don't know why they're seeing things totally differently. And I think that's the fun of it is like being able to surprise them with I'm guessing from their perspective, watching us do whatever we do and then getting to actually see what's happening is probably pretty fun. So what are you working on right now before we sort of wrap up here? You're working on getting in touch with your creativity, but are you mostly doing family stuff? Is that the main thing?

So I mostly do newborn work families and slowly but surely getting back to freshwater hospital sessions, I love those after babies are born, so obviously COVID that didn't really happen. In fact, I had actually worked really hard to build that part of my business up and was booking so many of those sessions and then they all got canceled and then no one could be in the hospital for a while. But I'm building those back up. So yeah, mostly just families, newborns, and I do a lot of in homework too, again, kind of building on my early childhood background and people playing and interacting with each other. And I really believe that your home is part of your family story. That's where we tell families and kids change and grow. And documenting the things they're into now, I think is important because six months from now, a year from now, will be different.

Yeah, of course. That's huge. Even like people have commented in my sessions, like, oh my gosh, the artwork that was on the fridge in that shoot, there's just all these little details that I think are really special and that home is huge part of what's going on. I mean, even I've had sessions with my dog, one of them was not at the place I live in now. And it's fun to just sort of be like, oh, look at the I don't know, whatever was going on in that other place can really spark some really nice memories.

Yeah.

One thing I like to ask people before we sort of wrap up is what is something that you kind of turn to? It can be a quote, it could be a daily affirmation, it could be just some advice you heard. What's something that you can offer listeners that you think might be helpful for any reason? It could be a business thing, it could be a personal growth thing, it could just be a life thing. But what's like a favorite thing that you turn to?

I think right now, I think the thing that's in my mind most is just to be open and to slow down and to simplify. I feel like I've turned off notifications on my computer. I'm just trying to turn off the distractions because I feel like it's easy in this day and age to like, oh, I get a text, I should respond to that. And I feel like it's taking me away from just focusing and being, I think being open and slowing down is kind of my current motto.

I love that. I think that's super important. That's lovely. And slowing down is always so nice. I think our creativity gets a chance to really show itself in different ways when we slow down, when we're actually listening. I think that's a really important space to be in. For sure. Well, cool. I don't want to forget to ask you where you like to show up the most on the Internet. So where can people find you?

Instagram is probably the best place to find me and for my website.

Awesome. And what are the handles? We'll have them in the notes, but just to make sure.

So my instagram is at sdph Piepres and my website is Sarahpiatricphotography.com.

Cool. We'll have those in the notes, but sometimes it's nice to just say them out loud. Well, thank you. Is there anything else you want to add about your journey or anything? Top of mind.

I think the other thing that I think was important for me in starting my business this is not new, but I think just putting out in the world the things that you want to do was something that I learned and I think was really important. And that helped me really attract the families that I work with and weeded out the families that I was not a good fit for, for the most part.

Sure.

So I think sometimes we try and do everything. Like, I know when I started out my business, I was doing events and this and that and everything. And just as a job, I'm going to take it. And I realized from that process, I think it's a good place to start in some ways. And from that process I realized the things that I really like more. And so those are the things that I post. Like I never post a picture, hardly ever of someone looking at the camera because that's not what I want to do, that's not what I want people to hire me for. And so people know that and I tell them that when they hire me. So I think, yeah, just putting out there in the world what you want to do is hopefully going to help your business grow into what you want to do.

Yes. That's huge. That's huge. We talk about this on the show as well, but that is a big one. Show what you want to sell. That's the essence of it. I think that's really important. Well, thank you, Sara. It was really nice to chat again and have some time to connect. Yeah, absolutely. I really do like hearing people's stories, especially because I know that a big portion of this audience are people trying to either iterate their business because they're feeling kind of stuck, or start altogether. And I think all the stories can be really an inspiring push for people. So thanks for taking the time to do this.

Sure. I'm. Happy to help others, because I know I had help along the way. Yeah, awesome. It's important.

Totally. Well, thank you again. And hopefully we'll be able to do this sometime again soon.

Yeah, I'd love that. All right. Bye bye. Take care.