Cheyanne Larsen-Glenn

I would say my clients and them trusting me with their memories, along with my hard work and dedication. I was told this weekend that I'm too humble and I don't give myself enough credit, but it really is the long hours that people don't see. They think, oh, you're going to show up with a camera, take my photos, and bam, you have this magical, beautiful gallery. But it's the little things that kind of go unnoticed, like tweaking the color saturations and making sure it's a well-balanced photo. The connections with my clients are also huge. I really try my best to be their friends in a way and make them feel comfortable during their session, because that's a big aspect too. I want them to feel comfortable in a sense where they can open up and feel like they're able to be in a loving situation, even though they have to kiss on camera with a stranger watching. So making them feel comfortable would probably be the biggest success factor.

I think it would be to have the work-life balance. Especially being a photographer, sometimes your weekends get cut short, and you get an email and you immediately want to jump and respond, but then you're letting your client and your audience know that you can be reached at any hour. So it's about having the balance of, okay, I need to shut off. My office, yes, is right down the hall in my house, but I need to close that door when 5 o'clock happens because I need family time. It's often easy, especially being a creative, to just get burnt out. In any field, you can get burnt out, right? So it's really that time to make sure that you have to refuel yourself and have that work-life balance. I also want to add the power of saying no too. At the beginning, it's so easy to say yes, yes, yes to everything, and I think it's also a good thing to say no sometimes because you could pass the next opportunity to a different creative in your field.

I think the biggest advice I have would be to, in the beginning, say yes to a lot of opportunities. I know I contradict myself there after saying to say no, but that way you get to shoot different things and see what you want to have your focus being, whether it be lifestyle, or editorial, or families, or newborns, or weddings. You get to kind of figure out what you like. Another big thing too is to network with a bunch of other people. Community over competition is something that I live by, because yes, the market can be oversaturated, but that's where you have your Rolodex of people where you could say, okay, well, I can't do this, but this person can, or how can I learn from this other person. Having the mindset of community over competition is really important because there's so many people in the world who could help you grow and learn.

I think it's the balance of being oversaturated. There's a lot of photographers, talented people who are out there, and I think the biggest thing is to want to stand out and be organically you. I feel like at first, it's kind of a challenge to figure out who you want to be your target audience and kind of figuring out your tone of voice as a business. At first, it's kind of like, whatever anyone will pay me for, I will photograph, I will be very flexible as an artist. So I think finding who you want to photograph and who you want to basically have the trust and those memories with is the balance of that.

Definitely being creative, obviously. And then I would say being authentic is another thing, just because everything is, in this day and age, a trend to hop on, and if it's not authentically you, then you're just doing something that doesn't match your audience. Community is a big one for me. You've got to be passionate. Another big one as far as morals is, especially being a photographer, capturing all types of love. It doesn't matter if you're a queer couple, if you're a straight couple, no matter your race, like, any sort of love needs to be captured and honored. So that's a big moral for me for my business, and that leans into authenticity too.