Her Story
About Tina
I discovered photography during my last year of undergrad when I had to take an art elective. I was getting a dual degree in psychology and Creative Writing, and photography had always interested me as a hobby. When I saw my first image come up in the darkroom, I realized this is what I wanted to do with my life. After graduation, I spent the first 6 months waiting tables to save money, then funded an 8-month trip through Europe and Africa, traveling to 30 different countries to build my photography portfolio. I then taught English in Taiwan on and off for 10 years, using it as my base while pursuing travel and documentary photography. I freelanced for airline magazines, shooting all around Asia, and had several gallery shows with my fine art photography. After 10 years abroad, I moved to New York for 2 years where I assisted commercial photographers and worked with Mary Ellen Mark, one of the biggest documentary photographers of all time. I returned to the Midwest due to family illnesses and got a scholarship for my Master's of Fine Art at Bowling Green State University. After completing my master's, I moved to Nashville 12 years ago, teaching part-time at NOSI College of Art while building my business. Nashville is a big conference city, which gave me opportunities to build connections with clients, event planners, and others in the industry. Now I not only work in Nashville but get flown around to different cities to photograph events. I do a combination of corporate photography and branding photography, and I'm trying to figure out how to incorporate more of my fine art photography into my business model now that my 5-year-old son is in school.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Tina
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
My advice would be find a mentor, find someone that you can learn from, even if that means you're not getting paid. Do networking and hustling and internships. Photography is a very hard industry, and I suspect it's even harder now than when I first got in because it's so easy to get into photography and there's so many photographers now. Sure, you can learn how to take a picture and all the technical parts, but no one's gonna pay you unless you figure out how to make money from it. You learn business from having a mentor, interning, assisting, and making connections. It's a lot about relationships. I would really recommend getting into some sort of professional networking group. I belong to MPI, Meeting Planners International, for the professional event industry, and that's enabled me to make a lot of connections and get work. Always be shooting. You can't go into photography thinking it's just gonna be a 9-to-5 job, it kind of becomes your life. Unless you're really lucky, you're probably gonna struggle a lot and be poor for a while trying to figure out how you can get paid for it. It's not easy. I struggled a lot in the beginning, but now it's my full-time job and it's been worth it. There were plenty of times when I was like, well, maybe I should just give this up and get a full-time job. I had teaching paying me while I was building up my business, so that was my fallback.
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