How To Escape The Trap Of Mediocrity And Obscurity To Get Your Photography Business In Front Of The Right People

Are you making do with “good enough” in some areas of your photography business? Doing so can reduce the chances of the right people finding you. “Good enough” can also cause your business to suffer in mediocrity and obscurity.

Which can happen to any of us.

But, without any horrible signs of trouble, it’s tempting to leave things as they are, right?

For example, I recently bought a higher-quality microphone for the podcast. This was in response to a couple of reviews and comments, which suggested I could improve the audio.

No one had complained about it before, and the audio wasn’t so bad you couldn’t listen to it. So, why bother making the change on the basis of a couple of reviews?

After all, I could have left things as they were on the basis that it’s “good enough”, right?

Sure I could.

But, I’ve never been one to settle for “good enough”, and neither should you!

Because“good enough” is just another word for one of the most merciless of business-killers:

“Mediocrity”

Hardly anyone is immune, and we all know what happens to the people who find themselves trapped in a world controlled by mediocrity.

They go nowhere, and spend their business lives frantically treading water just to stay afloat. Many times, their photography businesses fail completely.

They certainly don’t get the best clients, make the most sales, or have the freedom to do business and live life on their own terms.

In short, mediocrity in business can lead directly to obscurity and a life of business slavery, although there are plenty of other ways to get trapped in obscurity, as you’ll see from the rest of this article…

Like any fatal disease there are some alarming symptoms associated with being caught up in such a mess, including things like these:

Having to deal with all those things can be utterly exhausting, and will eventually make even the most passionate photographer feel sick at the mere thought of picking up a camera.

Mediocrity: Don’t Settle For “Good Enough”

The most obvious source of mediocrity is the overall quality of your work as a photographer.

For instance, the technical and creative elements of your photography obviously have a direct impact on how it’s seen and felt by others. If it fails to generate some kind of emotional response then it might be perceived as mediocre, or simply okay or “good enough”, but certainly lacking any kind of wow factor.

Photography that fails to blow your clients’ minds away when they first see it is clearly a poor version of what you intended to create.

Unfortunately, no photographer is fully immune to this problem without active prevention.

But how can you escape this particular trap?

It’s quite easy really, it just takes a bit more thought, time, and effort.

Constantly Raise The Bar Of Excellence

Every professional photographer should be heavily invested in a continual desire to raise the bar on their own work, you don’t need me to tell you that, right?

In fact, of the many skills a photographer should master, becoming an incisive and decisive editor of your own work has to rank near the top of the list.

Good editing is part of the constant process of strengthening your portfolios by replacing weak images with stronger ones, instead of just adding new ones every time you return from an assignment to create an ever-expanding gallery.

For example, start out by setting a hard upper limit on the number of photographs to allow in any given gallery of your portfolio, say 20 or 30.

Once you reach the limit, the only way a new photograph can be added is to make room for it by removing an existing one from the gallery. Over time, this ensures the overall quality and impact of the gallery is always growing, and not simply stagnating.

The low number of spaces in the gallery is chosen deliberately, to ensure that each image requires serious consideration, and should be set to a number outside of your comfort zone, but the process does become easier over time with practice.

Mediocrity Is Not Reserved Just For Your Photography

The strength of your photography work is the obvious source of “good enough” in your business, but there are others too.

For example:

As you can imagine, working hard to constantly elevate every aspect of your business to new levels can save you from falling into the mediocrity trap.

Here’s one last thought on the problem of mediocrity before we move on:

Being mediocre doesn’t necessarily imply that your work sucks. Far from it, in fact, because both the playing field and the bar are constantly changing. Work you might have considered well above average last year can suddenly feel clichéd or out of vogue today. Client expectations also change, and something you thought of as being exceptional service yesterday becomes expected as standard today.

From that perspective, mediocre simply means being normal or average. The problem is, average is nowhere near enough for a business to succeed in today’s marketplace.

The Obscurity Trap: Being “Famously Average”

The other big problem facing professional photographers is the one of obscurity – otherwise known as the “nobody knows I exist” problem.

As I already mentioned, obscurity can often be the inevitable result of mediocre work, but that’s not the only cause.

There are also plenty of highly-talented professional photographers out there who are toiling in obscurity and whose work is anything but mediocre. You may even feel like a victim of such obscurity yourself, especially if you look around at some of the photographers in your community who are doing well despite less-than-stellar work.

Quite frustrating, no doubt about it.

In a world where we imagine and hope our work should be able to speak for itself, the reality of the situation sounds highly unfair. However, the obscurity trap is more often a product of ineffective or misdirected marketing than a measure of how good a photographer is at doing their job.

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying many times that it’s not always the best photographer who wins the game, but the best marketer.

Unfair? Yes, but annoyingly true nonetheless.

The potential pitfall here, though, is that focusing on marketing alone without striving to simultaneously improve the work and the client interactions within the business results in being what I call “famously average”.

In other words, lots of people might know who you are, and you might even feel busy, but you remain stuck in a world of mediocrity where you’re working like mad to get nowhere, and you attract too many of the wrong people instead of your ideal clients.

The Winning Combination

So how can you escape the terrible fate of being “famously average” in your community? How can you stand out from your competition as “famously amazing” and be seen as the obvious choice for your ideal target clients?

As hard as it might feel at this point in time, especially if you’ve been dealing with some of the negative effects of mediocrity or obscurity, it is possible to escape both if you’re prepared to work at it.

This simple formula can help focus your attention on what you need to do:

If you focus your efforts on improving each of those three things equally, you’ll be able to attract more of the right people and get paid what you’re worth to create a healthy photography business.

But, don’t forget this is not a “set it and forget it” process – the work never ends!

The reality is, you’re playing on a constantly changing field where today’s excellence can become tomorrow’s mediocrity and where obscurity is forever on your heels.

Not sure where to start? Here are a few tips in each of these three areas for you:

Photographic Excellence

Unmatched Professionalism

Marketing Mastery

And here’s one that applies equally to all three areas:

Never stop learning! There’s no such thing as “I’m finished” when it comes to your photography, marketing, and business training…

Obviously, I could go on at great length here, but I hope this brief article has given you some good jumping off points to help you to start moving forward.

Today’s quote is Closing Thought By Seth Godin

Successful people are the ones who are breaking the rules…

Before you can ever become a professional photographer you have to learn the “rules” of photography.

Aperture, exposure, ISO, depth of field, lighting, composition, framing, choice of lens… the list goes on.

As amateurs just starting out, we make all kinds of mistakes despite reading every technical manual on the planet, but experience and practice are the only way to learn the “rules”.

And then, after suffering countless underexposed, poorly-lit, badly-composed, let’s be honest here, crappy images (thank goodness for digital, right?), we finally gasp at that one amazing image we managed to create.

So we work even harder to hone those technical skills almost to the point of surgical precision.

And we wonder why our photography hits a wall and seems to fall just short of incredible.

It’s only then, if we’re lucky, that we realize in one of those crazy Zen moments that learning to obey the rules was only half the journey.

It’s now time to learn how to break the rules—but intelligently—because that’s the only sure path to mastery of our art.

But remember, too, this is a journey with no true end, only new horizons to be breached…

🙂