Article from The Wall Street Journal
06/14/1999
Written by Robert Johnson

The Heart as Career Counselor
Lessons From Turning Passions Into Professions

Instead, he majored in "the most practical thing I could think of: business administration, specializing in investment." After graduating with honors In 1980, Mr. Till endured eight years of audit and risk-analysis duties for a total of four banks, most of which were merged or sold during a period of industry consolidation that he found frustrating.

The last straw in banking came in 1990, when his then employer, the struggling Eliot Savings Bank, was closed by me Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

"I'd never been so happy to lose a job," he says. "Every day for weeks I had gone to work knowing the bank probably couldn't be saved. Then one Friday the FDIC inspectors came in and changed all the locks. They offered me a job in auditing, but by then I had my fill of banking," he says.

Besides, since 1985 he had been accepting an occasional weekend photography assignment, mainly weddings and bar mitzvahs. So when the FDIC closed Eliot Savings on a Friday, and invited Mr. Till to join them the next day in counting up the Institution's assets, he declined. "Guys, I'm a photographer now," he recalls saying, "and I have a wedding on Saturday."

He still thinks like a banker, though, and that, Mr. Till explains, is why he has been in the black for each of his nine years in photography.

At first, he was most reluctant about going professional with his picture-taklng. "I tried to turn down my first assignment," he says. "It was to photograph a former girlfriend's wedding and I swore this was the stupidest thing I'd ever done. But she knew my reputation for taking pictures in college as historian for the Theta Chi fraternity, and she talked me into it. So I took the job and my wife went along."

Weddings are now Mr. Till's bread and butter, and though it means burning through his weekends shooting roll alter roll - one year he worked a total of 48 Saturdays and Sundays - it happens to be where the money is. Mr. Till's typical fee for a wedding is $4,500. "A lot of photographers will charge less and they probably don't make much, if any, money," he says. "You have to be a business person to know what you need to charge. That's the toughest thing for most people who try to get into this. Ask about their break-even figure, and they say, "What?"'

Mr. Till learned to study the wedding business the way he once looked at a bank's balance sheet. "Photographers need to understand that the typical formal wedding today costs about $25,000," he figures. "Their reasonable share of that, for providing the only lasting memory of it, should be about 10% to 15%."

Pricing and other business information are among the tools that Mr. Till has picked up by "joining just about every professional photographers' association there is, going to a lot of conventions and updating my knowledge with one or two weeks of seminars every year."

One key lesson: Find your specialty and stick to it. "It's harder to make money as a jack-of-all-trades doing studio portraits one day and kids' sports teams the next," he says. "Do one thing really well and that's how you build demand for your services." His business wisdom is now a business in itself: Mark Till Consulting, specializing in helping fellow pro photographers survive. "You ask some what their fixed expenses are and they won't include what they pay themselves - because they change it for different jobs. I tell them, 'No, no, you fix your salary first - everything else is a variable expense."

Helping other photographers to profit from their work is a difficult mission, he says. "So many of them just think they're so lucky to be taking pictures, they forget to make a living. What good photographers do is a gift to humanity. The trick is to help photographers enjoy the rest of their lives as much as taking pictures."

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