Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Memberful. Looking to find sustainable sources of income from your blog this year that don’t include fighting against changing search engines and social media algorithms? With exclusive membership content, you can create a new source of income by turning your food blog into a membership business while creating the content you’re passionate about. Memberful has everything you need to quickly get your membership program up and running with content gating, paid newsletters, private podcasts, and much more. Plus, Memberful seamlessly integrates with your existing WordPress website, or you can use Memberful to create your own member home within minutes using their in-house tools. And with Memberful, you can create multiple membership tiers, limiting access to certain recipes, meal plans, and cooking tutorials to better connect with your most devoted followers and monetize the content you’re already producing.

By using Memberful, you’ll have access to a world-class support team ready to help you set up your membership and grow your revenue. They’re passionate about your success, and you’ll always have access to a real human when you need help. Food creators are already using Memberful to foster community within their audiences and monetize their content. And listeners to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast can go to memberful.com/food to learn more about Memberful solutions for food creators and create an account for free. That’s M-E-M-B-E-R-F-U-L.com/food. Thanks again to Memberful for sponsoring this episode.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. This week on the podcast, Bjork is chatting with Alanna O’Neil. Alanna is a photographer who also does some food photography and has actually written two beautiful cookbooks. She’s on the podcast this week to chat more about her career in food photography, how she transitioned from working in fashion to photography, how she moved to Hawaii, and how she’s built her career as a photographer. She also shares more about how you can develop your skills as a photographer and build your portfolio and has a really beautiful way of describing the importance of storytelling through your visuals.

I really enjoyed editing this interview. She has a really calming energy about her and just a really thoughtful way of describing a lot of things that will really make you think about how you approach your career and how you approach your photography. It’s an awesome interview, so I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Alanna, welcome to the podcast.

Alanna O’Neil: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here and chat.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we’re going to talk about something. This was actually one of my first loves, was photography. So when I was in 7th grade, I would bike to the library in our hometown, it was two blocks away, and I would check out books on photography. I just was super fascinated by photography. I got a SLR camera for my birthday. Actually, my wife has a food website called Pinch of Yum. The first three posts we did, I was the one taking the pictures, and then very quickly we were like, “Maybe Lindsay should just figure out how to do the photography for it.”

But I love photography and it’s one of the most important parts of what we do in the world of publishing, especially for people who are publishing food and recipe content. But also just if you are going to be a creator in general, one of the most important mediums is photography. There’s photography, there’s video. And generally speaking, there’s also this idea of storytelling through visuals, which we’re going to talk about today. But before we do that, I want to hear about your journey into photography. What did it look like for you to build this into what is now a career? How did that start? And were you always pursuing photography kind of as the end goal?

Alanna O’Neil: Sure. It’s always kind of been in my background. And then slowly it’s come to the forefront. So my mother, she just was a hobbyist, so we had a dark room in our horse barn.

Bjork Ostrom: Whoa.

Alanna O’Neil: So I’m from Vermont, so we had a horse barn and lived on a farm. So our dark room is in the tack room.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you like awesome things?

Alanna O’Neil: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Like, to be a kid and to grow up with a horse barn and a dark room just feels very magical.

Alanna O’Neil: Yeah, it was very idyllic. And so in the tack room where we kept all the horses things, then she transformed it into a dark room. So I was just always at her hips, just watching her develop film and stuff. And then I always just kind of love, I was very shy and introverted person, but I was always very perceptive and I just was always looking and just taking in information. So I think I kind of developed an eye early on.

And then I’ve always just loved taking photos, whether it’s landscape, nature, animals. And then I actually then went into fashion design in New York City where I worked for three years for Calvin Klein. I was in that timeframe where I realized this hustle just wasn’t for me. It was creatively enjoyable because the love for photography really came through is because I was choosing the images that would be used for the collections that would be on the runway. So I would kind of be doing the mood board and sourcing of the creative design for it. So that was really fun, but I just didn’t match up with this lifestyle that I grew up with. I love being outside in nature and just being in this concrete jungle on Times Square every day where you see the sunlight maybe 10 minutes a day. It just didn’t work out.

So I slowly then transitioned focusing more on just on me and what brought me fulfillment. And I ended up in Hawaii where I really took photography seriously as a, “I really want to do this,” as a career. So it was a complete pivot, but it’s kind of always been in the background. And now I’ve really felt like I’ve come into my own following that intuition that was always there.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. You knew that there’s this pull. It feels like there’s a lot that we could look at in the space where you talk about leaving New York, coming to Hawaii and building a career around photography. Those are some pretty significant changes. I think anybody listening to this, maybe it’s not a move to Hawaii, but there is an interest in evolving and becoming more towards following your intuition to get to a place where you feel like you are more of who you really are. Some of us, I feel like we know who we are, we want to pursue that, but we maybe feel kind of stuck. How did you navigate that? You mentioned it quickly, moving to Hawaii, that’s a really big deal. Once you get there, you know, kind of want to do photography, but how do you actually take those steps into doing it? Can you talk more about that?

Alanna O’Neil: Yeah, so it was kind of like a soft jump, like a soft leap of faith because I was like, “Okay, I have this degree in fashion design. It’s like I have to use it somehow, but I want this healthy lifestyle, like a balance of being in nature.” So I found a company that did activewear design in Maui, and they were like, “Okay, well, you can come and do the job and you can move to Maui and you’ve got the job.” So it was a soft jump from taking my skillset and then moving to Hawaii. So it wasn’t just like I went cold Turkey. But then I was in that job for several years and I just kind of reached a ceiling of like, “This isn’t really calling me. It’s not fulfilling me anymore.” So then I really took that leap of, “Okay, I know what I’m good at, and I know that my skillset can be… I’m much more than where I’m at right now,” if that makes sense.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Alanna O’Neil: And it take so much self-awareness.

Bjork Ostrom: What does that look like when you say self-awareness? Is that intentional structured time that you have to reflect?

Alanna O’Neil: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Or is it just naturally who you are? For anybody else who’s looking to be more aware of themselves, what would your advise be?

Alanna O’Neil: I think for creative people in general, and especially for photography, we’re so sensitive to our environments. The more we can actually take space and take some time away to just think and reflect, that’s when our answers I find really come to the surface. So for me, I am a runner. I run every day early in the morning, and that’s my time of an hour just thinking. And so it was really a quiet time for me to just reflect. I knew there was just something in my bones. I was like, “This is not a line for you anymore.”

And it was almost like you had to hit a point where you can’t avoid it anymore. And that was me watching my colleagues in New York City eat lunch, hunched over their computer, sleeping at work, shaving a fur skin or a handbag, $3,000 handbag that no one on this planet needs anymore of. And you’re like… So you just have those moments and it’s just like sometimes they’re subtle, sometimes they’re really loud and in your face. I think the more we can stay tuned to those little quiet moments of… Because I feel like the answers we already have within us, it’s just a matter of getting quiet.

Bjork Ostrom: And hearing what those are.

Alanna O’Neil: And hearing what those are.

Bjork Ostrom: And for everybody, that’s going to be different. For you, it’s running. But almost to look back and say, for anybody listening to have this, think back to when were those times that you felt like answers did come or things felt more clear, and then try to recreate those moments. For some people, it might be going for a walk or running, or maybe it’s meditating or maybe it’s talking with a friend. For some people, that’s how you start to get clear on your own position and thoughts. But essentially, just recreating the thing that has worked in the past, I feel like there’s something to be said about that.

Alanna O’Neil: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think this is also an important point when you talk about your story and getting closer to what feels like the place that you want to be in, is partial evolutions. And I think sometimes we think in full evolutions, like, “I’m here and I want to be here. How do I get from A to B?” But a lot of times I think it’s better if we place that as F or E. And in order to get to F or E, we got to go A, B, C, D, E, F.

And for you, the transition being, “Hey, I have this work in the world of fashion design. I know I also want to be living somewhere else.” And so you figure out the living somewhere else equation while maintaining a similar work environment. And then once you did that, it sounds like what you did is you said, “Okay, I’ve partially evolved kind of location. I’m in a place that feels inspiring and a good fit for who I am. Now what does it look like to evolve the work or career portion of the equation?” Is that kind of, when you look back at it, how it played out?

Alanna O’Neil: Yeah, it definitely was a slow evolution, like a snowball or something just kind of unfolding because I think some people maybe who are listening just are totally black and white. They just cut everything off completely, like, “Okay, I did photography and now I do graphic design.” It’s just for me, I like to do things a little bit slowly and more intentionally rather than just cut something off completely. So I worked backwards of like, “Okay, I know these factors, A, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, all these are kind of my parameters of what makes me happy and fulfilled. How can I make my lifestyle, my career fit into that?” And for me, it was a slow evolution. But once I started actually thinking about them, the easier was for me to come to terms with, “Okay, this is my next step that I’m on.”

Bjork Ostrom: Mm-hmm. What did that look like then when you knew photography was kind of the path forward, or at least what you wanted to focus on and you had a traditional W2 job, but you wanted to evolve into this world of photography? How did you start to introduce the thing that you were passionate about and interested in into your life in a way that was career-oriented? Like, “Okay, I’m going to figure out how to do this as a thing.”

Alanna O’Neil: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So it started with food photography because I love cooking and I love food and just the stories that are around food because it’s such a human thing that we all have connected to. And so it started by just capturing things locally at my farmer’s market. Or I would reach out to brands or companies on the island and offer a free shoot or something and just say, “Hey, I’m just interested to build my portfolio up.” That way I had just some hands-on experience working with people. And then once I felt like I had a solid portfolio of a variety of different things, that’s when I had the confidence to actually email brands and say, “Hey, look, I can create this in this sort of way, tell this sort of story with your product,” and then it kind of just grew from that point.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I think it’s one of the things that people don’t give enough credit to, which is doing work for free especially in the early stages. And I think so often we are coached on like, “Get paid what you’re worth.” And all of it is really true. And that’s the hard part, is like it’s not that it’s not true. It’s just that in some instances, there is other truth. And that other truth is what you are trying to do, the exchange that you have in that relationship isn’t one where you’re like, “I’m going to give you something and then you’re going to give me money.” The exchange is, I’m going to give you something. And what you’re going to get is something that builds your portfolio,” which then allows you to sell more confidently or in just an easier way. And so it’s almost like you compress the length of time it would take for you to close a deal because you’re creating a more compelling workbook or portfolio that you are then able to put in front of people.

Did you find in those early stages when you were reaching out to people and saying, maybe it was a restaurant or something or a brand, “Hey, I would love to document your stuff for free”? Did you hear back from people quite a bi? And generally where they’re like, “Great!”?

Alanna O’Neil: Yeah, but I think that’s maybe just a switch that doesn’t work in my mind because I sent out hundreds of emails and so many of them never replied and never responded. I think it’s having that resiliency and maybe a little bit of shamelessness where you’re just like, “I don’t care. I’m just going to keep emailing and reaching out.” And then eventually, they’ll reply and then you’ll connect and it falls through. But I think if you’re just starting out, I think you really have to have thick skin and just put yourself out there and continually just ask and think outside of the box.

Even just two days ago, I shot for free for this bakery here. And I was actually the one to reach out and be like, “Hey, I’d love to just shoot for you just because I want to have that aspect for me and my own portfolio.” And by doing so, it creates a really wonderful relationship because now they see your value, they see the work that you’ve put in. You have something really wonderful to now include in your portfolio that wasn’t there before. And in the future, they’ll maybe share it with their friends, they’ll tell people, they’ll maybe come back to you in the future and be like, “We’d love to do another shoot with you.” So it’s you have to give something in order to get something back I think in the early days, but I think being resilient and consistent and persistent are just so critical when you’re just beginning.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And so much of what I think about in those relationships is like, take anything outside of the context of a business relationship and think about it in that way, like, okay, you’re meeting a new friend for the first time, how do you be a good friend? Well, you go out to dinner and you pay for it, or you come over and you bring bars. I don’t know. You do some type of exchange where you are giving before you’re asking. And relationally, that’s how we’re built. We exchange these things. We establish trust, especially in a situation where you’re not known. Over time as you become somebody who does, and this would be in the world of a portfolio building, but also as you start to establish that trust and those relationships, what can happen then is like you said, somebody can say, “Hey, I worked with this person. They were really great. If you need a photographer, here’s who you can reach and who you can connect with.”

So much of it comes back to these foundational behaviors of how we interact in the real world. Those transfer over into business relationships, but sometimes we forget about that and think that it’s all transactional. But all of it is just people interacting with other people and it’s relationships. And at its best, it’s all about trust and people feeling comfortable with who you are and whether that be in a regular relationship or a business relationship. For you now, what does day-to-day look like? Is the majority of the work that you’re doing working with restaurants? Is it branded photography for different brands? How do things look for you now day to day or week-to-week?

Alanna O’Neil: Yeah, so I do some branding right now, but what I’m actually really focusing on is developing a program for new photographers. It’s going to be a monthly program where it helps people in three different categories of mindset, business and photography. So every month there’ll be a new module that is released. So that’s kind of my baby of the moment that I’ve been focusing on. And I’m hoping it’s going to be a really nurturing space to support people within their photography journey. Essentially, it’s a program I wish I had when I started out, because I was so in the dark. Because I came from a different background, I don’t have formal training in photography, so I learned all these things as I went. So that’s kind of what I’ve been focusing on in the moment, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So why those three things? You said it was mindset, business, and photography?

Alanna O’Neil: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Talk to me about the value of each of those things and why you created those as the three segments of the program.

Alanna O’Neil: Yeah, so I think they all are related. It’s almost like the camera, like ISO, aperture and shutter speed. It’s just like they’re all interconnected. And the more you play with one, it affects the other. So business training, I think creatives, and I’m so guilty of this, we are not the most business savvy when it comes to starting our own business. So the trainings will include how to market yourself, how to price yourself, how to reach out to brands, how to structure your business, that the business foundations, your values for your business. So all of these things that we sometimes neglect because we’re so focused on that creative portion.

And then the photography will be really nitty-gritty trainings in terms of how to find your visual voice, shooting in natural light, portraiture, how to editing. Different types of sessions for photography topics in general. And then mindset is a big one. And I’m really glad that I am including this because I think especially for beginners, we can get really stuck in our own way and we compare ourselves. We don’t feel like we’re good enough, we are wondering why we’re not there yet. We’re wondering how we stack up against others. And having that confidence and self-belief and self-worth really goes hand in hand with putting out your best work and feeling confident and knowing that there’s more for you. Even though you may be just on this one spot right now, there’s so much potential ahead of you.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great.

Alanna O’Neil: So I think all of those complement each other nicely.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. If we could, obviously we don’t want… It’s not like we’re going to go through the whole course or whatever.

Alanna O’Neil: That’s okay.

Bjork Ostrom: But let’s pull out one from each of those. So in the business category, for somebody who’s… And my guess is this is for people who want to build a photography business, like build a business of photography, is that more or less accurate for the-

Alanna O’Neil: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And/or become a better photographer? That probably would also apply.

Alanna O’Neil: Mm-hmm.

Bjork Ostrom: But let’s say in the business section, what’s one actionable thing that you could put in front of people who are listening to this podcast and say like, “Here’s something from a business standpoint that you should consider valuable insight, a tool, like a tactic, a way to go about things”? Just to get a sample of what that might look like and to hear from you a little bit about side of things.

Alanna O’Neil: Sure. Yeah, I think for photographers, one thing that’s really important to consider is just what is your offerings? Are you service-based? Are you product-based? I mean, do you sell prints? Do you sell packages? Or do you actually just work as a service by control, like freelancing? So I think you have to really think about these two distinct categories of which one you want to fall in, because if you’re product-based, that could be online courses, that could be an e-book, that could be prints, that could be YouTube things, like anything digital that you would sell online or physical print products or things like that.

Or if it’s more service-based where you’re actually working with clients and brands and freelancing and maybe publications or shooting for cookbooks, it’s really just kind of thinking of what avenue do you want to go down? Do you want to do both? Do you want to do a merger of both things? But I think the more we can really fine tune what we actually offer. Because sometimes you’re like, “Oh, I’m just a photographer.” We’re like, “Okay, well, what do you do? What do you offer? Do you offer branded shoots? Do you offer portraits? Do you offer food? Just restaurant food photography?” It’s being really clear on what are your offerings.

Bjork Ostrom: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It’s almost like imagining somebody coming to your site and thinking, seeing it hitting a landing page and being like, “Is this for me or is this not for me?” And I imagine in the world where you have decided that you’re going to do restaurant photography and you’re going to help restaurants build really compelling images or create really compelling images for their menu or their menu board or their restaurant or social media. Or somebody who owns a restaurant that comes to your site and they see, “Oh, this person does restaurant photography. Here’s some testimonials,” it’s a very quick yes.

It’s also a quick no for somebody who has product and they want to sell quinoa chocolate crisps, and they’re like, “Oh, this person probably could do it, but I see they’re specialized in restaurant photography.” And so very quickly you’re able to filter out yes or no. It seems like sometimes the temptation would be like, “I kind of do everything. I’m a photographer.” You can speak to this, but it feels like what happens then is then you kind of don’t do anything. And so even though it’s like there’s a thousand different yeses, but they’re all kind of watered down yeses where people aren’t like, “Oh, this is exactly what I need.” Does that feel accurate?

Alanna O’Neil: Yeah, definitely. I think if you know want to do restaurant photography and that’s what you want to focus on, it’s helping restaurants build their brand and create their menus, that shouldn’t be solely your focus for your website and your branding and your social media, your story, who you are as a person, as a photographer. Because I think the more we infiltrate other things… We do restaurant photography, but then we also post a picture of a family portrait we shot last weekend. It is not cohesive and it’s not like a hell yes to that person, that restaurant that’s looking for that service. So I think the clear we can be on what we offer, it just makes it so obvious because if you say, “I’m a photographer.” Well, okay, but what does that mean and what do you offer? Because I think it’s wonderful to have all these interests in different types of photography, but in terms of actually making money and selling a service, we have to be super distinct and deliberate of what we share and show.

Bjork Ostrom: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And part of it too, we’ve talked about this in podcasts before, but it’s what do you want to do? What are you excited about? But also what’s the need? There has to be a market pull in order for there to be potential for you to build a business around that. So do you have any thoughts on that or advice for people who don’t really know what’s needed within the market? Or even I imagine family portraits is one of those where there’s always going to be a need, but there’s probably also a lot of competition, there’s a lot of other people doing it. Any advice for people who are trying to figure out what that is?

Alanna O’Neil: Yeah, I think it’s an intersection between what’s needed and what you enjoy. Because personally, I don’t want to shoot weddings, even though I know there’s a market here for it in Maui and it’s very infiltrated. Because I know if I don’t personally enjoy, I know I’m probably not going to be very good at it either. I’m not going to enjoy it. So I think it’s this need of looking, “Okay, well what do I enjoy? What do I enjoy shooting? What do I enjoy doing? And then what else out there that is needed?” Maybe it’s photographing a blogger’s food recipes or something, and you reach out to a food blogger and be like, “Hey, your photos are not so great. I mean, the recipes are good, but I could help you with your photos.” So it’s kind of finding this cross balance across intersection, I guess, of what you enjoy versus what you feel like you could give some value to that’s out there.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I think there’s this quote that I think of Frederick Buchner, who is I think kind of a theologian and an author, he says, “The place God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” And I think of-

Alanna O’Neil: I like that.

Bjork Ostrom: … what a great exercise for us as creative people to think about what is our deep gladness and where does… It’s essentially exactly what you’re saying. Where does the world’s deep hunger, where is that intersection? And I think of Humans of New York. For people who aren’t familiar with that, the channel, and I don’t even know his name, but he’s a photographer and he goes out and photographs people, but then he also asks them questions. And he rolls that all into a story that he tells that really resonates with people. And there’s an obvious, like, the world has a hunger to hear the story of other people, and it seems like for this photographer, it brings him deep gladness it seems like. And so it’s for us as creators, it’s thinking where do those things overlap and how can we find that. So I love that.

Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors.

This episode is sponsored by Clariti. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could figure out how you can optimize the existing posts on your blog without needing to comb through each and every post one by one? With Clariti, you can discover optimization opportunities with just a few clicks. Thanks to Clariti’s robust filtering option,. You can figure out which posts have broken links, missing alt text, broken images, no internal links and other insights so you can confidently take action to make your blog posts even better. We know that food blogging is a competitive industry, so anything you can do to level up your content can really give you an edge. By fixing content issues and feeling content gaps, you’re making your good content even better. And that’s why we created Clariti. It’s a way for bloggers and website owners to feel confident in the quality of their content. Listeners to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast get 50% off of their first month of Clariti after signing up. To sign up, simply go to clariti.com/food. That’s Clariti, C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food. Thanks again to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

How about switching into the photography side of things?

Alanna O’Neil: Sure.

Bjork Ostrom: So my guess is, in some capacity, everybody who listens to this has either at some period done the photography for their business, probably still do photography to some level. Maybe they work with a photographer, so they need to understand what good photography looks like. But it’s a really big broad question. But for somebody who wants to get better at photography, how do you do that? What are the steps you need to take and skills you need to develop?

Alanna O’Neil: Sure. That’s a broad question, but I think it can just be whittled down to people are like, “Well, what’s your style?” Well, your style is how you interpret the world, how you see the world. So thinking about how you interpret what you see and how is there a pattern within all your images, how does that reflect who you are? And also I think it’s not just about conveying information like, “Oh, this is a piece of bread on a board.” There’s something deeper there that we have to convey something else. It’s like creating a photo that’s about something, not of something. Does that make sense?

Bjork Ostrom: Can you explain more on that? Double click on that thought.

Alanna O’Neil: Yeah, so it’s like, okay, I could take a picture, let’s say, of a house on a lake and it’s just a house right on the lake, right? And that’s just a picture of a house on a lake. There’s nothing there. There’s nothing telling me anything more about it. But if I backed up and I included other elements that were a part of that scene, maybe it’s the dog that was running by or the birds that were flying across the sky, there’s something subtle. It’s actually about this place. And maybe it’s the old man that’s walking around the corner with his buckets of grain because he’s feeding his ducks, whatever, it’s like a belt’s place. So I think it’s not just conveying what you see, but what’s the story of this place or subject.

Bjork Ostrom: This is a really specific example, but Lindsay, my wife Lindsay, just published a post. It’s like a chocolate chip cookie recipe, which isn’t novel. It’s a little bit unique in that she calls it two huge chocolate chip cookies. The idea being it’s like for two people. But the first, or I guess it’s the second image in the post is that it’s a plate and it’s the cookies and it’s Lindsay holding one up, and then it’s our three-year-old, Lena’s hand, reaching in for the cookie that’s on the plate. And it’s like, I know the moment, but it also tells a story that’s so different than if it was just two cookies on a plate.

Alanna O’Neil: Two cookies on a plate, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Is that a little bit of what you’re getting at, is figuring out how to tell the story with the image?

Alanna O’Neil: Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean. It’s just like you have two cookies in a plate, and okay, that’s all it is. It’s two cookies on a plate. But what if you cut up the chocolate chip cookie and it was melted, and then the chocolate was smeared on the plate, and then your daughter’s hand was coming over and her hands are all stained with chocolate? There’s so much more interesting and intriguing. There’s a story there. And it’s not just of these cookies, it’s about what’s happening in a moment. And I think that’s how to improve your photography, is really thinking about a moment, not just simple information in front of you, if that makes sense.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And you talked a little bit about it. You talked about it being interesting or unique. Is that what we’re trying to get at? Are we trying to get at novel? And if so, why? What is the purpose behind wanting to tell a story with an image?

Alanna O’Neil: Yeah. Well, I think it so goes back to who we are as humans. Storytelling is such a part of our DNA and who we are as people. I mean, it’s passed down through generations just orally. But visually, it’s like why would a brand want to work with someone if there’s no life or something that’s going to call this potential buyer to purchase this product? So I think visual storing is a way to engage the viewer and evoke a sense of emotion and really tap into our humanness. And that could be done through color or composition or how we frame the photo or the subjects within it.

So for me, I think storytelling really makes a photo come alive and it brings this humanness to it. And even if there’s no humanness or human in the frame, you can tell something was there. It feels lived in and authentic and real rather than some of these images you see on Instagram or Facebook or wherever that are just so perfectly styled, everything’s just curated to a tee. But to me, that just feels so sterile and I can’t connect to that because it doesn’t feel real.

I relate to your daughter’s chocolate chip cookie hand stains on the white tablecloth because it feels like life. So I think the more we can embody life into our images, it pulls at you instantly and it engages you within the scene and the product if you’re a brand.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s almost like trying to understand who we are and how we operate as people and then thinking about in the different mediums that we interact, what does it look like to recreate that in some way? We talked about it in the instance of trading emails back and forth or reaching out to a brand and giving before asking. In this case, it’s like, what are some of the things that we are most drawn to? Story is one of them. And that comes out in our desire to watch a TV show or go to a movie or listen to a book or something like that. All of those are just us watching stories. What does that then look like to tell a story through a static image? It’s interesting to hear you talk about like, “Here are the ways that you can do that. You can introduce humanity. You can introduce something that is imperfect because we as people are imperfect people. When we see that imperfection, we resonate with it to some degree.” So it’s inspiring to hear you talk about that.

I almost think about in an iPhone, you can set it to be a live photo. And it’s like, what does it look like to try and make a live photo in a static image? What are the elements of that thing being alive that could then be in a static photo? So that’s great.

And then what about in the world of mindset? That’s such an important thing. You talked about just briefly this idea of comparison, how difficult that is. We talk about this idea of compare and despair. No matter where you are in your career, that always seems to be true. But what’s one thing, whether it’s comparison or something else, that you would communicate as an important consideration for creators, or in this case photographers, what’s a mindset that’s been most helpful for you as you’ve built your career?

Alanna O’Neil: Yes, definitely. I think it’s having a conversation with myself, but in three different versions. It’s like the past me, the present me, and the future me. So when I feel insecure or I’m afraid or I’m feel like I want to compare myself to someone else, or I scroll through Instagram and I get triggered by something because I see someone book this major client and there’s that pain, you get the jealous, we’re human and it’s so natural to be on top of our game and then just be thrown off completely by something we see or someone, or something someone says.

But I think it’s like we can have this take a step back and be like, “Okay, well what would the past me say of where I’m now? And what would my future say to me today? What words of encouragement or support do I need to hear from both of them?” Because I think, for instance, if we take a comparison to other people as an example, it’s just such a trap that I think so many people fall into as photographers and just creatives in general because we live in this world of social media and there’s so many images that we see in flux every day, and it’s natural to compare yourself to someone else.

I think if we actually just stay tuned to the path we’re on and the vision of where we’re going and the business we want to create, and we just can’t compare ourselves to someone who has 20 years under their belt versus where we are right now. And it’s like having compassion and grace with ourselves and reconnecting to your why and why you’re doing this, why do you love photography and just coming back to those questions. But I think talking to your past self and your future self to support you in the moment has been so helpful for me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s interesting. There’s this book we’ve talked about a couple of times called The Gap and the Gain, but the basic premise of it… Are you familiar with it? Yeah?

Alanna O’Neil: Yeah. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: I think of the idea of… Well, the basic premise being like, oftentimes on any given day, for all of us, anybody listening to this podcast or for you and I right now, we are at this point in our lives. And if we look backwards, there’s a lot of ground that we have gained. And if we talked to the version of ourself that was at the very beginning of whatever that journey is and they were to connect with this person that is here today, they might say, “Wow, look at you. This is really incredible that you have done this and you’ve learned a lot and you’re a different person and you have these skills and abilities.” Maybe this acknowledgement of this ground that you’ve covered. And in the book, they talk about this idea of the gap being us looking at the ground that we haven’t covered.

But it’s fun to think about what would it look like for that person to look backwards at where we are today, the person who’s at the other end of that gap, and to say like, “Hey, you know what? Stick with it. You’re going to get through it. You’re going to figure it out. It’s going to be good.” And I love that idea of having a conversation with both of those personas, the ones your persona from the past and your persona from the future. Just kind of the reassurance that each of those personas would give you as you’re on your journey makes a lot of sense.

So you’ve done a lot in the world of photography. When we talk about the gain, you have covered a lot of that ground. What would your advice be for that person who is just starting out? Like, it’s not you, you’re not looking back and having that conversation with you, but it’s that person who’s just at the beginning and in the early stages and they might be listening to this podcast. What would your advice be for them?

Alanna O’Neil: Yeah, I would say to stay open and just explore and experiment and develop a real visual literacy of trying and shooting so many different things. Whatever piques your interest, follow it. I always say just follow your curiosity of maybe sometimes if you go traveling and then for whatever reason you feel like, “I should shoot that,” just shoot it. Don’t even second guess, just shoot it. Because I think the more you just follow your intuition and that curiosity of be it food photography, street photography, whatever, the more you can really find who you are as a photographer and maybe then say no to something completely like, “I’ll never do this again or I’ll never do that again.” But the more you can explore and experiment and just be open to learn and just have this curiosity to just keep shooting and practicing, I think, is my best advice.

Bjork Ostrom: I don’t remember. So this is going to be a terrible story. Speaking of stories, I’m going to set it up by saying this is going to be a terrible one because I don’t remember a lot of the details. But it was like the premise was this. They were doing a study and they asked people to go in. I don’t even remember, I would give credit to whoever shared this story originally, but I don’t remember who it is, so it’s going to be a really flimsy story. But hopefully the purpose of it will be clear.

The study was like, “We want to see who’s going to have the best pots.” It was a pottery experiment. They had two groups and they said, “Okay, with one group…” They set it up as, “We want you to be as careful as possible with making each one of these pots. Your goal is perfection. Your goal is quality.” And then they told the other group of people, “We want you to just make as many as you can, and your goal is quantity. The goal is to get as many out there, to create as many pots as possible, to throw as many pots as possible.” What they found was the group who they had instructed to not care about quality but to care about quantity ended up with higher quality, because naturally what happened is they went in not being precious about what the outcome would be, and they had repetition. And that repetition is what allowed them to evolve and to funnel into the things that we’re working.

Ed Sheeran talks a lot about how the most important thing for him as a songwriter was writing in thousands of songs in order to get the bad songs out in order to then have good songs. I think part of what I hear you saying is like, do it. Don’t be precious about it. Get out there, shoot all the different things you think you might want to shoot and get after it because that’s going to be the thing that helps you refine your process, understand what you do, evolve your skills, and it’s going to help accelerate you towards the place that you want to get. Does that feel accurate?

Alanna O’Neil: I totally agree, yeah. Because I think there was a quote, another quote by a photographer that said like, “Your first 100,000 photographs will be terrible or something.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, right.

Alanna O’Neil: Or maybe it’s 10,000. It’s just like you have to get through. There’s a growing time and you have to just get through all those bad ones and then until you really fine tune what you like and what you are good at. And even now when I approach a shoot, it’s usually takes me a while to really like these photos. It’s like the last few. When I start editing, sometimes I’ll start from the end because I know that’s when I’m most warmed up to my subject and my scene. Those are the ones I end up liking. It took me some time to just kind of get there and then warm up. But there is, you just have to get through this point. And then all that is not useless, so productive. It’s not a waste of time, what I’m saying. You have to do it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes, right. Even if the images are bad or they’re not what you want.

Alanna O’Neil: Oh, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s in service, yeah.

Alanna O’Neil: I have so many bad images.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s in service of getting closer to where you want to be and kind of compressing. If you take 100,000 photos over 20 years, that’s one thing. You could also take 100,000 photos in a year maybe. And the idea being you’re going to have to do it one way or the other, and so just accept it and to move through it, yeah, I think that’s great.

So Alanna, there’s going to be a lot of people who are interested following along with what you’re up to. I know you’ve also published some books. And my guess is there’s also people who’d be interested in learning from you and seeing what you’re up to with the content that you’re going to be creating and the education in the course.

Alanna O’Neil: Sure.

Bjork Ostrom: So where can people follow along with you and what you’re up to? Point us in all the right directions and we’ll include those in the show notes.

Alanna O’Neil: Okay, sure. So you can see my website, it’s just alannaoneil.com. And then Instagram, everyone’s favorite. It’s alannaoneilphoto. And I offer a mentorship program for new photographers. The program that I’m talking about that covers business and mindset and photography training is called Visual Voices Collective, and I’m hoping to launch this autumn. So I’m still being in the works and being developed. So stay tuned for that.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. That’s great. Alanna, thanks so much for coming on.

Alanna O’Neil: Thank you so much for having me.

Emily Walker: Hey, there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and thank you so much for listening to that episode. We really appreciate it. If you liked this episode or enjoy the show, we would really appreciate you leaving a review or rating wherever you listen to your podcast episodes. Ratings and reviews help get the show in front of new listeners and help us grow our little show into something even bigger. We read each and every review and it makes us so happy to hear when you’re enjoying the podcast or what you would like us to improve or change in upcoming episodes. All you have to do is find the Food Blogger Pro Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it’s on Apple or Spotify or another player, and enter a rating and review. While you’re there, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss a new episode. We really appreciate it so much and it makes such a huge difference for our show, so thanks in advance. And that’s all we have for you today. So have a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Businessese. That’s business, with ese at the end. We hear it time and time again, the business side of running your own food blog can be tricky. It can be difficult to navigate how to protect the content that you create, and accurately create important website policies like a privacy policy and website terms, especially when privacy laws are changing so quickly. Enter Businessese. Businessese helps small business owners handle the fine print, and translate legalese with easy to customize DIY legal templates. Businessese offers templates for bloggers and business owners through products like their website policy bundle, which includes a privacy policy, terms of use, a website disclaimer template, and access to the Businessese Privacy Law Library, to help you identify what you need to customize each template for your own blog.

Danielle, the owner of Businessese and our Food Blogger Pro legal expert is so generous with her knowledge and time with this community, and she’s given all Food Blogger Pro podcast listeners free access to a resource called Four Tools to Protect Your Food Blog. In this resource, you’ll learn all about the most essential website policies, including an overview of the current state of privacy laws, and get an exclusive discount code to use in the Businessese shop. And if you decide to purchase any templates or bundles from Businessese, you’ll get lifetime access to any of the updates they make. Head to businessese.com/foodbloggerpro, Food Blogger Pro is all one word, to download the Four Tools to Protect Your Food Blog resource for free. Again, that’s businessese.com/foodbloggerpro. Thanks again to Businessese for sponsoring this episode.

Emily Walker: Hey, there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Today on the podcast, we’re welcoming back Rachel Korinek from Two Loves Studio. Rachel was on the Food Blogger Pro podcast almost five years ago, and she’s back today to chat more about food photography, and being an entrepreneur as a food photographer. Rachel has a background as an educator, and you can definitely tell in this interview, and when she chats about food photography because she’s just so good at explaining all sorts of different concepts, especially food photography, which can sometimes be tricky to chat about on a podcast. She’s really thoughtful about explaining the concepts, and walking you through it step by step.

In this interview, Rachel chats more about how she got into a career in food photography, and what the different seasons have looked like in her business. She answers some listener questions that listeners to this podcast submitted, about three core edits she recommends for editing food photographs, her recommendations for background props, and tips for using your phone for food photography. She also chats more about some of the common mistakes she sees food photographers making, and her tips for styling hard-to-style foods.

One quick note here, Rachel was kind enough to send a couple photographs that she’s taken that illustrate the point she talks through in the podcast. So she has two photographs that will be in the show notes, and she mentions them specifically in the episode. So if you’d like a visual for what she’s talking about, make sure to head over to the show notes at foodbloggerpro/podcast to read more about that. It’s a really awesome interview, we always love having Rachel on the podcast, so I’m just going to let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Rachel, welcome back to the podcast.

Rachel Korinek: Thank you. I can’t believe it’s been close to five years since I was on, that’s wild.

Bjork Ostrom: Five years, probably nothing has changed in either of our lives, very similar to what it was in 2018.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah, time goes so quickly.

Bjork Ostrom: The funny thing is, so much has changed, and yet here we are still doing very similar things. We’re in this world of talking to people who are really good in these specific areas. For you, that’s food photography, sharing that with people who are creating things online in the area of food or recipe content. So that’s what we’re going to be focusing on today, is talking about all things food photography, and it’s a really important part of what we do, and it’s a world that you’re in. So for those who didn’t get to listen to that episode five years ago, can you talk about how you got into food photography?

Rachel Korinek: Yeah, I sort of fell into food photography, like a lot of us, we don’t realize that food photography is a thing. If you talk to people who don’t know, they’re sort of really astounded that this is something that you can get paid to do, but when you look around everywhere, there’s photos of food. So I was still one of those people that just sort of stumbled across a magazine, and realized that this was something that really interested me. ’Cause I had started to, like everybody does, create a million blogs about stuff that nobody cares about, and I was cooking, and taking photos of that, and really seeing that that was something that interested me. And at the time, I was working as an accountant for a retail company, and they wanted to promote me, and I just remember being like, “This is not what I want to do. I really want to give this food photography thing a go.”

Bjork Ostrom: You know it’s bad when they’re like, “We want to promote you.” And you’re like-

Rachel Korinek: Yeah, I know.

Bjork Ostrom: “I don’t want to be promoted.”

Rachel Korinek: I know. And if I’m honest, I probably cried, ’cause I was like, “I really don’t want this, but this seems crazy, because this is what people want. They want a career, and a promotion, and here I go throw it all in to try this food photography thing that people thought I was a bit crazy.”

Bjork Ostrom: And You could see this path of success, “Okay, if I do this 10 years, 20 years, this is where I’ll be. I don’t want to be there.” And so that was the moment where you looked, and you’re like, “What if I went down this other path?”

Rachel Korinek: Yeah, I really felt like I just had to give it a go. If I looked back on my life and it didn’t work out, I really was like, “I just have to give it a go.” And that was 12 years ago.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And when you say you cried, was it like, “Shoot, I have to make this decision”? What was that moment? It was a long time ago, if you remember it.

Rachel Korinek: It was probably a bit of relief of, I really wanted to give this thing a go, and there was this defining line of, “Are you going to take this promotion? ’Cause You can’t really work on them part-time each.” So it was really this relief of this sign of, “You really have to give this a go.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And having that clear picture then, and saying, “Okay, there’s some relief here.” You’ve maybe been kind of wrestling with the decision, now you know. What did that look like to branch out on that new path, and take a step into being an entrepreneur?

Rachel Korinek: It was very hard.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Rachel Korinek: And I think it’s easy to look on social media, because people… It seems from the outside that things are really easy. And it was probably about five years of stop-start because life happened. There was various things that happened. My now husband lost a visa, we had some death in the family and illness, and so there was lots of stopping and starting. And that can be disheartening because you’d really try to get this thing going. But I think it’s, when I look back, life does happen, you have to work things sometimes slowly. So getting over that hump essentially, then things just started to sort of come my way.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I was just watching a video yesterday, he’s a expert on search engine optimization, but he kind of creates general business content now, his name is Brian Dean, he had a site called Backlinko. But he was talking about this company that he launched, and he was like, “What I realized is that I really needed to enjoy or find passion in the thing I was doing, because it takes a long time for it to catch on.”

Rachel Korinek: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: And that’s not always true, sometimes you catch something, and it happens right away. And a lot of times, from the outside, you hear about those stories, and it can seem like that’s the norm. But I think it’s the exception-

Rachel Korinek: I think it’s the except.

Bjork Ostrom: One in 1,000, one in 10,000. What you don’t hear about a lot is people who just continue to show up, they grind, they make a little progress, they go to sleep, they get up, they have a setback.

Rachel Korinek: Exactly. And for years too.

Bjork Ostrom: And he talked about five years.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And he talked about five years, and for you, you said at five years, it’s kind of interesting. Another quick anecdote, a story that I heard somebody say is… He’s an entrepreneur, and he said, “In a five-day week, I feel like I’m taking one step back every day, and on the fifth day, I take five steps forward.”

Rachel Korinek: Forward.

Bjork Ostrom: And he used that as an analogy for business, essentially. And I think it’s helpful to remind ourselves of other people who are in it that that’s the norm. Because sometimes-

Rachel Korinek: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Like you said on social, you can look at it and people are like, “[beepbabeepbadoo, I’m just being super successful, not about trying to work-”

Rachel Korinek: I’m sort of facing that right now, I’ve had success, and sort of plateauing now, and it’s like, “What is the next thing that’s coming?”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Rachel Korinek: I don’t necessarily always know what that answer is too, but I guess I’ve just looked back, and I’m like, “The one thing that I can rely on is getting up, and trying again, and keep moving forward, and trying things.” Is really the only thing that we can control. And so even people who look super successful will still have some setbacks or plateaus that aren’t always visible either.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. Yeah.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: What I’ve seen is, there’s personal seasons of reinvention, and then there’s also industry seasons of reinvention.

Rachel Korinek: Exactly, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: We’re in this world where it changes relatively quickly. In the building that we’re in, there’s a frame shop, and so that business looks relatively similar today compared to what it did 10 years ago, maybe you’re marketing a little bit different, or tools are a little bit different, but for us, doing media and content online, 10 years ago looks very different than what it does today.

Rachel Korinek: I feel like even two years ago is… It could just…

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. You have this industry reinvention, where suddenly, you’re playing a different game, and you need to decide, “Do I want to show up and play this game, because it’s a different game than I was playing 10 years ago?” And for some people it’s a great fit-

Rachel Korinek: So true.

Bjork Ostrom: For others it’s not. And then there’s also personal seasons of reinvention, where things change, you have a baby. In your life, you have a young one, we have two girls. So you have that personal season of reinvention. So for you, what do you feel like are some reflections, I’d be interested to hear you talk about those seasons of success. Like you said, “I’ve had some stretches where I felt really successful.” What did that look like?

Rachel Korinek: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And then would be interested in the seasons of reinvention, and it sounds like maybe that’s a season now, so it’d be interesting-

Rachel Korinek: Yeah, I mean, I think the success that I had was ’cause I followed what I wanted to do, and it came out of that five-year grind of just feeling like it was setbacks, and not getting where I wanted to, and not making a lot of money, which is really hard when you work super hard. And so I just really wanted to follow exactly what I wanted to do, and that was types of clients that I wanted, or teaching… I did my editing courses, so I was really focused on the things I wanted to do. And I think it showed, because like you said, you show up time and time again, ’cause you really love to do those things. So that’s sort of going well.

And then you get to a point where you’ve created all these ideas that you had, and what’s next? Waiting for that next idea, or the next level, potentially, instead of just shooting by myself, it might look like shooting with teams, or for larger clients, and things like that. So I’m just in a space where I feel like I know the answers will come, and I find, even though this is super frustrating, the more I try to find that answer, the harder it is to find.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Rachel Korinek: You just have to keep your hands in the pie, and trying different things, and then eventually, that answer, if you trust, will come. So I have a few ideas of things I still want to achieve in my career, so I guess I’m just sort of being like, “I know those are things I want to do.” So focusing on getting those done, but like you said, I had a baby this year, so now I am having to work slower. So those things are probably going to take a little bit longer. Which is not what I’m used to, I’m used to being able to just focus on myself, and put a lot of work into it.

So I think there’s a little bit of reinventing myself, but also the industry, even just in six months with AI and all this stuff coming out, it’s hard to know exactly how those things are going to play out into what I essentially would like to do. I’m really enjoying creating YouTube videos, and I’m working with my husband, and we create those together, and that’s really fun. I’m having a lot of fun doing that, I know in the past, the things that I’ve been passionate about have always helped me be successful. So I think that’s really lucky if you have those things, so that’s kind of just what I’m focusing on.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: So you had talked about your courses, that was one of the things that you’d done, teaching people about all the different ins and outs of food photography, have also done client work a little bit. Can you talk about maybe the different stages of your business, and what those look like in terms of working with clients, working with brands, doing course content? How did things evolve for you as a photography professional?

Rachel Korinek: A lot of people, well, maybe not a lot of people, but people see teaching as potentially something they can do, or maybe they enjoy it. For me, I guess ’cause I had a background in teaching, I went to university to do a teaching degree, it was always something that I was really passionate in, and I think it just evolved naturally. ’Cause I really started my food photography blog because I wasn’t finding the things that I needed to learn online, so I was learning those things myself, and then writing, and putting it out there for others to learn. So I think it was-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, which, I think, it’s a great way to do it.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: For people who are learning a thing, to learn and document is awesome.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah. So I think it was really natural.

Bjork Ostrom: Whatever it is.

Rachel Korinek: The two things are really natural. So because I have these two elements of my business, I can pick and choose the types of clients I wanted, or the types of brands that I wanted to work with, or even the speaking gigs that I do or don’t take. So I think it just, again, was a really natural progression how that happened.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep, that makes sense. This is why it’s great to interview people like this, because you have the heart of a teacher, ’cause that’s kind of what you did.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: But you also have this deep knowledge in photography, due to not only thinking about how you can teach it to people, but also going through the process of working with clients, and doing shoots. And so let’s talk about some of the things that you’ve learned. I think there’s going to be a lot of things that we can pass along to people, specific to best practices, even for Pinch of Yum, we’re continuing to, and this is really Lindsay, continuing to think about evolving the process, making it more efficient, but still prioritizing pictures because they’re so important. But how do we also get process shots in? So we’re always evolving and tweaking our systems.

Rachel Korinek: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: So let’s talk through some of those questions that maybe people can take some takeaways from, starting with that efficiency category. Thinking about doing multiple shoots in a day, I just did a live Q&A with Lindsay in Food Blogger Pro, and one of the questions that somebody asked was, “What’s your advice for getting more done?” Or something like that. And Lindsay was, “Batching.” So when you think of doing multiple shoots in a day, how do you go about doing that? What does it look like to do that well, knowing that there’s a lot of variables involved?

Rachel Korinek: Yeah. And I think a lot of people listening will be running a food blog, so there’s probably a couple of different types. But there’ll be larger food blogs that have teams, but then there’ll also be a lot of us who just work on our own. So I tend to do both, depending on who the client is, the budget, things like that. I think it’s always more challenging when you have multiple shoots in a day, and you work by yourself. I mean, I don’t think it’s any secret that you have to be super organized if you’re doing multiple shoots in a day. If I’m working on my own, I can probably shoot four to six recipes in a day on my own. If a client needs more, so eight to 10, I would need an assistant, someone to help me with food prep, cleanup, and it probably would depend on the complexity of the recipes as well.

So when you’re shooting for a client, they’re going to pay you for a certain number of days, or hours, or whatever, recipes. I can take an example of, I had a client, and I would do monthly recipes for them, so they can put it in an ebook, and they could share it on their social, and they had an app, and things like that. So she would send me the recipes for a specific month, and I would go ahead, and… Basically, when I got the recipes, I would go through them, I try to categorize them into, like if you had a four-day shoot, and I’m shooting multiple recipes, I would try to break it up into a mix of easy and complex together. ’Cause you don’t want to have a day where you have six really tough recipes to get through, you kind of want to have a mix, it’s going to help you fill the time-

Bjork Ostrom: Cereal-

Rachel Korinek: In that day.

Bjork Ostrom: You have a bowl of cereal that you’re shooting on the easy end.

Rachel Korinek: Sometimes it’ll be-

Bjork Ostrom: Barbecue on the other.

Rachel Korinek: A vinaigrette or a dip, really easy, a smoothie, super easy, ’cause it doesn’t take as much prep time as well. So a lot of people, like food bloggers, will know which are their easier recipes, so I try to have a combination of both of those to help me get to the time constraints of the day. I always think, for doing this 10 plus years, at least this is true for me, the day of the shoots starts out quite slow, and then you kind of get into some momentum, and it ends, you can shoot things quicker, essentially.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Rachel Korinek: ’Cause you’ll set up, maybe you’ll tweak the lighting at the beginning, and all those things will help you with the shoot as the day goes on. So I try to pick a couple of easy recipes that I can start off with, to just get those shots, and-

Bjork Ostrom: Almost like warming up a little bit.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah, exactly. Under undo your belt, and then finish off with an easy one at the end of the day as well. Because usually, you’re tired, and it’s good to be like, “Okay, it’s the last one, and it is not going to be super challenging.”

Bjork Ostrom: And your brain is at that point where you’ve made so many decisions, and you feel fatigued, it’s like, “Let’s just do something easy.”

Rachel Korinek: Exactly. Yeah, so I think those things always help in terms of the day, and then it comes down to, is there things that you can do to prep for recipes? Which, a lot of food blogs probably are really good at. Can you do something the night before? Soups I find I can always cook the night before, just to help me out on the day, ’cause they’re usually pretty easy to reheat. Are there little things like, “Okay, we have three recipes today, and they all require us to use diced onion.” For example. So it’s just quicker to cut that onion once, and then save for different recipes, than having to do it three separate times. So little things like that. I’ll scan the recipes to see where things are going, and sort of create some kind of list in my head, or add those together one after the other, so I can sort of use them and help speed up things, especially if you’re working on your own, I find that that really helps.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. How about if you are at the point, let’s say you’re working on your own, one of the things that I hear my friend who’s in video production talk a lot about is pre-production.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: How much of the shoot day, so let’s say you do an eight-hour day, and you’re doing four to six recipes on your own, how much of that is pre-production? Like you thinking about what’s going to happen, getting groceries ahead of time, versus what actually happens the day of?

Rachel Korinek: I think it depends on number of recipes too, but obviously, if you’re doing six recipes, you’ve got quite a big grocery shop to do. I know other photographers who will hire someone to help them with those pre-production days, or if you’ve got a food stylist, if you’re shooting for a cookbook or something, stylists will usually do those things. But if you are working on your own, and you’re the core person in your business, you’ll be grocery shopping.

So there’s that element of it. There is also, it depends on the client too, but I usually will go through and save a whole bunch of images to a mood board for each recipe to give me some ideas. I will pick backgrounds and props that I want to use, if not all of the recipes, like a good chunk of them. And sometimes I’ll end up changing it on the day, but those first three recipes, I’ll have backgrounds and props selected the day before, so I can really just jump straight into it. Sometimes there’s a fridge clean out that’s got to happen to get all the recipes in, and then I will look at certain recipes like, again, soups were a great one. I would definitely cook them the night before, or sometimes ground beef can be cooked the night before, and just kind of helping prep myself for the day when there’s going to be a lot of things going on.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: You had mentioned this, but somebody to go out, and if there’s a lot of grocery shopping that has to happen, a lot of times that being hired out, what would be the first hires that you would make if you wanted to be efficient with your food photography? Your shoot days? My guess is one of the early ones would be somebody to help… The go for this, go for that, but also probably somebody who could understand maybe some of the recipe prep type stuff.

Rachel Korinek: Exactly, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: So what general advice would you have for somebody who’s maybe at the point where they’ve kind of done it on their own, and now they have a little bit of disposable income within their business, or personally that they want to spend on their business, and they say, “Hey, I can justify hiring somebody.” It’s not like they’re going to hire the photographer, ’cause that’d be more expensive, but they’re going to hire somebody who’s going to come and support. What would those support elements look like?

Rachel Korinek: There’s two things, I think there’s something that you really dislike doing, that is always a good thing to hire out. I really like marketing, and I love my email list, but I don’t love going in and putting those things in the backend, I can get somebody else to do that.

Bjork Ostrom: Right.

Rachel Korinek: I think, for me, sometimes I like the shopping, but if you have a lot of recipes all the time, it’s actually better… My time is worth being used to edit photos, rather than go shopping. So definitely you could outsource the groceries. Having someone help you with food prep I think as well is a skill that most people can do. You might need to give them some direction, or… Usually if I’m styling I’ll want to do the final style, but I’ll get someone to dice things up, or do the cleanup, and the washing up prep.

And usually, I’d like to try and hire someone who might be starting out in food photography for myself, so that they can see the process, and learn a little bit on the job as well. So I found those things to be great. In terms of a photo assistant, they might be probably a bit more expensive than someone who’s just doing groceries and food prep, but they can help you… They should have some sort of understanding of photography, they can help you tether, or check are the photos in focus? They should really be someone who can say to you, “Oh, the lighting is maybe too bright.” Or, “Things are getting too hot.” And they can help you change some of those things. So they should be contributing to the shoot, rather than you just pointing around telling them what to do.

Bjork Ostrom: Telling them what to do, yeah.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah, exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like another brain, versus just another body.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: This friend, so he’s done a couple documentaries, some of them are on Netflix, I’ve referenced him a few times, but to give him a little shout-out, one of them is coming out in a little bit, I think it’ll be called Bitcon on Netflix, the other one is Pez Outlaw, and then the last one is Legend of Cocaine Island. So people can check those out to see these documentaries. But one of the things he always talks about is, when he goes on these shoots, it’s amazing how many people are there.

Rachel Korinek: Oh my gosh, yes.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s somebody to do makeup, there’s somebody to do… Doesn’t touch the cameras, but just tells the cameras what to do, and how to focus, and then there’s-

Rachel Korinek: It’s super niched, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: One person to just focus the camera, and then one person to hold the light. So I think, if nothing else, I just want to give some affirmation to anybody who’s out there shooting on their own, video or photography, because you’re doing a lot of jobs. You’re doing food styling-

Rachel Korinek: You’re doing a lot of jobs, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Photography, editing, recipe, you have to understand the recipe itself. You’re having to create great recipe content. So it’s a lot that people are doing.

Rachel Korinek: It’s a lot. Exactly, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And that people are having to learn.

Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by Clariti. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could figure out how you can optimize the existing posts on your blog without needing to comb through each and every post one by one? With Clariti, you can discover optimization opportunities with just a few clicks. Thanks to Clariti’s robust filtering options, you can figure out which posts have broken links, missing alt texts, broken images, no internal links, and other insights, so you can confidently take action to make your blog posts even better.

We know that food blogging is a competitive industry, so anything you can do to level up your content can really give you an edge. By fixing content issues, and filling content gaps, you’re making your good content even better. And that’s why we created Clariti, it’s a way for bloggers and website owners to feel confident in the quality of their content. Listeners to the Food Blogger Pro podcast get 50% off of their first month of Clariti after signing up. To sign up, simply go to clariti.com/food, that’s Clariti, C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food. Thanks again to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

How about on the food styling side of things? Knowing that that’s something that you do as well, talking about multiple jobs. What are some common mistakes that you see people make? Because that, obviously, is such a huge part of it. You can take a great picture, but if it’s not styled well, it’s not going to look great.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah. Sometimes people are like, “What do I do with this food that’s really ugly?” There’s one food recipe that stands out in my mind, and it was chicken and cheese wrapped in a rice paper, and then air fried. And honestly, there’s not much you can do with that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Rachel Korinek: It’s a clear tube that has nothing redeeming about it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rachel Korinek: And so what I always, always fall back on is, if you have great lighting, you can almost make anything look good. So anytime I have really, really tricky food, it’s not that you want to distract the viewer from the food with props and backgrounds, but they can really be a nice support to help soften the blow, essentially, that that’s not the prettiest food in the world. So I think there are little tricks like that you can do, but always, if you can get your lighting done really nicely, you can really make ugly food shine.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Rachel Korinek: But there’s a lot of things I like to think about with food, you’ve got your composition of the whole scene, but then you have, are you thinking about any composition theories or techniques that you can bring to actually styling the food? So anytime I have a client, I’ll go through all the recipes, and I’ll be thinking about, “Okay, we’ve got a lot of brown in this dish.” There is a pho to that’s in the show notes, it was a beef tinga, and it’s really just beef, onions and tomatoes that you can see in the actual shot. It’s a lot of heavy… A lot of brown, depending on how you cut the onions, you’ve got a similar shape to all of those three ingredients.

So for me, looking at that, it was like, “Okay, what can I do to make this look pretty?” And if I need to go back to the client… If you’re running a food blog, you probably have a little bit more autonomy over that, but I would ask the client, “Is it okay if I actually change the cut of the onion?” You don’t want to make it so different that it’s going to cause a problem to actually cook the recipe, but if they’ve asked you to finally dice it, you might see if you can do thin slices that are roughly around the same size, just to break up some of those different shapes that are showing in there. I’ll ask, “Are there garnishes, any herbs or stuff that I can add at the end, or sprinkling of Parmesan cheese or something like that?”

And if all those things are a no, then I try to lean on, “Can we add side dishes to this to make it look more interesting?” Or more of a scene, or how can we not just focus on that? There’s another photo in the show notes where I made, and these are both client shots, but I did meatloaf. So meatloaf is another tough one. Again, just brown-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Rachel Korinek: Just a shape, everything’s kind of mushed in there. This one, we didn’t make so much in a loaf shape, we actually made it in a cake or a brownie pan, an eight by eight. So I was thinking, “I’m going to cut it into interesting…” I mean it’s just a square, but cut it, and move them around on a board, make sure that I have some of the sauce on top, that picks up a little bit of shine, and so it’s not looking dry. Suddenly you’ve cut it in a way that might be different to what you would see other recipes. So just thinking about a few little things like that can really take a dish from maybe a one to a seven.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah. And it’s interesting, my dad was an art teacher, but a lot of it is almost the different elements of art. It’s contrast, it’s focal points, it’s complementary colors, all of those things you’re thinking about putting those things together, and it’s just that food is your canvas for what you’re using.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah, yep.

Bjork Ostrom: So even for people to review some of those standards of art, it feels like it would be a helpful thing to look at.

Rachel Korinek: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah, so you can apply that to the whole composition that you’re putting, you’ll have the hero dish, and a side dish, and maybe a glass of water, or a napkin. So you can think about it that way. But I also encourage you to think about… Take those elements, and apply it to just the food. If you were just shooting a bowl of ground beef, how can you just apply those to that specifically, is really how I try to think about it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. You talked about lighting, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts on artificial lighting. Is that primarily what you’re shooting with? Do you use natural light? And if artificial light, what would your advice be for people who want to create a consistent look in everything in terms of where you’re positioning the lights, what type of lights, things like that?

Rachel Korinek: Yeah. Like A lot of us, I started off doing natural light, and I always recommend mastering natural light before you move on to artificial. Artificial can be a jump, because again, you have to create it from scratch. And artificial light is one of those things where if you don’t have great tools, you won’t have a great quality of light. So sometimes people have a small budget, they start out with artificial light, and it is quite challenging. I sort of shoot artificial light nine and a half times out of 10 these days, because I love the challenge of being able to create the exact light that I want. I can shoot any time of the day, and it can be very consistent. So again, that’s another key to shooting multiple recipes in a day, I can have a set-up, it’s not quite set and forget, but you can really motor through, and know that it’s going to be consistent.

So I do have a YouTube video, it’s a 30-minute free tutorial on my go-to light setup. And I wanted to show people, one, what you can do in a small space, but how you can replicate gorgeous, beautiful, big window light with just one light. So I’m sure we can link to that if people are interested in checking that out.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep.

Rachel Korinek: I would say, use the light that you have. So both lighting types can be really beautiful. As an Australian being in Australia when I first started out, lighting is very different down there to how it is in North America, especially in winter. And when I moved here, I was like, “Oh, I can see why people complain about certain times of the year.” So it can really help you get out of a tricky spot, and especially if you have a food blog, and you want a very similar aesthetic that you can shoot all year round for your blog as well, that’s where artificial light can really help you.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, especially if you’re working a normal job, and then you get home at five, and you have 15 minutes to do a shoot when it’s in the middle of the winter-

Rachel Korinek: And a lot of us-

Bjork Ostrom: The light disappears so quick.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah, it’s great if you have a space, or maybe that’s a room in your house or whatever, you can literally just leave the setup there, and you get home, turn it on, you know it’s going to be reliable, then you can focus on things like composition, or for food blog, you can focus on really making sure that the viewer is going to see how they can cook, or process shots, things like that, to help the end user. ’Cause a little bit different to a food blog than to a client, so you want to make sure that people landing on your blog understand how to cook. And there’s some really great blogs out there who do fabulous portrait shots, and I’m a good cook, but I still appreciate seeing those.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah.

Rachel Korinek: It really helps me understand, “Oh, this is what it should look like, and that’s working.” And whatnot.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. So one of the things that I think is great about this world is, and this world meaning people who get into creating content online, social media, or perhaps it’s on a blog, is, a lot of times, it can be an avenue into another profession. Is that a little bit of what it was for you? You had a site, you experimented with publishing content online, and then realized photography was really what you loved about it, and then built a business around that? Is that true somewhat, or not at all?

Rachel Korinek: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah, no, I think so. And it’s interesting when people… You’re putting it out there, and then you get your first client, and you’re like, “Oh, I can really do this.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Rachel Korinek: And maybe you’ll add new skills. Like, “Currently, I’m doing video, and where does that lead?”

Bjork Ostrom: Yes.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah, you sort of have a base, and then you just start adding your skills, and you see what you like doing, and then you follow those passions. A lot of us wear so many different hats, that sometimes I think, “Oh, could I get a job in marketing or consulting?”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Rachel Korinek: So there’s many ways, especially if you’re interested in those things, that you… I guess your business evolves, and might take paths that you never even imagined it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. There’s a conversation we’re having, we’re talking with this… It’s probably a Fortune 50 company, they’re kind of beta testing one of these things, we’re kind of helping out with Pinch of Yum, and Lindsay was giving some product feedback, and he responded back, and he’s like, “If you ever needed a job in product development, let us know.” But it’s part of built into what we do-

Rachel Korinek: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: And you need it to be successful, these different elements. So what I was getting at with that is, one of the things I’m constantly trying to bring up on the podcast is, that what we’re after, it might… What we think we’re after might not always be the end result of where we get. And some of us get in, we start a blog, and then we’re like, “Actually, we really love developing the website.” And that becomes a thing that we do. Or we create content online, and we’re like, “Actually, we love to do photography or video.” For people who are on that path, “I love photography, I love video, that’s actually something I really want to do. I want to do more of that. Maybe I don’t even need to have my own thing, I could just do it for other people.” How would you recommend those people find their first clients, or the first brand to work with if they want to secure those deals? And what did you learn about sales, really, marketing and sales as it relates to working with a brand or a company?

Rachel Korinek: It has changed since when I first started, and in some ways, potentially it’s harder, because there’s a lot more people doing it, but in a lot of ways there’s more avenues for you to share what you’re doing. There’s one brand specifically that I really want to work with, and it’s a matter of just being like, “I am going to create the content to show them that I can do the job that I ultimately want to get.” And so sometimes there’s two thoughts on that, that people are like, “You don’t want to be creating content for them that’s free.” I’m not really creating it for them, I’m creating it for me.

And that could be like, “Am I teaching something?” Or, “Am I learning a new recipe?” Or, “Am I learning how to use a new piece of equipment?” And you can target brands within those things. So maybe it’s lighting that I want to work out for myself, and my portfolio, and my clients, but I could also work with a brand of lighting. So I could be not only shooting with that, and showing the company what I can do, but I could also be teaching other people, so showing them the range of skills that I have.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Rachel Korinek: And sometimes when we start out, and you look at the people that inspire you, sometimes you feel like you should work with the brands that they’re working with, because maybe they’re cool brands, or they’re large brands, but when you get down the rabbit hole, you might think, “Actually, they’re not the brands that I want to work with.” So it’s always, I think, like we’ve said before, is coming back to do you enjoy doing that specific thing? Because sometimes, I’ve spoken to a brand, and actually working with them took three years-

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, yeah.

Rachel Korinek: For whatever it is, and it’s like, “Can you consistently stay in front of those people for three years?” And the answer is yes, if you’re interested, and passionate about that, and you’re sort of going to do it anyway-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Rachel Korinek: But if you are not, that’s very hard to sustain.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, if it feels like a total energy suck every time you’re doing it, then it’s going to feel like a long three years, but if it’s a brand you love, that you’re going to be talking about, thinking about anyways, it’s very different.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: I had an interesting conversation with a connection who’s in a different industry, completely different than the food world, and we were talking about their… But essentially online media, and he was talking about his process for sales, and it’s a really big company, sponsored content type stuff, working with brands. And I was like, “How much of it is inbound versus outbound?” He’s like, “Oh, 95% is outbound. It’s us pursuing brands, pursuing companies. It’s having a database of all of our contacts, following up with them occasionally.” And I thought it was interesting, because a lot of us, I think, myself included, assume you get really good at something, and then just inbound stuff comes in. But so often, it’s reaching out, it’s hustling, it’s reminding people that you’re there, top of mind, doing all of those things.

And I think back to, we did some type of webinar thing a while back, and one of the things I said, kind of similar to what you’re saying, is, don’t be afraid to do things for free. And not that you’re just giving it away, but saying… Maybe you do a blog post, and you use a brand in that blog post, and say… Reach out to the brand, and say, “Hey, really love your product. I used it here. Here’s what it looks like. If you’d ever be interested in working together, or having photos done for you, would love to connect.” I think it’s a lot easier than coming to them and saying, “Hey, can we work together?” And they’re like, “Who are you? What are you about? Prove to us.”

Rachel Korinek: Yeah, I mean, if you think about it in our personal lives, maybe you want photos for your wedding, or of your family, you wouldn’t hire a photographer who didn’t have wedding or family photos in their portfolio, most likely.

Bjork Ostrom: Right, right.

Rachel Korinek: So if you are trying to go after a brand, maybe it’s flour, and you are trying to pitch pancakes, and you have no pancakes in your portfolio, no pancakes on your blog, it just doesn’t make sense.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Rachel Korinek: So maybe you want to be the pancake person, you would go and do all that work first so that clients can see that… Or brands can see that you can really execute that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Rachel Korinek: One thing that came to mind is, especially for creatives, I think when we don’t hear back, or we get nos, we take it personally ’cause we think there’s something about our work that’s not good enough, but honestly, I can’t tell you how many times I might’ve followed up with a magazine, a client, a brand, and they’re like, “Oh, we actually need something.” Or, “We needed a photographer.” It doesn’t happen all the time, but I’m surprised how often it happened when a client says, “Actually, the photographer we had didn’t work out. We were actually looking for somebody, you landed in our inbox.” So sometimes you’re also doing them a favor too by just popping up, reminding them that you’re there. Timing is everything.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and it’s work. It takes effort, it takes repeated… And a lot of times, it’s work that doesn’t immediately pay off, but six months down the line, a year down the line, once you have those connections, people know that you’re quick to respond.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah, and I mean, I was devastated when people tell me that at the beginning, I was like, “I need work now. I need these things now.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Rachel Korinek: But the thing is, like you said, the work you do now will help you in six months, and then the next day. So it all works itself out if you continually just keep on that treadmill, things just kind of consistently come your way, if that makes sense.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yep. So one of the things that we do is, we occasionally ask our listeners what questions they have for an upcoming interview, and we’ll pick three of these questions that people ask. There’s a few more than that, but we’ll pick three here. Starting with this, do you use Lightroom for editing photos? And then any general recommendations for the editing process?

Rachel Korinek: Yeah, so I use Capture One these days, but editing theory is editing theory. So when you understand how to edit, you can edit the same sort of way in many programs. So in terms of editing, when I started teaching editing a few years ago, I just really found that people weren’t… Like you’ve got all these tools, which ones do you use? Or we would rely on presets. And I think if you rely on presets and you don’t understand how to edit, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

So I came down to, what are the three core edits that you need to do. And so I always tell people to think about your exposure adjustments, your contrast adjustments, and your color adjustments. So if you ask yourself those three questions, “How is the exposure for the mood or the story I’m trying to tell? Is there enough contrast?” That’s where a photo really pops out and has that wow feeling. And food is so important when it comes to colors, so, “Are my colors feeling really rich? Or are the colors…” I always use this example of a strawberry, a gorgeous red strawberry looks really delicious, but if it’s slightly orange, that looks weird to us.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Rachel Korinek: So some of those presets sometimes will change those colors. So always come down to, if I can just put it in a nutshell, is exposure, color, contrast, are the three things you want to look at when you’re editing.

Bjork Ostrom: And that being important regardless of the program that you’re using?

Rachel Korinek: Yeah, exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Great. How about any background props that you use or recommend? If you were on an island, and you could only take five background props with you, what would they be?

Rachel Korinek: Oh, that’s a hard one. I’d say pinch bowls are just great, because you can put lots of different things in them, salt, pepper, herbs, they really can be very adaptable to add to the scene. They’re small, so they can fit in all kinds of… If you want to add a little bit of negative space here, or cut it off, or it’s very complementary, so that’s something I would take. I’ve been collecting vintage flatware, knives, forks, spoons. So a nice vintage spoon is something that I would take. I probably would take a linen, ’cause again, it’s just something really easy to add to a frame. And then when you think about plates, bowls, things like that, something that has some really nice handmade texture is just… It picks up the light really nicely, it’s very complementary to food. If you could spend a little bit more money and just get a couple of handmade pieces like that, that’s probably neutral color palette, would be really awesome.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. All right. And then you’d have your island shoot, you’d be ready to go.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Was that five? I wasn’t keeping track.

Rachel Korinek: I feel like that’s four.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. Oh, okay. Yeah, so you have one more.

Rachel Korinek: One more. I feel a cutting board.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah. Something that feels like it’s been loved a little.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, not brand new, out-of-the-box?

Rachel Korinek: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool.

Rachel Korinek: Not that fake bamboo kind of stuff.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And then last question, how about any tips or tricks for taking good pictures with your iPhone, or camera phone? Knowing that we have these really capable phones, we don’t need to buy $1,000 camera if we’re just getting started, but what would be your advice for people who want to use their-

Rachel Korinek: Yeah, I get this email all the time, people are like, “I want to start right away, but I only have a phone.” Sometimes they want to ask my permission, that that’s okay.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah. “It’s okay.”

Rachel Korinek: Yeah. What I say is that photography happens… Part of it is the camera that you have, but there’s also the part that happens outside the camera. So that’s always composition, it’s always lighting. So regardless of the camera, if you can get really nice lighting and composition, I think those things are really important when you have a phone, because you’re a little bit more limited to some of the settings that you would have. The other thing about a phone is, we have the ability to just press buttons, and we have a super-wide angle, or an in-close. So a lot of times, I would recommend using some of the narrower settings that you have, because if you shoot something wide, and you get close to your subject, you get perspective distortion, and you might see glasses or whatever kind of feel like they’re falling out of the frame. So if you can use those settings to help you get a shot that is not going to have any of that distortion is a good tip.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Point being, if you take a wide angle picture, you never want to be the person right on the side, ’cause you end up looking really weird.

Rachel Korinek: Weird, exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: So same with food, you don’t want to be taking these wide angle ones, because it could potentially be distorted, or look a little different?

Rachel Korinek: Yeah, and I think a lot of the times with composition we cut things off at the side of the frame with still life photography, so those start to look a little weird.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. So much that we could talk about, so much that we could continue to talk about, but the great thing is that you have a YouTube channel where you cover a lot of this stuff. I know that you said you’ve kind of been working on building that out. You obviously have your courses, and the content that you’ve built there as well, and occasionally working with brands as well to do food photo shoots. Can you tell us all the different places you live, Rachel, and where people can follow along with you?

Rachel Korinek: Yeah. Come and say hi on YouTube, check out the videos that we’re sharing, a lot of teaching stuff on there, so you can find Two Loves Studio on YouTube. And my blog is twolovesstudio.com, so I’m always sharing the things that I learned in food photography, all the little aspects, and then on Instagram too is the other place. So Two Loves Studio for all of those. If you want to check out courses too, if you head to twolovesstudio.com, I have a courses section on there. I tend to teach very specific, I like to dive deep into certain concepts, so you can really understand all the ins and outs.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. That’s great. Two Loves, what does the name come from?

Rachel Korinek: It’s so weird, when I was coming up with a name, all I was saying to myself is, “What is a word that encapsulates my two loves?” And then it just kind of stuck.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s two loves-

Rachel Korinek: But it didn’t feel like-

Bjork Ostrom: That’s what it is.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah, it didn’t feel-

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like name inception.

Rachel Korinek: It didn’t feel quite finished. And I think six months later we added the studio on.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah, so that’s where that came from.

Bjork Ostrom: And your two loves being?

Rachel Korinek: Food and photography.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. Oh, that’s awesome.

Rachel Korinek: Yeah, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Love that. Two Loves Studio everywhere online. Rachel, thanks so much for coming on.

Rachel Korinek: Thank you for having me. Maybe we won’t leave it five years next time.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, five years, every three years, two years, we’ll have to shorten it a little bit. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Rachel Korinek: Thanks for having me.

Alexa Peduzzi: Hey, everyone. Alexa here, and thanks for tuning into this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We hope you enjoyed it. And I wanted to give you a little sneak peek into what we have going on on the Food Blogger Pro membership side of things in October. First of all, I can’t believe it’s October, but that is what we are talking about. So if you’re unaware, the Food Blogger Pro podcast is just one part of what we do here at Food Blogger Pro, the other half is a membership, so it’s a paid subscription community, where you get access to different courses, and trainings, and events, and more. It’s a fantastic place to spend your time if you want to start and grow and monetize a food blog. So I would definitely suggest checking it out at foodbloggerpro.com/join. But we do something new every week for our members, what I like to say is that our membership will look different at the end of each week, because we’re always adding new value to your membership. So this is what we have going on in October.

So actually this Thursday, we have a Q&A with Danielle Liss, she’s our legal expert, and Sam Adler, the fabulous blogger behind Frosting and Fettuccine, and they will be talking about pricing your work, and working with sponsors and clients. This is going to be such a good Q&A, so we actually wanted to offer it available to everybody, so members already get access to it, included in their membership price, but if you’re not a member, and you still want access to this conversation, and you want to attend live, and ask some questions for Danielle and Sam, you can actually go to foodbloggerpro.com/price, and go ahead and sign up. It’s just $25, so that would be a really great thing to do if you’re looking to maximize your earnings in Q4, and get ready for all that your business has to offer in 2024.

Next up, on the 12th, we will be publishing our next coaching call, and that is going to be with Megan from Cake ’n Knife. And in this coaching call, Bjork answers some of her questions about doing a few things really well, deleting old content, and finding the connection between authenticity and engagement. It’s an awesome conversation, and we can’t wait to share it with our members. And finally, we have a quick win video happening on the 19th. So a quick win is like a course, but it’s only one lesson long. And in this lesson, you’ll be learning about setting up an Amazon shop. So we figured this was kind of great timing, considering a lot of people try to maximize their affiliate earnings through Amazon in Q4. So we’re really excited to give you some tips and tricks on how to successfully run an Amazon shop page. And that will be our October. So again, if you’re interested in getting access to any of these, you can join the membership at foodbloggerpro.com/join. But otherwise, we’ll see you right here next time, next Tuesday. And until then, make it a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti, C-L-A-R-I-T-I. I kid you not, I was going to record this half an hour ago, but I was in Clariti and realized there’s an opportunity for Pinch of Yum that is a project we should move forward with, so I created a video, communicated it with the Pinch of Yum team, and said, “Hey, we should move forward on this and really get to work cleaning this up.” In our case, what I had done is I said, “Hey, show me all of the posts in the past year on Pinch of Yum.” And then I sort ordered that in reverse order by page use, so I was looking at pages that on Pinch of Yum in the last year, got zero page use, and I realized we have a lot of really thin not valuable content, and it’s important to clean that up. In our case, we’re going to delete a lot of that content and we should have done that a long time ago, but we just didn’t get around to it.

And it wasn’t until I was using Clariti that I realized that was something that we should have done. I was able to see that. It’s a lot of old giveaway posts and things like that, so we’re going to move forward with that and clean up Pinch of Yum. That’s what Clariti is for. It’s to help you discover that actionable information to create a project around it, and either you can follow the project or you can assign it to somebody within your team and then track the impact that that has by making notes or seeing when you made those changes over time. We bring all the information in from WordPress, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics. You hook it all up and then you can sort order and use Clariti like a Swiss Army knife for your content. If you’re interested in checking it out, go to clariti.com/food. C-O-A-R-I-T-I.com/food and that will get you 50% off your first month. Thanks to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Emily Walker: Hello. Hello, Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We’re really excited to share today’s interview with you. Bjork is chatting with Shanika Graham White and Darnell White, the husband and wife team behind the Food Blog Orchids and Sweet Tea and the production company, Brooklyn Sweet Tea Productions. Over the course of the interview, they share more about the early stages of their blog and how they made the leap from just food photography to videography and then to opening their very own production company. They also chat about their workflow and equipment set up for shooting their recipes and what the division of labor looks like between them. Shanika and Darnell have had lots of success working with brands and they share really good advice for knowing your value and using that in negotiations with brands. I’ve just scratched the surface of everything that they cover in this interview. It’s a really motivational listen, and I hope you enjoy listening to the episode. Without further ado, Bjork, take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Darnell, Shanika, welcome to the podcast.

Darnell White: Thank you for having us.

Bjork Ostrom: This is going to be a fun story, not only because we’re going to be talking to two people, which is always fun. Not only because we’re going to be talking about two people who are working together, but also two people who are together in real life and working together, which I really appreciate because Lindsay and I have navigated that and have been in that world, but also because you have two different businesses that you’re running but are also interrelated. You have the publishing side, which is the blogs, social, the following, cookbooks, which we’ll talk about. You also have a production company or a studio where you do photography and video, so a lot of things going on, but which one came first? What did you start with? What led you on this journey to begin without of those two things? The blog or was it the studio you were doing photography and video?

Shanika Graham-White: It actually was a blog, Orchids and Sweet Tea, which I started in 2016, and we were doing that for a while. Back then I was just learning photography, and so as you know, you start off and it’s like, “Ugh, this is what my work looks like.” And then as you go on, in time it evolves and then you go back and you reshoot and revamp, so that’s what started first. Then I think it was around last year, early last year, we started the whole production company and it’s really because Darnell found his passion in editing and videography, so we decided to create that as-

Bjork Ostrom: What’s that?

Shanika Graham-White: We were hoping to have that into a studio and evolve that into hopefully a team and make it bigger.

Bjork Ostrom: Is that something you knew Darnell in 2016 that you were interested in photography and video?

Darnell White: Honestly, no. Really, I had no inclination that this was the direction I was going to take. I think it just because I see the love that my wife was having for it and time I really thought blogging, you couldn’t really make any money from it, so I wasn’t really motivated like that. It was not until I think the pandemic happened, and Instagram pretty much was like, “We are moving into reels to promote your business.” So my wife was like, “You know what? This is going to be a game changer for us if we could learn this video thing.” I said, okay, let me give it a shot. Then as time went on, I started to develop more of a love for it.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. It’s one of the things that I’ve seen for as long as we’ve been doing this. One of the things that I’ve seen is a lot of times people will have an entry point. For you it’s Orchids and Sweet Tea, and maybe that is what it is that you love. Shanika maybe for you what you love doing, you love creating content, you love publishing content, but there’s so many connected things around that. There’s writing, there’s video, there’s photography, there’s the math of accounting and bookkeeping. There is operations, there’s website maintenance. As people know who get into this there’s so many of those things around it, and what we’ve often seen is people then use the entry point and then use that as a gateway into another thing and it sounds like Darnell for you, that was photography and video.

The other thing that was insightful and I think important to point out is I think there are these waves that happen. Anytime there’s a big change in industry, and the really obvious one is a social platform goes from primarily photo-based to now video. We think about that with Facebook, that was a huge one that we went through. It was just photos and photos could go viral and it was like, “Oh, videos. Videos go viral.” But now it’s just not videos. It’s reel based content that goes viral, so Shanika can you tell me a little bit about that time when you knew, “Hey, this could be a really big thing for us.”

And the last piece that I’ll share that’s interesting to think about with that is I think with each one of those waves, creators have the potential to be a better or not as good fit with each one of those. It’s really hard if you’re somebody who is great at photography and that was your sweet spot and you could stage a photo perfectly, it would be beautiful, and then suddenly it transitions into video or reel based content, which is a little bit more user forward. Maybe it’s talking to the camera a little bit more and it’s a new set of creators that are then unlocked in a way. Did you know that was true for you when that pivot was happening and how did you know that?

Shanika Graham-White: To be honest, when I first, I think it was in 2020, saw that reels were becoming a thing. I think really, especially I think 2021 towards the end of that, and last year I saw that this is really becoming a thing. At first I was a little hesitant, although I knew that it would be a game changer because I was just like you said, I was just getting my voice and my style in photography, and then I’m like, “Oh, man, to fully transition into videos seems hard.” We dabbled into it, and obviously you have partnerships and you do video, but to really dabble fully into it, I was just like, I found it hard to figure out how to transition.

And so Darnell was really one that was like, “No, we can do this. We have to do video, and you can do it. If you just create a system and you just realize a flow, you can actually get it done.” So we started, I don’t know if you saw way back into the beginning of 2022 we started reels and it was just playing around figuring it out, like you said. Back then, I don’t remember how many seconds reels had to be, but we were playing around with it and then trying to figure out how then do you cause retention? because like you said, with reels versus videos, reels are very user forward, but at the same time you have to capture people in the first two to three or four seconds, and so if you don’t get that point, your whole video dissipates almost.

And so I think after we’ve just practiced, practiced, practiced, I was just like, “Okay, we can definitely do this.” And we created this system where, all right, I can still do photography and do the reels at the same time, and which is what I really do, I shoot once. We just stop in between a take, do the photography for the blog because you have to do, you have to show the ingredients and you have to show step by step. We literally stop in between each take, take photography then hop back in the video. It’s like you have to work your brain in a mathematical way to have it all done.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk a little bit about what your system is for that? Because I know some people will do, they’ll do a shoot and they’ll say, “I’m just going to do photography because that’s them. I’m going to go on photography mindset and then I’m going to do another shoot of this exact same thing and I’m just going to do it with video.” How do you go through the process of getting both and just doing it once so you don’t have to go and repeat everything again?

Shanika Graham-White: I think it’s just really mapping it out. How I first start is that I make sure that I write down, if I’m doing two recipes today, I’ll write down those two recipes, the ideas, then I’ll write down the actual recipe that I’ve actually at this point either tested or I know that it’ll work because it’s maybe based off of a previous recipe. Then after that, how I always tell people is to have your ingredients organized, so I literally will put everything in individual bowls or rankings or whatever, have everything around me in my station.

We have a setup of a C stand that does all the overhead, and then we’ll have a tripod that does more forward or three forts and then we also have a gimbal which Darnell holds, so we literally have three different cameras to capture views. And so we have our board, our station, and we’ll just have all our foods and ingredients laid out. First things first, I always take pictures of the ingredients because that’s like get that out the way. Then we head into the video and let’s say I’m making a cake, I’ll probably get to the point where I mix the batter, then we stop, do the photography, then we continue. It’s stop and continue depending on the points that you want to do for the photography.

Bjork Ostrom: And then this is getting really into the weeds. When you do an import, then are you importing all the photographs into one bucket and then all the… Are you separating at that point?

Shanika Graham-White: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay, and that’s where things are filtered out into different buckets. Got it. You’ve built a really incredible Instagram following. Has that been, because you’ve been video forward in the process of creating content and any tips that you’d give for other people who are looking to build a strong following on Instagram?

Shanika Graham-White: Last year around the, I want to say I think my first reel went viral in April, and then after that, I think it was around May-ish that we really went hard on reels and did two a day, and I think that is what pushed the following because at that time reels were branching off to beyond your followers, so you’re actually gaining more people because it’s exposure, and I think that’s what we used as a way to build our following. Really my tip though for people I think is I know that now Instagram is so different, so it’s wonky now, but I think it’s just about going at your pace.

Now we’ve switched up for 2023. Last year we did two a day. Now we do maybe one and it just depends because now Instagram is pushing photos and the video, so we balance the two, but I think it’s just about finding your pace. I think it’s just about understanding what your audience wants and loves, which is super important and I think we know that for blogging in general. I think just creating your own style, because I know that it’s hard to stand out because there’s 1,000,001. Now influencers and bloggers are mixed in the same melting pot, and so I think just knowing your style and having your voice is just the only thing that’s going to make you stand out at this point, honestly.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. Darnell, along the way, you guys are doing a video, you’re figuring it out. What did the division of labor look like for you as you got into it and as a couple working together? And there’s going to be all sorts of people listening to this podcast. Some are in relationships, some aren’t. Some want their significant other to be involved, others don’t, but for those who have some type of partner that they’re working with, as you start to figure out division of labor, can you talk about what that looked like in the early stages and how did you go about saying, “Hey, you know what, I’m going to do this and help with this.” And to what degree are you working actually together throughout the day versus in your separate departments and coming together when you need to?

Darnell White: I would say because I’m more so the techie person. I love the camera equipment, the lighting, anything that’s tech related. I think it was naturally that gravitated towards the video production, so my wife was really more so into the creating aspect of it. She’s more of the creative mind, I’m more of the analytical mind. When it came to the video production, I had to somehow look at the photos that she did a whole production to make and say, “You know what, how can I bring this into video production and create a vibe so that people can understand that this photo can be brought to life?” After a while it was trial and error and I realized that I think I can go more into the video production because it’s not too far from programming because that’s my background where I came from.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Darnell White: That’s how it melded where it was like, “Okay, this is not too far off so I can do this.”

Bjork Ostrom: I feel like for somebody who’s outside of both of those worlds, they’d look at it and say, “Wait, those are two really different things.” How, in your mind, as you were processing it, how did those fit into similar categories and allow you to problem solve in the same way?

Darnell White: I think with the programming, what it taught me was you had to start with how you want to see it and then work your way up to that. When she does the photos, I see the end results already. Now I had to figure out a way to how can I shoot this in a particular way to bring it to life with the end result? Now when she’s mixing the batter, I’m looking at it from a perspective of, “I want to look at it where if I’m in the kitchen seeing my grandma or my mom cooking, how I want the viewer to see it.” And that’s how I build upon that and over time I just edited a certain ways to bring that to life.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s the piece there that’s really interesting and that we try and do as much as we can is to have a real life specific example of an individual that you are placing in the seat of user, because you could look at 240,000 Instagram followers or a million pages or whatever it is, but really those are all individuals and those are all people. One of the things that’s been such a great reminder for us is anytime somebody comes up and they’re like, “Hey, I made this thing.” That is almost more impactful than a thousand people viewing it, because you’re like, “Oh, you took the thing that I thought of and created and put into a digital format, and then you use that to make something in your home for people that were coming over.” And it’s like, “Oh yeah.” It’s really important that not only do you have the aesthetic, but you also have the instructions and information that gets people from point A to point B.

In taking the step forward, you have the site, you’re starting to get some traction with that, you published a cookbook in 2021, which is incredible. Talk to me about stepping into launching a new business with the production company, Darnell. What was that like? And how did you take the, I know it’s still early stages, but how did you take the first steps into moving forward with that?

Darnell White: Well, I think because we was already working for brands, and they ultimately was like, “We love your work and we want you to shoot for us.” And we’ve done a lot of work behind the scenes and it just felt natural because it was training us to do our own thing because we were already getting the traffic and the clientele for that. It just felt natural to say, “If we’re doing it for them on these one or two occasions, why not make it something where we can really cement ourselves in this field?” Because it’s not a lot of people in that video production, but they’re such big players and it’s like why can’t we come along and play as well. Our camera equipment is not too far off from them and our technology is not too different, so I think we can do the same thing. What helps is that we have such a big Instagram following at this point that can justify that so when it’s time to negotiate these things, it’s like, “Well, you see, the work is right here.”

Bjork Ostrom: You’re building a portfolio-

Darnell White: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: Content that you can use to show brands that are interested in working with you. When you say you had already been working with brands, are you referring to sponsored content on Instagram or the blog they come to you?

Darnell White: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think that’s one of the things that creators don’t give themselves enough credit for is we live in this world of, we collectively as creators I think publishers, influencers, whatever you want to call that type of work where we think we are going to get paid based on our following. Which I think to some degree, there’s truth to that. For the brand it’s like they’re paying to get some form of advertising, but oftentimes also what a brand is getting is media. They’re getting really great photos, they’re getting really great video. If they were to go to a studio and do that, it would be tens of thousands of dollars potentially for them to get a package of maybe even similar quality images and video.

But as a creator, you might discredit it and say like, “Well, I only have X many followers, I’m going to charge $250.” But there’s a lot of value if a brand is going to take that and use it in other places. How did you learn how to structure contracts and agreements and what the norms were? Or was it like, “We’re going to learn as we go with this”? Because it seems like something that maybe not a lot of people would share. You’re not going to be able to reach out to another studio and be like, “Can you guys help us get started?” What was that like to learn as you got into it?

Shanika Graham-White: Honestly, I think this is where it was beneficial to have the blog, because being that I do that and have contracts and partnerships with brands. From the blogging side and had to learn that, like you said, a lot of people don’t share, and even if you reach out to a creator, a lot of people are not, they’re a little hesitant to even share numbers because it’s such a competitive space. I think just, I learned a lot through going through talent management and seeing how they structure their pricings and why they structured a certain way, and then also a lot of trial and error. You have to do a lot of negotiating with brands and partnership. I think I learned the space of, “Okay, how much is it great to charge? What is the ball point of for reel?” At my right now, I look and say, “for reel, I start at 5,500.” For some brands, that’s a lot.

And granted, with everything there’s negotiation because it depends on the brand and the size and all that stuff, but I feel like when you look at, like you said, what are the many hats that you have to wear in one role? Now for video it’s like, “Okay, one might say 5,500, that’s a lot.” But then when you look at it like, “But you’re getting stylists, food stylists in the midst of it. You’re getting equipment that most people would have to rent that we bought. You’re getting edits, which takes hours upon time.” We break it down.

And so I think after doing market research, especially like he said in the videography space of people that we love like Parker Walbeck and these folks that we actually love that are in the product for videography space. We figured it out these are the little pieces. How can we then put it to what we know is valuable? And then as you said, it’s still learning from here because there is no solidified price. I think, like you said, it’s all about value-based, and so that’s how we look at our content now, value based.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s interesting if you break that down and you really look at it, and I have a friend who’s in the video world. He’s in, he’s all over the place. He’s in Miami shooting this crypto documentary, and we have this running joke where, so he used to send a picture of him in a Lamborghini, not driving it, but video and then he was in Canada while back shooting this documentary called Pez Outlaw, which is on Netflix. The running joke is, he’ll always send me these incredibly beautiful photos, and then I just respond with the same picture of my window at our office with a snowy parking lot. It’s just inevitably, he’s somewhere awesome and I’m just in the same seat.

But one of the things that he often talks about is how expensive some of those shoots can be, because you have the assistant and you have the person who holds the camera, and you have the person who is the DP. It’s a little bit different, but similar idea where if it was a traditional shoot, you’d have those seven or eight jobs. That just adds up so quickly and when you break that down and show a brand, “Hey, we’re absorbing a lot of this. We’re doing the styling, we’re doing the editing, that’s all rolled up into this.”

I think as much as possible to take away with that, that I hear is in those conversations, help a brand understand how you’re dividing that up and what it might look like if you go somewhere else to give some perspective on the cost associated with it, the cost savings in working with somebody who can do all of those different things.

Shanika Graham-White: All of those things.

Bjork Ostrom: When you think of the split in your day-to-day, the work that you’re doing, how much percentage wise of your time is, are you thinking now about the blog, the building a following, cookbooks, things like that versus the studio and building that up as the business focus? Or is it 50/50?

Darnell White: I would say right now the main driving force is the blog. Getting traffic to the blog is one of our number one goal right now and I think the video production is the underbelly that we are trying to build up to a point where it can pretty much pay for everything, but it still takes time for us to convince brands that they should work with us. They see Instagram and they’re like, they’re really excited like, “Oh, we want that. We want that.” So we’re like, “Okay, let’s go over into the production side and see what we can do.” And oftentimes they don’t really want to go down that route because there’s no following there. They want the following, they want the engagement, they want this, they want all of that. We had to find a balance where it’s like, “Okay, we can give you that, but we also offer this as well.” And that is where we’re at right now.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. It’s interesting. It’s almost like they come, I would imagine the idea is they come for the following, they come for the exposure, but then it’s almost like a secondary offer, it sounds like, where it’s like, “Hey, also if you want to continue to have really high quality content, we have this as a service.” It’s one of the things that you see really big businesses do and I think small businesses could think about that more often. Which is just yesterday, I don’t know, I think it was a radio ad or something, but it was for an Apple Card, and I was like, “Oh, weird. Apple is in the credit card business.”

And they have been for a long time, but it wasn’t until I saw a formal commercial where I was like, “Oh, it’s an Apple.” And it’s obviously the big companies when you see that, but I think with small companies, and so far is you have the bandwidth to do it, to think strategically about, “Great, so we get this traffic in, we get these inquiries, that’s great. We can do a sponsor content deal, but what can we do in addition to that to potentially double our income?” Or it’s not really an upsell, but that kind of idea to have additional opportunities for them to work with you and to partner with you, which I think is just so smart.

I’d be interested to hear you talk a little bit about, for people who are wanting to break into that or get a little bit better, specifically with sponsor content, working with brands, what’s your advice to help them take the next few steps? Somebody who’s early stage, maybe they’ve done a little bit of it, maybe there’s a little bit of fear for them, and stepping into that world, what advice would you give somebody like that? Shanika you can start.

Shanika Graham-White: The advice I would give is to always go into anything. I know that usually we’re pitching to brands, we might DM to get an email or we might email them over always stating your value is my main biggest thing that I’ve learned along my journey. When I was reaching out to brand partnerships, I would just be like, “Oh, I so want to work with you and this is what I can do.” But now I’ve realized that brands don’t care. There are a ton of people that they can choose from, and so the whole point is to always reach out and stating automatically your value.

Like you said, now, it’s not just following, but it’s what do you bring to the table? And I think when I started seeing, I think after so many trial and errors and so many partnerships, when I realized that we actually have value. They actually come to influencers and bloggers because we connect with the community that we have, and so they can plaster that on a TV commercial, and maybe they’ll get millions of views, but how many people are going to stop and actually click over and say, “I’m going to buy that.”

Probably not that many, but if you have a community of, even if it’s 200,000 followers and you have a community where the moment you drop something, they’re like, “What is that? I want that because you have that, or I trust you because you have that.” That’s value, and so I think just going in, seeing your value, and also just correlating that and conveying that to the brand is my best advice, honestly.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Darnell, anything you’d add to that?

Darnell White: Honestly, I think you just got to trust your work. Really trust your work, because today with social media, a lot of the brands get excited over the number of following and sometimes I’ve seen literally the same work that we’ve done at maybe like 30,000 followers, and we haven’t really changed anything much. At a hundred thousand followers we realize that many of them is superficial, because if we was looking at the 30,000 followers and saying, “Man, our work sucks. We should stop this.”

When we hit a hundred thousand now they’ve seen all these people saying, “Oh, let’s work together. Let’s partner, let’s this.” And so now you got to ask yourself, “Well, was your work not good at 30,000 as it is at a hundred thousand?” Now it really is about trusting your work and seeing it through, because in this social media realm, everything is so trendy or viral or what’s the next hottest thing and it can make you feel a little insecure of your own work, because I’ve seen a lot of people on social media do such dope work, don’t get in trouble. Sometimes it’s just a matter of exposure. It is. You know what I mean?

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. There’s a concept that I think a lot about, and I think it relates to this a little bit, which is who, not how many. As creators in the world, one of the things that’s really true is good work is good work, and it’s good work apart from the number of followers. Sometimes we don’t know why things get huge followings and other things, or why something goes viral, why something doesn’t, but if you focus on the thing that you’re creating, the work that you’re doing and producing as opposed to just the following, eventually, if you stick with it eventually, if it truly is good work, that will shine through.

I think what happens is there’s this spectrum, and there’s both sides are important. One side is the work, the creativity, and the other side is the distribution of the work. To understand how the distribution works is important. We talked about reels. Reels are going to be higher potential for that to go viral than a photo on Instagram as an example, so that’s the optimization of the distribution, but on the other side is the quality of the work itself. I think sometimes in conversations like this, podcasts like this or creators can sometimes get caught up in this idea of how do I figure out the platform? But they’re not really figuring out how to do good work and the good work is going to be the thing that perseveres.

But it’s also, it takes time. It’s low. I use the analogy often to music, but it’s like if I was starting to learn piano today, I wouldn’t expect to be a full-time pianist in a year and a half. I would say I might be able to get it if I try really hard and work on the craft every day in seven years. I think if we could have that same mindset, if we are just beginners with the creative work that we’re doing, I think it would serve us well. What was that like for you? And Shanika you can start, as you are learning a new thing, you’re in the early stages of it to persevere and continue on with it. Was that a hard thing to do?

Shanika Graham-White: Oh man. Yeah. I can’t say how many times I felt like quitting, how many times I probably had to stop and readjust, recalibrate, go back to the why center point and figuring out, like you said, getting back to focusing on the work. I think that’s just because there’s just always pressures on social media and this whole thing of virality and comparison, because I know a lot of people say you shouldn’t compare, but it’s hard when you’re scrolling on your screen and you’re constantly seeing so many different things. You end up comparing or you end up adapting to someone’s style because you’re like, “Oh man.” I either admire it or I see that it gets a lot of engagement. There’s plenty of times I’ve had to just stop for a moment and be like, “Let me get back to my why. Let me get back to the content.”

And actually, I think I’m trying to take a traditional, non-traditional route of blogging, because like you said, people like Pinch of Yum and Minimalist Baker and Deliciously Ella that I started in the game and those were the pinnacles of, “Wow, those were the bloggers that I wanted to attain to be where blogging was about you.” It wasn’t about keywords, it wasn’t about all the things that we do now. It was about, “Oh, maybe I can’t consume dairy, or I’m a vegan, and so I’m going to create a blog for people like me who want to figure out how to consume this lifestyle, or who wants to figure out how to make recipes for their family that are dealing with that.”

Now. I think it’s come to be this, it’s a business and it’s supposed to be, but I think it’s taken on more of a business aspect than back then when it used to be really about, “I want to help and build a community of people that are dealing with what I’m dealing with.” A lot of the times those bloggers would share health conditions or whatever they had, and they were like, “I just want to create for people who wanted something I needed.” I think I try to keep it that traditional. That’s what keeps me persevering. I still to this day look at them and say, “I still want my blog to be that, but I know that I have to make it a little bit more modernized to media and all the other things that it is now.”

Bjork Ostrom: The balance between personalization and optimization.

Shanika Graham-White: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: That world is always, there’s always such a push and pull there, and no easy answer to figure out what the balance is with that. Darnell, how about for you with photography and video? What was it like in those early stages as you were getting started to know you were in the early stages, you probably knew where you wanted to be, but there’s maybe a little bit of a gap there. What did you do to help close that gap?

Darnell White: I think what helped close the gap is when people on social media started to respond and say that they made the recipe and they would actually DM Shanika videos of their children enjoying. I think for me, I’m a sucker for the children. For me, to see these round cheeks eating, but in a squash pasta like, “Yum, yum, yum.” Oh my God, this is really going into people’s houses and people are creating this and feeding their families. I think that’s our secret sauce is to empower families to get back into the kitchen, because we live in today Uber society where you can Uber everything. DoorDash, you can do all these things. They come at your door. In some way, shape or form, it dumbs us down a little bit, because when you got to ask yourself, when was the last time, for example, you remember somebody’s phone number out your cell phone? You see a person’s name?

It’s those little small things that we can’t stray away too quickly from to say, everybody to some degree should learn how to cook something that’s whether it be a grilled cheese, whether it be rices and peas, whether it be whatever, but to see when we create the recipe and it goes into somebody’s house and they create it, and then they show Shanika a video, it’s a beautiful thing. I think that is what pushes me to say, “We got to keep going.” Because this is much bigger than us.

And some of them come back and say, “Our kids wasn’t able to eat any food, and we try this recipe and this one was a hit.” So our child is a picky eater, so we know where that comes from. To know that from one picky eater to another, they can understand it. Although they’re on a smaller level, we understand food can be increasingly intimidating and complicated, but if you can keep it simple with the flavors, just the moment you eat it or they smell it in the house, that’s enough for them to even want to buy. That right there is like, “Nah, keep going. You got to keep going.”

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. There’s so many things about work, how we work, how create that are not the logistical functional parts of it, so much of it is, you get a note from somebody and it’s encouraging or it’s a video of a kid eating and you’d think it’s numbers and it’s metrics, but a lot of times it’s those soft things that are encouraging and helpful. It’s also some of the non-metric based things that can be part of the challenge piece with it too, and can keep you from going forward. I’d be interested to hear your reflections, and we chat about this a little bit before, as you entered into the space as Black creators in the healthy food world, was that something that you knew getting into it? There’s going to be some things we might run into that are difficult here? What did that look like going into that and did you have any ideas around what it might look like?

Shanika Graham-White: Yeah, so I think for me, because I grew up in Florida and I didn’t know anything about healthy eating, so literally I was introduced to it because my mom’s a nurse, and so I think in my later years, probably late teens or early adulthood, I started really taking care of what I ate, or just my health in general. I think it was just this new concept that I didn’t really see, especially in the Black community. I think the hardest part for me now, even as a creator, is introducing really healthy foods to Black people. I know that I have such a mixed audience and I love it, and sometimes I will make a recipe and it doesn’t translate in the Black community because it’s like, “We are not used to this or maybe-”

Bjork Ostrom: Do you have an example of what that would be?

Shanika Graham-White: Gosh.

Darnell White: Overnight oats or something like that.

Shanika Graham-White: Oh yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Totally.

Shanika Graham-White: Right. Which is-

Bjork Ostrom: In the shore, in the suburbs of Minnesota, everybody’s like, “Overnight oats.”

Shanika Graham-White: Right, but then if I make it hot and I make it actual oatmeal, it’s received. I’m learning now in the space that I’m in a health space feeding the balance because I have two different audiences that follow me, so I’m always trying to figure out a creative way to be in the middle. Even with that example, like I said, now I’m like, “Okay, you might not understand overnight oats, but if I do it hot and everyone understands it, then I can give you the option of overnight oats.” And so maybe you quiet, maybe not. I’m trying to learn how to balance the two and that’s one of the hardest things-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, interesting.

Shanika Graham-White: To the Black community because when you look on social media, a lot of Black influencers, a lot of them are the ones that are really with large followings and stuff. They make the typical extremely cheesy mac and cheese and a super fried fried chicken, the things that we’re used to seeing. I think when, like you said, when people are being introduced to new things, sometimes it’s a challenge for change and not everyone is willing to evolve into that change. Some people are like, “I’m rejecting it because I don’t understand it.” Like I said, I’ve just been trying to figure out the balance and having a creative way of translating both.”

Bjork Ostrom: It’s interesting. A lot of times people think about the intent of the content that they’re producing, and if you do affiliate content, they often talk about buyer intent, Best Shoes or whatever. In the recipe world, a lot of times what we’re doing is we’re thinking about intent. Overnight oats, I’m going to create a recipe because I know somebody’s searching for overnight oats. One of the interesting challenges that you’re talking about, and I’ve never thought about this before, but it’s almost like it’s maybe taking somebody’s intent, but introducing a new thing that is adjacent to that.

Shanika Graham-White: Yeah.

Darnell White: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s almost like education in a way to say, “Here’s another opportunity. Here’s a thing that you.” I’m going through this right now. I’m working with a coach, and every I’m doing… Every time I eat something I take a picture of it, and then at the end of the day, I send it to him, and then he gives me feedback on it. It’s been super educational for me to… And we live in the world of food. I’m not as much in it as Lindsay is, but to go through that process of food education or just another viewpoint on something like, “Oh, you could add cinnamon to this and it would be a good addition and it would be helpful.”

Has that framed up the decision making around what content you will do, what you won’t do? If you are planning out your content calendar do you have ways that you view certain types of content? Like, “Hey, we’re going to try and do this piece of content because it will rank well and we’ll get as many people as possible, versus I’m going to do this piece of content because it’s near and dear to my heart, and I feel like I love this recipe and I want to share it with people that follow me.” how do you approach decisions around content knowing the complexity of the dynamic of the audience that follows you?

Shanika Graham-White: That’s the craziest thing, because it’s twofold, because then there’s also the whole thing of what performs well on social media versus what’s Google search.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Shanika Graham-White: There’s also that too that you’re also balancing, but I think for me, I try to balance between the two of what’s near and dear to me, and then also realizing I have to also figure out what resonates, and so I think that’s been my approach lately. I think about it, “Okay, what did I like in my childhood? All right, right? Is that something that a lot more people probably could relate to?” So now Biscoff cookies are a thing, so I’m thinking, “Okay, how can I transform a childhood nostalgia and put that into maybe something that’s of today and fusing the two?” That’s where I’ve learned to have my most creative point is figuring out if I know that people love pizza, what can I use that’s nostalgic that I can add to pizza?

Because I’m more willing and open to trying new things and testing out combos that might necessarily not be thought of and I think that’s just because I grew up an extreme picky eater, so my mindset is of a picky eater, so I think I’m constantly thinking of, with a picky eater, you need options, and so I think that’s why that translates into my content, because I’m always giving people options. I would make, for instance, I have a recipe that’s coming out that’s shrimp, fried rice. I use farro instead of rice, but I always give people the option, “You can use rice or you can use quinoa, or you can use, but these are things that I also know would work.” I love giving people that option, and I think that’s the creative point that I use now.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s interesting. It’s almost like not only is it decisions around what people would be, if you’re a picky eater, what would you like or not? But it’s also decisions around what would somebody have in their cupboards? Would somebody have rice? Would they have-

Shanika Graham-White: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: What’s a normal thing? There’s a, gosh, I wish I remember what it was. We could maybe look it up and put it in the show notes, but it was photojournalist piece around food around the world. Maybe it was in the US as well, and just people would empty their cupboards and they would do a picture of it. It was so fascinating to see in all of the different places around the world and in the US if I’m remembering it right, here’s what somebody’s cupboard looks like.It was like, “Oh, there’s so much variety and there’s so many different opportunities for people to create incredible things from that.”

But as people who are putting together a recipe, part of what you’re thinking is like, “Is this person going to have rice or not? What are they going to have this unique ingredient or not?” Or not even are they going to have it, but we grew up in a small town, both Lindsay and I, are they going to be able to get it? Is it even available at the grocery store if they did want to get it? And those are the things that I think are so helpful to wrap your head around as you’re going through the creating process for recipe development and whatever it might be.

As we come to a close here, I’d be interested to hear you reflect on a question that I’d like to ask occasionally. Darnell, I’ll start with you and then Shanika. If you were to go back and start over again, or if you were to go back and have a conversation with yourselves as you’re about to begin on this journey, what would that conversation be? Darnell, let’s say you meet yourself at a Brooklyn coffee shop, some trendy coffee shop on a corner street, and you’re like, “Hey, it’s me from seven years ago.” What would you tell yourself when it comes to building a business, building a following, creating?

Darnell White: I would say go easy on yourself because you’re going to get there anyway. At first it was man, the stress of it all. It was managing the business, managing accounting, managing household, day-to-day living, managing conflicts, managing social media and comments where they’re like, “Oh, I don’t like this.” It’s all those different things that chip away at you, and sometimes it does get you feeling a little down about your work and feel like it’s not enough or it’s not resonating, but I would definitely tell myself, just keep going and take it easy on yourself because you’ll get there eventually. Which is what is happening now.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s so great. Lindsay often talks about this idea of radical acceptance of yourself. How do you be accepting of yourself in all circumstances and gentle with yourself? That’s so great. How about you, Shanika, you go and run into yourself as you walk into the grocery store?

Shanika Graham-White: I think I would have told myself to be myself. I think when I look back, especially now that I’ve been focusing on SEL and revamping old posts, just seeing when in 2017 or 2018 when I created a recipe, sometimes I think to myself, what was my thought process? I wasn’t even as advanced to even have A tracks in those things. I think it’s probably finding inspiration from Pinterest, but I look and I say now, when I revamp it today, the way that it gets so much traction, I just think to myself, was it… I think it back then when I had less, I was able to be more authentic, but I think sometimes when you get to a point of options or you get to a point of growth, you then again, the pressures of what it is to be at the top or to stay at the top yet-

Bjork Ostrom: The stake are higher.

Shanika Graham-White: Yeah, so I think just be yourself from the beginning all the way until the end. Would be my thing.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. I have a friend that works in the same building as we do, and his son was in the other day and he was leaving to go to, he’s on the golf team, and as he’s leaving, my friend who’s, his dad said, “Be yourself. Isaiah, be yourself.” And it was that same thing. He’s like, “Don’t try and emulate the other players. Play your game.” And I think it’s a good reminder for all of us. You got to be yourself. Love that.

Really great conversation. I think for me, what’s inspiring about it is people who are in it, showing up every day, doing creative work, creating new things. Excited for you guys and what you have ahead the studio, and a lot that we didn’t get to talk about, so maybe I’ll have to jump on another time, cookbook and all the other great stuff that you guys have going on. We’ll link to everything in the show notes, but can you just do a quick shout out to your site, where people can find you on social? And then also we have some brands that listen to the podcast as well, if they’ve ever been interested in reaching out for photography or video work with the production company, so just chance to do a quick shout out for those.

Darnell White: Okay.

Shanika Graham-White: Are you going to do the production company?

Darnell White: Okay, so for the production company is, it’s going to be BrooklynSweetTeaProductions.com. We’ll take care of all your needs. Anything regarding photography, videography, if you need evidence to see what it’s all about, head over to Orchids and Sweet Tea on IG. I’ll take it to you.

Shanika Graham-White: Yep. On IG, I’m Orchids the letter N Sweet Tea underscore, and then my main blog site is orchidsandsweettea.com.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Shanika, Darnell, thanks so much for coming on.

Darnell White: Thank you so much.

Shanika Graham-White: Bjork, thanks for having us.

Alexa Peduzzi: Hey. Hey, Alexa here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We really appreciate you tuning into this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I’m here with a special announcement. Are you ready for this? Because I’m hoping you’re sitting down. It’s a big one. One of the things that we pride ourselves here at Food Blogger Pro on is the fact that we always are contributing content to the membership, so our members memberships are always growing in value because we’re adding new courses, we’re doing new events, we’re adding new deals. It’s just a constantly changing and evolving membership in a good way because things change very often and new strategies need to be talked about, et cetera.

One of the new pieces of content that we’re really excited about for 2023, they’re called Coaching Calls. We’ve been asked for coaching calls are one-on-one calls with Bjork or with the team just so many times over the past few years and we’re finally doing it for our membership, so you can work through your specific blogging and business questions with the one, the only Bjork in these calls. You and Bjork will discuss your blog and your business, and we’ll record each conversation and add it to the membership so the greater Food Blogger Pro community can learn from the advice shared there.

Any active Food Blogger Pro member has the opportunity to take part in one of these coaching calls. We actually have an application that members can submit, and you can find that over on foodbloggerpro.com/live. If you’re an active member, be sure to go there and you can submit an application, but essentially we’ll go through the applications and reach out to you if we think there would be a good time for you to come on and have a coaching call with Bjork. We are just so excited about this, and if you’re not a member and really excited about the opportunity, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com/join to learn more about the membership and get signed up right there. Otherwise, we’re really excited. We’re just so excited about this new content idea and we hope you are too, so that does it for us this week. We’ll see you next time and until then, make it a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti, C-L-A-R-I-T-I. Here’s the question. Are you manually keeping track of your blog posts on a spreadsheet or project management tool, maybe it’s like Airtable or Asana or maybe you’re not even keeping track of anything at all when it comes to optimizing and organizing your content, how do you know what to change and how do you know what you’re doing is actually moving the needle? With Clariti, all of that stuff is easier. It’s easier to keep track of things. It’s easier to know if the changes you’re making are having an impact, and that’s why we built it. We realized that we were using spreadsheets and cobbling together a system, and we wanted to create something that did that for you.

Clariti brings together WordPress data, Google data like Google Search Console and Google Analytics, and it brings all of that information into one place to allow you to make decisions and also inform you about the decisions that you’ve made and if they’re having an impact. I could talk on and on about the features, but the best way to understand it is to get in and to work with the tool yourself.

The good news is Clariti is offering 50% off of your first month if you sign up, and you can do that by going to clarity.com/food. Again, that’s CLARITI dot com slash food to check it out. Thanks to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Emily Walker: Hey, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you’re listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Welcome to episode 408 of the podcast. This week, Bjork is interviewing Helena Murphy from Helena Rose Photography. Helena is an amazing product and food photographer based in Bristol, England, and she is self-published, both a magazine and most recently a cookbook. Bjork and Helena chat all about her career journey from starting off in a corporate marketing role to making the transition to a freelance career. She shares more about how she has prioritized education to really improve her photography and editing skills, and even has some advice for people looking to take the leap into photography as a career.

A few years ago, Helena was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, and this diagnosis impacted how she views and operates her business and led her to create her cookbook, which is the plant-based Crohn’s and Colitis Cookbook in hopes of sharing her recipes with others suffering from the same chronic illness. Helena shares a lot more information about the process of self-publishing her cookbook and how she uses her photography and aesthetics to convey a message and mood to her readers, particularly those suffering with a chronic illness. Helena has a really inspiring story and we’re excited to share this episode with you, so we’ll get right into it. Bjork, take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Helena, welcome to the podcast.

Helena Murphy: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. We’re going to talk a little bit about your career and your path to not only self-publishing a cookbook, but also doing commercial photography. One of the great things about your story is you’ve created this version of what … It sounds like you’re ideal. We’ll get into it, but doing some yoga instructing, doing commercial photography, you’ve self-published a cookbook, and I think it’s one of the really powerful things to remind ourselves of is that we can create our ideals, but it takes a while to get to the point where we figure out even what that is, and it sounds like you were on that journey in 2018, 2019 as you were figuring out what does it look like to transition from corporate work to working on your own, and then once working on your own, figuring out what it was that you actually wanted to be doing. So take us back to 2018. It seems like altogether forever ago, and also not that long ago, but you were working in the world of content. What were you doing at that point?

Helena Murphy: Yeah, it’s been a really long winding journey, definitely to get to the point where I am. When you tell it all back in a story, I think it can sound really quite simple, but the lived experience of it is a lot more windy, but yeah, that’s right. I was working in content creation. So the very first job I had in that corporate London world was a social media coordinator. That was my first job out of uni, and I think that was 2014. So it was one of those times where your parents would be like, “What even is that?” It was when you would post three or four times a day on Facebook at that time, and each post was getting thousands of likes. It was this era.

So I started off my journey in social media, and then I segued over into editorial. So I was writing blog posts and newsletters, and that’s where I first picked up a little bit of photography. This was still in my corporate role. I was working at a fashion house and I was often sent out. We had a really strong lifestyle thread to this fashion brand, so I was often sent out to interview different artists and bands and local shopkeepers and people who owned really cool plant shops and all of this kind of stuff, and I would organize getting them fitted out in cool outfits, and then I would interview them about what they were doing.

The photography’s piece came because there was no one to take photos. So they were like, “Can you just take the team camera with the kit lens and just get some snaps of the person in their outfit or of whatever it is that you’re doing?” That’s where I fell in love with the photography and I had no idea what I was doing. So I have no formal training in photography. I’m self-taught, but I would see other bloggers or other content creators at that time creating all of these really beautiful photos.

I had no idea how to achieve that look. I didn’t understand that that was not shot with an 18 to 55 millimeter. I didn’t understand … I didn’t even know what a preset was at that time. This was maybe 2014, 2015. So I really stumbled my way into photography and that was my first little hint of photography and I loved it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s interesting when you talk about that. One of the things that I think is true for any of us is we’ll naturally have a pull in a certain direction, and I think this is true for humans, whether they’re four years old or 80 years old. We see it with our daughter Solvi. As a dad, I’m trying to figure out, “What is her pull? Where does she naturally go?” Some of the cues for me, every morning she gets up and asks if she can print out coloring pictures because she loves to color. She loves puzzles. So it’s like, “How do we open the door?” As a dad, I’m thinking, “How do I open the door as much as possible to those areas that she loves to go that direction?”

I think for people, adults, we have that same thing, but I think sometimes we’ve muted it. We’ve just pushed through and are doing the things we need to do because it’s like, “Well, that’s work and that’s what we need to do,” but one of the great joys that can exist for us is when we can find something that we enjoy doing, we’re passionate about, we want to learn about, and we can find a way to create income from that.

It sounds like in those early stages of you experimenting with photography and being assigned the task of doing photography for these shoots or for these articles that were being written, that was like, “Wait a minute. This is actually something that I’m interested in.” Is that true? Is that what was happening at that moment?

Helena Murphy: Yeah, definitely. I found out, really, I personally just really didn’t gel well with being at a desk from 9:00 until 5:00 and it felt quite constraining. I really enjoyed being out on assignment and being able to interact with people, meet people, do something with my hands. It was fun, it was creative, and then I could come back, and I just really, really enjoyed that aspect of it. Even though I didn’t know what I was doing, I think that was half the fun. It was a challenge and I could so clearly see what I wanted to create and what I was creating. There was a huge, huge gap.

Bjork Ostrom: Say more about that. What do you mean by that gap?

Helena Murphy: So what I said before in terms of I would look at my pictures and all I knew how to do was apply a basic crop, which was the blog crop required to put it up on our specific site, but I didn’t understand … I didn’t have access to Lightroom at that point. I didn’t think I even knew Lightroom existed or Capture One. I didn’t understand about shadows or how to utilize light. So that was something that I delved more into after I left my corporate job and jumped into freelancing for myself. When I knew that I wanted to take photography to the next level, that’s when I started to invest in some education because I could see I’m creating X and I really want to be creating Y, so someone is going to have to help me get there because I don’t know what I’m missing.

Bjork Ostrom: So there’s this podcast called This American Life. It’s hosted by a individual named Ira Glass. I’ve talked about this on the podcast before, so people who have listened for a long time will know that it’s one that I often refer back to, but he talks about creativity and he talks specifically about the gap, and he tells … I’m just going to read a little bit of this to see if it resonates with what was going on for you at that time. This is the quote, “Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish somebody told me. All of us who do creative work, we get in it because we have good taste, but there is this gap. For the first couple of years, you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not, but your taste, the thing that got you into the game is still killer, and your taste is why your work disappoints you.”

A lot of creative people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting creative work went through years of this. Do you feel like that was true for you like that that period of time, there’s this gap, you knew what you wanted and you knew where you were and you wanted to figure out how to close that gap?

Helena Murphy: Yeah, that’s such a good quote, and I think it’s still relevant today. Oh, my gosh. I’ve been doing this now for about five years, and it’s still true. It’s still super frustrating when you see something that inspires you and you just can’t quite reach it, but I guess that’s what keeps us in the game, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. What were some of the things that you did early on that helped to close that gap? Like you said, there probably always is a version of that gap. You’re always wanting to get better and aspiring to be sharper with your skills, but it sounds like there’s a period of time where you decided I want to work intentionally to close it. You talked about education as a component of it. What did you do and then what did you learn in that process that helped to make progress against closing that gap?

Helena Murphy: Yeah. So I would say in 2018 when I jumped into freelance life and left the corporate world behind, that first year was actually very much an amalgamation of doing the things that I’d done in my previous jobs, as well as photography. That first year, it was very frantic and it was me trying to just bring in the money, maybe match the salary of my old job just to stay afloat, and then all of the threads of that fell away, and I just end up with photography.

I think for that first year of freelancing, I felt maybe overwhelmed or too afraid to invest in myself, which I don’t know if that makes sense, but there was a resistance or a fear, actually, to putting the time aside to learn. So I was only doing maybe one shoot a month for that 2018 period, and it was just through opportunities that maybe landed in my lap or within my existing network. I didn’t really push very hard on the education front at all because it felt a bit scary. It felt like, “This is something I really want, and what if I’m not very good at it?” I don’t know. So there was a resistance there.

Then we moved out of London and the pandemic happened. It was 2020 by this point. I had the space and the time. That was one upside for me personally. I had the space and the time for the first time in ages to actually just focus, and that was the opportunity to dive deep on the education.

So the first thing that I addressed was Lightroom. I feel like I had been pulling at sliders with wild abandon, hoping for some kind of results. I think I had about 12,000 images in one catalog. I didn’t understand catalogs. It was just all of these really rookie basic, but you don’t know what you don’t know and you don’t know until someone teaches you. So I took Rachel Korinek’s Lightroom masterclass course, and that was a complete game changer for me because I could actually then have control over the edits I was making on the photos, so then I could actually-

Bjork Ostrom: What was it specifically? Do you remember going through that class? Were there light bulb moments where you’re like, “Oh, this is going to have a huge impact on how I edit and manipulate photos”?

Helena Murphy: Yeah, definitely. Even things like … Prior to that, I had discovered presets. I was usually influenced by Beth Kirby at the time and her work. All of her editorial work, I just thought it was beautiful. I remember buying some of the preset packs from Beth Kirby. So I knew how to apply a preset, but then I didn’t know how to make the edits. You know when you’re at the beginning and you apply a preset and you’re like, “Ooh, no, that that’s way too much,” but then I didn’t know how to change any of the colors or decrease the saturation, et cetera.

I remember feeling so empowered when I learned how to edit properly for the first time, that, “Oh, I actually don’t need to rely on these presets or if I was to use a preset, now I understand how to change the hue of that green to make it less yellow.” So things like that were really empowering, especially for food photography where you might want to just really add a little bit of power to certain tones like the reds or the greens.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. So you’re going through this process, you’re starting to learn the tools, and it’s actually something that I’ve been thinking about too. I’m in a season where I haven’t taken the time or made the time to step away and learn, and I’ve been thinking about that with ChatGPT. Everybody talks about ChatGPT, AI. I’m really curious about it, but I think what I need to do is take a moment and block off four hours in a day and go through a course to have somebody teach me.

I was thinking about that just in general with the work that I do and contrasting that against people in other positions. Specifically, I think about if you’re training in a sport, let’s say you’re an Olympic athlete and you’re a speed skater. Every time that you are doing the work of speed skating or most of the time I would guess you’re working with a coach, there’s always somebody giving you feedback and giving you advice and insight on how to improve and change and adjust.

There was this moment that I realized I don’t have that in my life in general for most things, and what would it look like if I had at the very basic level somebody who is just teaching me, but then even beyond that coaching in a way to say, “Here’s ways you can improve or change or adjust what you’re doing.” It’s such a gift to be able to have that, but sometimes it doesn’t feel like work, specifically the education piece.

I’m curious if you felt like that where you’re in the early stages, you’re trying to build your freelance business, you’re trying to get clients, there’s endless work to be done, and to take a half a day or even an hour or two hours to just stop and learn, while it’s probably the most impactful thing we could be doing, it sometimes psychologically doesn’t feel like you’re doing work because the work that you’re doing is a little bit different. Did you run into that at all or were there other barriers that felt like were in the way to move forward with the education component for you?

Helena Murphy: Yeah. It can be really easy to get caught up in the busyness of every day, and it feels like if you’re not maybe working on a shoot or editing shoot images ready for delivery or pitching or any of those things that really tangibly move the needle forward that, “Oh, it’s a waste of time. I shouldn’t be doing that. I shouldn’t be dedicating my time to that,” but I do think that dedicating your time to education and furthering your skills is beneficial to your clients as well in the long run so that you can be more prepared for the next shoot or take on a bigger project or something that you are imagining to do, but you don’t quite have the skills yet.

So I think education is super important to do that. I would say that I was I guess lucky in a way in that when I first came to dedicate that time to it. It was during the lockdown here in the UK. So I had all of that 2020. That was free space where I couldn’t be necessarily out all of that year shooting with clients. So I did use that time, but now that obviously things have gone back to being able to shoot and to being able to be on location again, it is harder to put that time aside, but it’s really important, I think.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. How about for anybody who’s interested in moving into photography as a career to do commercial photography in a freelance capacity, whether part-time, what advice would you have for those people who are in the earliest stages of looking at doing that?

Helena Murphy: Yeah. So moving on from the education piece, I would say don’t be afraid like I was to dedicate time to learning because it is really empowering and that you are worth the investment. I definitely struggled with that for a good year. I would say taking on personal projects as well is really, really helpful. I think shooting without the expectation of the client brief can really help you to push your own limits, push your own boundaries, create work, and if you’re not happy with it and there’s nothing riding on it, you can reshoot it again or you can come back to it. I think that’s really important.

Again, I think for that first year, I think I was just intimidated by the prospect of it all and didn’t take on as many personal projects as I could have. So I think having a mood board on Pinterest or somewhere like that with work that inspires you that you can think, “Oh, how can I create something like this or in my own style?” I think that’s a really great one to do.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. So one of the things that you talked about in that transition period was you had been doing these things in your corporate career that carried over into freelance. You were doing a bunch of different things and then some of those started to fall off as you started to focus on the things that you, it sounds like, really wanted to do and got some traction. How did you navigate that because one of the hard things in that phase is letting go of something that you’re making money from? You have this thing, it works, and to say no to that feels like a difficult thing when you’re in those early stages of making that transition.

So one of the things that’s so great about this that’s worth pointing out is it’s like building your own job description like, “Okay. I do want to do this. I don’t want to do this,” but in doing that, you also have to make sure that the job description you’re building is justifiable from the standpoint that it’s actually creating income for you that sustains you as a job would do. So what did that look like to mold your work in that phase of life?

Helena Murphy: Yeah. It definitely took time and it wasn’t an overnight thing. I would say there is benefit to having, I guess, that theory of the four legs of the table having multiple different revenue streams. I think there’s definitely something to be said from a financial security perspective. So when I first went freelance, I had the photography element, but I also had some freelance content writing gigs. I trained to be a yoga teacher as well at that time over 2017 to 2018. I did my yoga teacher training and I started teaching yoga, and it’s something that I still do to this day and I teach around eight classes a week now. That’s varied over the years. It’s gone from four or five through to eight, through to 13 or 14 at one point.

So I do think there is something to be said for having lots of different strings to your bow that you can fall back on and pick up from a security perspective, but in terms of whittling it down from all of those things that I was doing, I just personally felt overwhelmed with how much I was doing and I felt that there wasn’t as much clarity as I would like in terms of my messaging and my offering. I knew that I wanted to focus all of my efforts on photography so I could get better and offer a better service for my clients. So I started to let the content writing and the social media drop away, and it wasn’t too hard of a decision because I think by that point I’ve been doing social media for so long that I just felt a bit jaded with it and it wasn’t too much of a hardship to let it fall away.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah, and it sounds like if there’s a push and pull in what you’re doing, it was seeing that you had a pull in the direction of photography and you maybe felt a push away from other type of work, being aware of that, but also being aware of a certain level of diversification and saying, “Okay. I’m going to do this thing in this category, which is very different.” For us, we’ve done similar things. We have our online businesses, but we also have brick and mortar commercial buildings that have rental income. That’s very different worlds, but what’s helpful for me personally, and everybody has a different degree to a comfort level with it, is what’s your sleep well at night and the level of diversification that you need.

Some people are hyper-focused in one area and that’s what they do like they have an Instagram account, they do sponsor content, and that’s their lane and they stay in that lane and they do a really good job with it, and that’s great, but I think for us, I started to feel this need to diversify a little bit. It sounds like you approached it in a similar way. Plus, I would imagine part of it is just diversification not just from revenue perspective, but from work that you’re doing and work that you enjoy. If you enjoy doing this type of work, you enjoy yoga and you enjoy being a yoga instructor, prioritizing that as a thing that you want to do because you get something out of it beyond just the monetary aspect of it.

Helena Murphy: Yeah, definitely. I think for my parents’ generation, for instance, they would definitely have trained in one specific area and then were expected and do that profession for 40 or 50 years. I think things are a little bit different now, and I think it’s something to be celebrated to be a multi-hyphenate as Emma Gannon coined. I think people can feel a lot of uncertainty or maybe sometimes even shame around having lots of different things that bring them joy or they’re like, “Oh, is it too confusing for people? How do I put myself in this one box and how will people understand me if I’m not just in one box?” I think it’s fine to break outside of the boundaries of those box, and we are multifaceted beings and we don’t need to put ourself in one strict box. It’s okay if you don’t necessarily have the cleanest elevator pitch, in my opinion.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I just pulled up Emma Gannon, her book, The Multi-Hyphen Life: Work Less, Create More, and Design a Life That Works for You. Is that a book that you’ve read or somebody that you follow?

Helena Murphy: Yeah, I haven’t read her book, but I listened to her podcast, Ctrl Alt Delete for quite a few years. She’s just wrapped up the podcast now, but plenty of really inspiring episodes about all sorts of different people who are doing things differently and what we are just talking about, creating their own careers that aren’t necessarily just a one word label.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome. We’ll link to that in the show notes. It looks like a great book and also a podcast that I would imagine resonates with a lot of folks who listen to podcasts like this. So one of the legs of the stool for you, and this is one of the things that we can dive in and talk about, is self-publishing a cookbook. It’s something that you went through the process of doing and tied into your story and your journey in discovering your own best executed diet and way of eating. So when did you go through that process and how did you decide that you wanted to self-publish a cookbook?

Helena Murphy: Yeah. So the book is The Plant-Based Crohn’s and Colitis Cookbook. So it’s very niched. I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease in 2021, so fairly recently, and I experienced symptoms for six months before my diagnosis, and then I got to remission in January of 2022. So through that whole process … If someone is unfamiliar with Crohn’s disease, it is an inflammatory bowel disease and it’s an autoimmune disease, it’s chronic. So if you’re diagnosed, you unfortunately do have it forever. It’s managed with medication and also diet and lifestyle factors as well.

I was just feeling unwell for quite a long time. The symptoms can be things like chronic diarrhea, fatigue, weight loss. It basically stops you from digesting your food, which causes you a lot of problems because if you can’t absorb your food, you obviously can’t function very well. So it got to the point where I was basically just bed bound for three or four months because of how I was with this disease.

When I was feeling better, thanks to medication and thanks to some slight lifestyle changes that I made, I was like, “I’m actually in the perfect position to try and help other people a little bit, hopefully, with what I’ve learned.” I’m a food photographer. I’ve been vegan since 2016, so I’ve been cooking vegan food from scratch for a long time. My partner’s mom is a nutritionist or she calls herself a foodologist. So she really helped me on a lot of the consultation of the recipe development. Then my partner, luckily for me, is graphic designer and he’s done a lot of artwork and was able to put together the cookbook for me. So I thought, “We have got a perfect family team here. I really need to do this.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. What was that like during that period of your life? I would imagine that those three months that you talk about that it almost feels like physical but also psychological warfare. It just feels like it would be a really difficult season for many different reasons. How did you get through that?

Helena Murphy: Yeah, I mean, it was really challenging. For the majority of the time when I had the diagnosis, I’d say I could live to maybe 70% of my usual self. So it had an effect, but I could deal and I could still function day-to-day, but then I just had a really stressful couple of days and stress can be a trigger and it just really supercharged the flare, and then that’s what pushed me into just being in bed for three or four months. It was hard, but I mean, luckily, I have really supportive friends, family, partner who were all there to cheer me on and look after me.

In terms of a work perspective, I couldn’t really work because I couldn’t really get out of bed very well, and especially photography, it’s such a physically demanding job to be on set all day and so I just couldn’t-

Bjork Ostrom: Physical can be stressful. When you’re doing a shoot with a client or just a shoot in general can be stressful.

Helena Murphy: Yeah. So going back to the four legs of the table in terms of financial income and stuff, that’s a really personal reason for me, why I feel it’s important to not just have one thing that’s your main thing because if that gets taken away for any reason such as sickness, what else are you going to rely on? It was very serendipitous in that I actually had a long time client come back to me over that period who was a content writing client and they gave me a really big commission and I could just do that from my bed. So even still, when I’d cut away all of the threads of content writing, et cetera, et cetera, it did actually come back during that time when I was sick and really help me out because I could just type away from my bed and then be like, “Okay. Now I’m going to sleep.”

Bjork Ostrom: It’s one of the things that I think is worth mentioning with what we talk about on this podcast, which is a lot of times we focus on the idea of building your passion, your dream, your pursuits of following into a full-time career or making full-time income from it or transitioning to have it replace your job, but I think one of the things that it doesn’t get enough credit for, it being having a side hustle or a skill or an ability that you’re creating, is a safety net.

I think there’s something really valuable about having a full-time or a part-time job that’s your normal full-time or part-time job in a traditional, in the US we’d say a W–2 income, where you’re working for somebody or maybe contracted on a consistent basis, and you have a side hustle, and that side hustle, the sole purpose of it for some people can be a safety net. It can be that additional leg on the table or stool or whatever it is that is there for you if something happens with your job or worker career that’s in the first position or whatever reason, you burn out or there’s cuts or whatever it is, that you have this safety net that if that happens, you can spin that up and then focus on that as your full-time thing.

For everybody listening to this, I think it’s justification for the skills and the abilities and the work that you are creating and refining in that it’s valuable even if it doesn’t grow into your full-time thing because it is a skill or an ability that you have that is there to be used when needed. I think that’s just a really important reminder to point out to people because it sounds like that’s what happened for you where things shifted in a really significant way, but you had this skill and ability from a previous position that you were able to then take advantage of and work in a flexible way. Is that still something that you think about in terms of how you craft your pie chart of work and income from your career?

Helena Murphy: Yeah, definitely. I think what you just said is really valid, and sometimes maybe it doesn’t fit with the ideal situation of where you had planned things to go or what your trajectory was, but that’s not always life. Sometimes a pandemic happens. Sometimes you get sick or sometimes there’s someone else that you need to look after or all sorts of extenuating circumstances. If you have a skill from a previous job or something that you built up that you hadn’t planned to have that be your 80% but for that period of time it needs to be, then that’s great. You can rely on that and just adapt as you go.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So the self-publishing side, you talked a little bit about your partner’s mom. She’s a nutritionist, foodologist. She’s able to help. Your partner is a graphic designer, able to help with that piece. What were the other components of the self-publishing process that you had? If you work with a publisher, they maybe have resources, they’d connect you with people, but what were the different hats that you had to wear from start to finish in order to get a book out into the wild?

Helena Murphy: Yeah, definitely. So I should say that I did have some self-publishing experience prior to this. My partner and I, around that time, he went vegan as well in 2016, and it was around that time that the Cowspiracy documentary was dropping and we were like, “Whoa.” It felt like we’d taken this pill in The Matrix and we were super inspired and we were just really into it. So we-

Bjork Ostrom: What’s the documentary? I don’t know if I’m familiar with it.

Helena Murphy: Oh, Cowspiracy on Netflix. It was like-

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, Cowspiracy. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Helena Murphy: One of those-

Bjork Ostrom: Eating vegan. Yeah, okay. There was another really popular documentary that Lindsay and I watched, and it was in the same vein. I remember running into my aunt and uncle who I never see, and they were like, “We went vegan and we watched this documentary,” but I don’t remember the name of it. It was on Netflix. It talked a lot about weightlifters and athletes who all ate vegan and how impactful it was for them. So anyways, you were saying this was around the same time you both-

Helena Murphy: No, I think I’ve seen that one. It’s good. It’s good. There’s so many on Netflix. Yeah, so we both were on that train and we were super inspired. So we decided to create a coffee table magazine that was all about eating vegan and sustainability and all of that. It was called Omnom. We published four issues over about two or three years. So we had no prior experience in publishing before that, but we bought a book and it’s literally called How to Publish A Magazine. It’s really good. It’s by Angharad Lewis. It takes you through from step one to publication of how to self-publish a coffee table magazine.

So we did that and we got ourselves some distribution partners and it was all over the place. It was in the UK, but it was in the US. It was in Japan, Australia. So we loved doing that, but we just found it was too much to do that alongside trying to build our freelance careers at that time because it was all kicking off at that time. So we decided to put a lid on it.

So when I came to publish or self-publish the cookbook, I was fortunate to have that experience to lean on. So it didn’t feel too out of my depth because I thought if we did it for a magazine, the process can’t be that different to doing it for a book. It was actually easier now because back then, there might have been, but I was not aware of print on demand services. So we actually had to save up to buy a print run, and it was more traditional where we took it to a print house and then all of these boxes of magazines arrived at our house, so we had to store them at our house, but when I came to do the cookbook, I used the Amazon print on demand service, and I know there are other companies that do print on demand services as well. So you don’t have to have all of these books or all of these magazines, whatever your product is, just sat in your living room taking up space.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. One example of a book that I was aware of at least, it was an extreme example of it, that we’ve purchased is … So we have a dog. Our dog’s name is Sage, and our daughter’s name is Solvi, and she really likes dogs. My mom bought a book. I don’t know if it was through Amazon, but it’s like where they put the actual name in. So it’s like it talks about Sage and Solvi and them interacting.

Helena Murphy: Oh, yeah. Cute.

Bjork Ostrom: So print on demand in a really obvious way. Can you talk about why it’s beneficial in a case like yours? Every book is the same. It’s not like there’s these custom edits made to it, but it’s print on demand and why that’s beneficial versus what you had to do with the magazines, which was an entire run of all the magazines and just what that looks like from a maybe warehouse perspective, but also just from a investment standpoint.

Helena Murphy: Yeah, definitely. So there was more of an upfront investment when we did the traditional print method because we had to pay for all of those magazines and then we had to set up our web shop so we could fulfill orders. So then it was up to us to have a web shop to sell the magazines and then to manually go to the post office and post them out ourselves. So that was an extra cost and an extra tax on our time as well. I’ve got to say in hindsight, we were terrible. We were great at a lot of things. We were terrible at posting. We would always end up arguing, “It’s your turn to go to the post office?” “No, it’s your turn.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, “Please, not again, not again.”

Helena Murphy: Exactly. So this was much better. I think it depends on your personality because if you enjoy doing that and it’s maybe a meditative process, that can be quite nice, but for me, having print on demand meant that there was no upfront cost. So you create your manuscript, you upload it to Amazon or your platform of choice as a PDF, you upload your front cover and you upload the content of the magazine or the book, and then it is published online, and then it’s only printed when someone orders a copy. So there’s also less waste because, obviously, if you’re trying to predict how many you’re going to sell, you have to be like, “Okay. I’m going to order a thousand,” but then if you only sell 500, you’re stuck with 500 copies of this book in your house. So from that perspective, from a waste management perspective, it’s quite good because you can just sell when people buy, which is amazing. So no upfront cost and no shipping and less waste. So those are the benefits, I think, of print on demand

Bjork Ostrom: In the software world, they often talk about this idea of MVP, minimum viable product, and it’s a way for you to get something into the world without having to do this huge investment of money or time or cost or whatever it is. This isn’t exactly the same, but because what you are putting in an investment of time, you’re doing the recipe development, you’re doing the photography, you’re doing all the different components of it, but what’s nice about it is you don’t have to have this investment of … We have a friend who just published a book, we went to the book launch, and there’s hundreds of books sitting out. There’s an investment that goes into it, and like you said, you have to then work through those books and make sure that you sell them and you hear the classic case of somebody who does have those and then they have a hundred books in the basement or whatever it might be.

So from start to finish, let me attempt to do a super high level of what the steps would be, and you can let me know if it feels accurate or if there’s other additional steps along the way. Obviously, you’re developing the outline, you are working through what you want the subject to be, what the focus is going to be. There’s all the content components of the book. That feels like an entirely different podcast episode. We could dive really deep into that, but you’re developing that out, you’re creating the design elements around it, and then you have a PDF, which you upload into, in this case, Amazon, self-publishing platform.

My guess is you’re making some decisions around do you want it to be able to do hard cover, soft cover, things like that, is every page color, so making some decisions on the platform side of things, and then maybe doing a couple test shipments like buying the book yourself, taking a look at it, seeing how it looks, but from a really high level, are those the steps along the way? It’s like you’re creating it, the content, you’re putting it into a PDF, you’re uploading it to Amazon, making some decisions around what you want it to be, and then you press go live and it’s available. What else would you add to that? I know it makes it sound way more simple than it actually is, but-

Helena Murphy: No, no. I think some people can think that self-publishing is really complicated or really mysterious or you have to be a special type of person to do it, but I really want to dispel that myth. It really is quite as simple as you said, and I feel like … I want people to feel like it’s accessible to them because I think self-publishing is a really great leveler and it’s one of the reasons why I chose to self-publish because I have a really niche content idea and I don’t have a huge Instagram following, so I didn’t necessarily want to spend all of this time crafting a proposal and trying to necessarily maybe convince someone who doesn’t understand Crohn’s or colitis or the people in this community. I didn’t want to have to try and convince someone of that validity, and I think self-publishing is a really great leveler that allows people to take back some power and be like, “No, I know that there’s a community who needs this idea, so I’m going to do it.”

So you just literally create it, upload it to the backend, and you’re right, yes, you can choose hard cover or soft cover. Those choices will impact how much it costs to create your book. So I would say the one disadvantage of self-publishing with Amazon is that I ideally wanted the book to cost around £17 pounds for someone to purchase, but because I made it hard cover and because I have so many colored images in the book, it made it more expensive to produce.

So therefore, it tells you what the minimum is that you have to charge for it. So my minimum was £24 pounds, and I couldn’t charge any less than that. Otherwise, I think it’s the way they create the royalties that just wouldn’t be enough for it to be remotely profitable. So that is the downside. Whereas if you went with a more traditional publishing house and got it printed, you could set what the price would be.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s an interesting observation of economies of scale. The way that you could make it most affordable would be to do a run of a hundred thousand books and then you get the unit economics down to a really low number, but then the disadvantages is then you have this huge run of books. It feels like the nice thing with this is you’re able to do zero runs and you do essentially a run every time that somebody buys it.

Can you talk about, in the backend as you were making those adjustments? Let’s say you say, “Okay, I want to do hard cover and I want to do color pages. 20 of the pages will be color pages.” In real time, is it creating the numbers around how much you need to charge for that based on what you’re picking?

Helena Murphy: Yeah, it really is. So you could actually just go through and select all of the options and go through, and then it will tell you, and I think it actually shows you in each territory as well if you wanted to look at each territory like Germany, Spain, France. So yeah, you can just change the options and then update it. So it’s pretty quick. I think, as well, another benefit based on that updating element is that if you wanted to update your manuscript because you realized there was a typing error or there was a photo that you wanted to update, you can really quickly do that.

So if I wanted to update it now, I can literally just upload a new manuscript and then the next time someone … So say tomorrow someone ordered a copy, they’ll get the new one. So that’s really amazing, but I mean, a bit dangerous if you’re a perfectionist because it opens it up for you to make 10,000 revisions.

Bjork Ostrom: Never ending, yeah. So in your case, you said £24 was the lowest that Amazon would let you charge. Can you talk about the decision making that went into that and just saying you could charge let’s say £26. So £24 pounds is maybe around 30 US dollars. What was that like for you to pick how you wanted to price it and what elements you wanted to be included within it, and how do you think of the book fitting into your puzzle pieces in terms of an income revenue stream versus a love letter to additional people who are navigating similar situations?

Helena Murphy: Yeah, definitely. So in terms of the decisions for whether it was hard cover or color images or not, I really wanted it … I had a really specific aesthetic in mind. So I wanted it to be really bold and vibrant and colorful just because food can be such a source of frustration for people with Crohn’s and colitis, especially when they’re in a flare. It’s difficult because there’s no universal diet that will help people with Crohn’s and colitis. Everyone has very different trigger foods. So while I might be okay with mushrooms, someone else might be like, “Oh, I’m going to die if I eat you mushroom.”

So putting together the aesthetic for the book, I just wanted it to be really fun and colorful. So all of the vinyls that I’ve used are really bright and colorful. I’ve used a lot of hard shadows, a lot of vibrancy. I thought if I didn’t have a picture for every recipe, that would be off-putting because I know that when I cook, I like there to be a visual reference, and if the recipe doesn’t have one, I’m 80% less likely to cook it. So when I made my own cookbook, I just thought that was really important.

So although it made it more expensive to produce and, therefore, I had to charge more for it, I wasn’t really willing to sacrifice the vision I had for the book based on the cost, plus the fact that it’s a super niche cookbook, and I think it might be the first vegan Crohn’s cookbook, so I just thought hopefully the people who it will speak to won’t mind too much.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. Then how about in terms of … For somebody who’s thinking of doing this and getting into it, would there be a range in terms of what you could expect from margins from self-published cookbook? Let’s say, if you have … and part of it probably depends on what you pick. Obviously, you’re picking what the margin would be, but if you were to say, roughly speaking, what does that look like? If you’re selling a cookbook for $20, is there a 10% margin you can expect $2 back or knowing that there’s a lot of it depends with it?

Helena Murphy: Yeah. So the cookbook that I’m selling is £24 pounds, and then I think I get £3 back from each one. You asked before, and I forgot to answer that my motivation in doing the book was definitely to speak to a community of my community of people that I felt there wasn’t anything that was serving them in the way that I wanted to serve them. So I went into it as more of a passion project rather than from a business standpoint. I also just really wanted the challenge. I guess going back to what we were talking about right at the beginning of taking on personal projects, I knew that creating and shooting 70 recipes would really improve my food styling and it would really improve my food photography.

I could definitely see that that progress from start to finish of just if you’ve been shooting a book for nine months and reshooting multiple things, if they haven’t gone quite right, you improve, and that was also one of the motivations that I had for the book. So I’d say for me, financially, was the bottom reason or a tertiary reason, but not to say that that couldn’t be a valid reason for someone to self-publish.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah. I think as much as possible, one of the things that we try and bring up on the podcast is the multiple reasons why you do things in the world, why you create, why you publish into the world. Lindsay talks about cookbooks for Pinch of Yum, and her frame of reference for it is always encapsulating her work in a physical form. That’s the motivator for her in doing that when she thinks about the potential of ever doing that.

So as we close out, what would your advice be for somebody who’s thinking about potentially doing this or wanting to do it but is maybe hesitant? What are the first steps? I think that’s one of the most important things with any project that we’re going to do. It’s not how do you get to the end, but how do you take the first step. What are the first steps into doing a cookbook and self-publishing a cookbook?

Helena Murphy: Yeah. So I think it can be easy to get overwhelmed. So organization, definitely, so picking a project management system like Asana or Trello or Airtable or even just Google. I plotted out all the chapters from a top level perspective, and then I started to dive down deeper. So from a logistics perspective, just getting organized and even just setting up a Google Drive with different folders for content, press, all of that things that you’ve got a place to start storing everything.

I think sometimes just having that framework can really help you to feel a little bit more prepared, but I guess maybe even taking a step back before that is picking your topic or what your book is going to be about. For me, it was obvious. It wasn’t necessarily like, “I want to create a cookbook. What will it be about?” It was born of a super personal journey and it was like, “Oh, I’ve been through this experience and I have the skills, I think, to be able to help people.”

I think maybe doing the research based on content that you’ve posted that has been really successful or blog posts that you’ve written that have been the most read, and seeing if you can pick up any patterns of what you’ve posted that people have really resonated with, and seeing if you can dive a little deeper in that way.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Helena, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your story. I know there’s two directions that we can send people. Would love for you to talk about each of those. One is just your photography. So if there’s a brand or creator who’s interested in potentially working with you, you know photography, you do photography and you do it well, where can people go for that? Then if people want to check out the cookbook that you’ve done, where can they go for that?

Helena Murphy: Yeah. Amazing. Thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed chatting with you today. So you can find my website, it’s helenarosemurphy.net, and I have a page on my website as well all about the cookbook, so you can find it all on my website.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on, Helena. Really appreciate it.

Helena Murphy: Thank you so much.

Alexa Peduzzi: Hey, hey, Alexa here from the Food Bugger Pro team. We really appreciate you tuning into this episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. I’m here with a special announcement. Are you ready for this? Because I’m hoping you’re sitting down. It’s a big one. So one of the things that we pride ourselves here at Food Blogger Pro on is the fact that we always are contributing content to the membership. So our members’ memberships are always growing in value because we’re adding new courses, we’re doing new events, we’re adding new deals. It’s just a constantly changing and evolving membership in a good way because things change very often and new strategies need to be talked about, et cetera.

So one of the new pieces of content that we’re really excited about for 2023, they’re called coaching calls. So we’ve been asked for coaching calls or one-on-one calls with Bjork or with the team just so many times over the past few years, and we’re finally doing it for our membership. So you can work through your specific blogging and business questions with the one, the only Bjork in these calls. So you and Bjork will discuss your blog and your business and we’ll record each conversation and add it to the membership so the greater Food Blogger Pro community can learn from the advice shared there.

So any active Food Blogger Pro member has the opportunity to take part in one of these coaching calls. We actually have an application that members can submit, and you can find that over on foodbloggerpro.com/live. So if you’re an active member, be sure to go there and you can submit an application, but essentially, we’ll go through the applications and reach out to you if we think there would be a good time for you to come on and have a coaching call with Bjork.

So we are just so excited about this, and if you’re not a member and really excited about the opportunity, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com/join to learn more about the membership and get signed up right there. Otherwise, we’re really excited. We’re just so excited about this new content idea and we hope you are too. So that does it for us this week. We’ll see you next time, and until then, make it a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by our sister site Clariti. C-L-A-R-I-T-I, is how you spell Clariti. All different iterations of how people say it, but it’s Clariti because it helps you to be clear on what it is that you need to be working on and really gives you direction around how you can go around improving and updating and tracking the content on your blog.

Bjork Ostrom: We built it because we had been managing everything in a spreadsheet. So, my guess is there’s two people listening to this podcast. One would be, you are people who track stuff. Then you probably track it in a spreadsheet, maybe air table, maybe notion. And my guess is it’s a lot of manual work.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s another group of people who just aren’t tracking anything, and that’s okay. You’ll get there eventually, but Clariti’s going to be the tool that’s going to allow you to do that more easily. It’s going to allow you to not spend as much manual time doing the tracking, updating, improving, and just generally understanding the lay of the land with your content.

Bjork Ostrom: And one of the things that I think is most important, a lot of times we talk about hiring on this podcast, but one of the things we don’t talk about enough, and I probably should talk about it more is some of the first positions you should hire for are software. It’s not an actual person, you’re hiring software to come in and to do a lot of the work that you are doing.

Bjork Ostrom: And that’s what Clariti is for us as the Pinch of Yum team, Food Blogger Pro team. We use Clariti to take manual work away from our day-to-day tasks. And we automate that. It’s one of the easiest ways to have your first hire.

Bjork Ostrom: So, if you’re thinking, “Oh, I hear people talk about hiring a lot. Who should my next hire be?” My encouragement for you would let your next hire be a tool like Clariti where you’re going to spend 25 a month and you’re going to save an incredible amount of time. That’s what it’s all about.

Bjork Ostrom: So, if you want to check it out, if you want to learn a little bit more about what it is and how it works, you can go to clariti.com/food, and you can deep dive into the ins and outs of Clariti just by signing up for that list.

Bjork Ostrom: And that’s not going to sign you up for the app. It’s not going to sign you up and process any payments or anything like that. It’s just going to allow you to understand the tool better through some onboarding emails that give you a little bit of context around what Clariti does and why we built it.

Bjork Ostrom: So again, that’s clariti.com/food, if you want to check that out. And as a last note here, we’re halfway through this 25 Forever deal. So, when I say you can think of hiring Clariti at $25 a month as a little team member who’s in the background working for you, that deal’s not going to last forever. We’re just wanting to get to our first 500 users as we’re in the early stages with this.

Bjork Ostrom: You’ll still get a lot of value out of it. But the great thing is, as the value within Clariti increases, as we build out more features, as we build out more functionality, you will be locked in at that $25 price as a thank you for signing up early, for getting … for being somebody who’s using the tool early on, giving us feedback, but also finding a lot of value out of it.

Bjork Ostrom: We’ve actually had two people this week, it was last week actually, that followed up and one person said, “I LOVE …” It was all L-O-V-E capital, “… this service.” And somebody else said the same thing in the Slack channel, which you can join and be a part of that after you sign up for Clariti to see how other people are using it and the questions that come up and offer any insider feedback along the way. So, thank you to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m really excited today to have Joanie on the podcast from The Bite Shot. Just recently we had some people mention The Bite Shot as the place that they’ve been inspired to level up their food photography. That’s what we’re going to be talking about here today.

Bjork Ostrom: You’ve been on the podcast before, so this is you are now a repeat guest. We have to have like a special jacket or a medallion or something, we can create our own cryptocurrency that we award to anybody who’s been on the podcast multiple times.

Bjork Ostrom: But today we’re going to be talking about some of the best tips that you have for food photography and food styling. And I think it can apply to beginners, intermediate and advanced. I think there’s always little takeaways and nuggets and things that can be applied from your vast knowledge, your expertise.

Bjork Ostrom: You have your YouTube channel, over 300,000 people following you there. You’ve written a book. We have it on our bookshelf right over here, and you’ve just done some incredible things. So, I’m curious to know if you rewind the tape, at what point Joanie were you like, “Hey, I’m all in on food photography.” When was that, and what made you decide to go all in?

Joanie Simon: It’s so funny, because yeah, I started my journey as a food blogger, went through Food Blogger Pro, set up my first WordPress site.

Bjork Ostrom: Love it.

Joanie Simon: Did all the things Bjork told me to do. And I even remember after I set up that site, I was so proud of myself because I don’t consider myself a techy person.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Joanie Simon: And I just sent an email and I’m like, “Bjork, I set up my site. I’m so proud.” It was 2015.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Joanie Simon: And you’re like, “Congratulations.” So, I think that one of the things in that journey was that I continued to … I think we can pay attention to where we gain our most energy.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally.

Joanie Simon: And then also where we get most drained. And for me personally, I felt like I could just sit behind a camera and take photos and style food and think about props and colors and all these things for hours.

Joanie Simon: But trying to write a blog post was like, felt like, I don’t know, emergency surgery, like I just didn’t want to do it. And so I think also too by paying attention to the people around me and what seemed to also be working. That there were local restaurants then that were noticing my work and saying, “Can we hire you?” And different food brands. I wasn’t pitching them for sponsored content, but that all of a sudden they were wanting to hire me to shoot their website or their social media.

Joanie Simon: And so I think that as you just start to watch, there wasn’t necessarily this one magical moment that I can pinpoint and say, “Oh look, this is the moment that I said food photography was where I was all in.” It’s that gradual process. But as you just start to pay attention to where’s your energy and what are the people around you telling you.

Joanie Simon: And it was so funny because as I ended up in food photography, people are like, “Yeah, I’m surprised that you didn’t qualify yourself as a food photographer earlier than you did.”

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Like your journey was a little bit slower to say, “Hey, I’m a food photographer.” You were doing it maybe before you were saying that you were doing it. Is that kind of?

Joanie Simon: Absolutely.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah.

Joanie Simon: Yeah. Because we just walk around going, “Oh, I’m not really that.” Right? Like, “Oh, that’s what other people do.” But there is that moment that then you can look around and go, “Oh, I guess I do have a photography business.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, this is a business. This is … At what point was that? And to speak to your process of finding that, I think one of the … Something that’s worth calling out is you got there because you started and you’re not, you didn’t end or you didn’t end up where you started, but you wouldn’t have been where you are if not for starting.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think that’s one of the great things about diving in and saying like, “Hey, I’m going to do a blog,” you get into blogging. And you’re like, “Wait, photography is awesome. I don’t like writing. I’m not super into the tech side of it.” But there’s this poll in this, in what for some people is like a sliver of what they do, but for you it could be the whole pie and you want to just do photography.

Bjork Ostrom: And we’ve seen that happen with people who get into it and they’re like, “I actually really love the tech side. I love development. I love technology.” That becomes the pull. So, I do think there’s something to be said about and we want to shine a light on the fact that starting is really important, but also be okay to pivot, change and adjust based on, and you said this to pieces, where do you see people coming to you like, “Hey, can you do this? Can I get your opinion on this? Could we hire you to do this?” So, there’s a poll from other people.

Bjork Ostrom: But also where do you find your energy? And I think of the book Designing Your Life and one of the activities they have you do, I think it was a Stanford class, like one of the most popular classes they had, and so then these two professors wrote a book out of it.

Bjork Ostrom: And one of the things they did is like, hey, each activity in your day, do a meter from like a gas meter from empty to full. Does this empty you or does it fill your tank? And it sounds like for you, it was like photography, a lot of that was filling your tank. And so not only were people saying like, “Hey, can you weigh in on this? Can we hire you to help with this?”

Bjork Ostrom: But also that’s where you want to be. And that intersection is really awesome if you can find it. But you don’t find it until you start and dig in. So, at what point were you like, “Wait, this is a business, I am creating income from this, I am going to really lean into this.”

Bjork Ostrom: Was there an inflection point where you realized like, “Hey, this is something that I can do as my full-time career and be really successful with it.”

Joanie Simon: Yeah. I think that my journey was unique in that I had been full-time in a sales job, in a different industry, not food photography, or food blogging, or content related. And because of personal circumstances made a really strong pivot toward opting to something that was creative. Right?

Joanie Simon: I knew enough about myself. I didn’t know that it was going to be photography. I didn’t know where it was going to lead, but I knew I needed to do something creative. And so for me, it was taking that big risk to take that big leap. But I 100% believe, and I’m still in that process of that you don’t know until you do something and it’s in that uncovering phase.

Joanie Simon: It’s like the whole process of the creative process, right? It’s like we give ourselves this bizarre expectation that we’re supposed to show up and commit and know exactly what it is and start doing it right away, and that this is exactly how it is.

Bjork Ostrom: Right.

Joanie Simon: And that’s just not how creativity works. It’s that whole I left my day job, I started food blogging, I started figuring out this camera stuff, I started teaching local food bloggers how to take better photos. I started reading tasty food photography from Pinch of Yum. I started doing all these different things that then collectively, but it’s in that creative process.

Joanie Simon: So, as far as how to turn this into a business and a living, so much of that I would say definitely came along with then the launch of my second YouTube channel, which is now The Bite Shot, because I had another YouTube channel prior to that, which was all recipe videos and cooking and trying to do the hosted Food Network style, here’s what I’m doing.

Joanie Simon: And it was again in that creative process that then suddenly I realized, “Oh, there is a business.” And I do think that something that was also important was starting to have models in that, seeing other people who were doing it like thinking about Sally’s Baking Addiction and you guys with the income reports and going, “Oh my gosh, this is real money. This is not just a hobby.”

Joanie Simon: And so likewise starting to connect with other photographers and see, oh this isn’t, people aren’t just charging $200 for photos. People are charging big, serious money that can turn into a full-time living, and way more than I was making in education 10 years ago.

Joanie Simon: So, I think that also having those connection points and having models to see. So again, I don’t think for me that there was a clear moment. I think it was a slippery slope in a positive sense.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, like a gradual becoming. Yeah.

Joanie Simon: The gradual process of uncovering this thing and this thing and doing lots of odd jobs and trying on lots of different things like, “Okay, now everybody’s doing buzz feed style tasty videos. I’m going to go learn how to do that. And I’m going to start to make those videos. And oh, I can charge more for that than I can these still photos. And now I can teach other photographers and I can turn that into courses.”

Joanie Simon: And so I would love to say that there was a big grand master plan in place, but there really wasn’t. It’s just been consistently showing up and looking for where does my energy go? But then also I think you had a really good key point, that is something that I would say I credit much of my success to is that I don’t rest too much into sunk costs.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, right.

Joanie Simon: That I’m like, “Okay, I set up this food blog, joaniesimon.com. If you go in the backend, there’s 300 recipes there and they’re not doing anything. They’re not … You could say, ”Oh, that’s a failure.“ But I go, ”That’s not a failure at all. That was my education. That was how I got to where I am.”

Joanie Simon: And at the same time though, okay, it’s time to cut bait with that, because that’s not, I’m not getting enough energy. I’m not passionate enough in this realm to make that work because you really, like the insane amount of time and energy, you have to totally love it to continue to show up consistently.

Joanie Simon: The amount of hours that I’ve lied behind a camera is you’d say, “Oh, this is kind of really that’s insane.” But it’s because I love it so much that I can continue to show up day in and day out even when it’s not fun. Even when I’m frustrated, even when I’m like, “I don’t want to do this today,” but I’ve made a choice to do this and this is now where I’m pursuing.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. I love that. And I love the idea of those not being … the idea of a sunk cost, meaning like, hey, just because you’ve spent 200 hours on something doesn’t justify spending more time if you don’t think that’s what you should be doing.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think sometimes we can get trapped in some of those, it’s almost like a mental mindset piece or a mental framework of like, “Oh gosh, I’ve done so much work and so much time in this certain area, I got to continue to do it.”

Bjork Ostrom: Well, you can view that as a learning experience to say, “Hey, this informed me that this isn’t the thing that I should be doing or shouldn’t be spending time on,” in pursuit of always getting towards that place that’s more aligned and making those micro-adjustments. Sometimes they’re macro major adjustments, but those micro-adjustments along the way to find that spot that really feels good.

Bjork Ostrom: So, do you feel like that is where you are now? Do you feel pretty aligned with the work you’re doing, and on any given day, are you in that space that feels appropriate both for energy and also in return on your time? Or are you still trying to find that?

Joanie Simon: Yeah. I think that that’s a constant discipline of checking in. I think I’ve been now The Bite Shot as a YouTube channel and as an educational platform has been around since 2017. And so four years of time and the wild adventure and success that that has found that I didn’t …

Joanie Simon: I just remember starting that channel thinking if I get 10,000 subscribers that my life will be forever changed, that will be incredible. So, that I’m sitting here with 300,000 is just unbelievable to me. But I think you do get to a certain point in your creative evolution, you go, “Okay, I’m not going to be a YouTuber forever.” Let’s just be … Who knows if YouTube’s even going to exist in five?

Joanie Simon: I’m sure it’ll exist in five years, but how that looks today is not going to look the same in the future. And so wanting to follow that evolution and to evolve the business and to keep myself creatively inspired. And so I think right now it is an evaluation of okay where, we’ve found success, we’ve found what does work and how do we return back to where we started?

Joanie Simon: Because I think that to the further you get on some sort of successful path, suddenly you’re pulled into lots of different opportunities and lots of different directions and you have to go, “Okay, but where did we start? How did we get here and what is still true today and what can now follow the long haul of the next …”

Joanie Simon: I’m not necessarily thinking about what does my life look like in five years, but knowing that my life will not look the same in five years. And so thinking about what is long-term sustainable. And so I think for me, it is there. I’m in a phase of wanting to simplify in certain ways that a lot has come into the business, and so how do we hone back in, how do we focus back in?

Joanie Simon: Does that mean removing certain social media platforms from what we’re doing? Does that mean focusing more on blog content? I think that, that, and how do we work with clients and you can only do so many things really well, and there’s so much value in that pointed execution, I think.

Joanie Simon: So for me, I shoot for clients, but then I also shoot for my YouTube and my content. And it’s like these two really great things that I have a really hard time deciding which do I like better, but then I think about, well what is, what am I uniquely gifted at? And I think that I’m more uniquely gifted as an educator than I am as necessarily a photographer.

Joanie Simon: I don’t want to discount my abilities as a photographer, but I think that when I look at myself as an educator versus a photographer, the education weighs out. And so really in this next year, focusing in more specifically just on the education side and doing that to the best of my ability and bringing more people into that process as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s interesting to hear you talk about that. I feel like a lot of business owners, creators, publishers can relate to this idea. It almost feels like, as you were talking about it, I was thinking of this analogy of breathing where I feel like we take in something and it’s like the rhythms of breathing more extended, but around creating and reducing complexity.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think as business owners and publishers, creatives, a lot of what we’re doing is we’re creating complexity. That could be something like hiring. It could be growing your following. It could be adding a course. It could be adding a social media following. You create this complexity by adding in another thing, pursuing another opportunity.

Bjork Ostrom: As you are creating that opportunity, you’re also exhaling and wanting to reduce the complexity. So, it feels like there’s this sweet science between growing and seeking opportunity without creating so much complexity that you kind of get crushed by it.

Bjork Ostrom: And there is no perfect answer, but there probably is this in-between, and I think we’re always seeking that to find that balance between pursuing that growth, pursuing opportunity, but not at the expense of creating something so complex that it weighs us down. And it’s not going to be easy.

Joanie Simon: Yeah, because I know that if I’m going to take anything into my business, it needs to be something I can repeat over and over again. That like a YouTube video, I can publish a YouTube video once a week. Now I’ve kind of veered off that course, because I think that there was so much complexity that entered my business. And so I stopped uploading regularly because then suddenly …

Joanie Simon: I’m only one human person, and I’m starting to hire people and learning that lesson as well of how I need to bring other people into that process and start to delegate. But regardless, from the creative standpoint and that magical stuff that only you can put into the world, it needs to be something that you can do on a regular basis, because yeah, that consistency factor is huge.

Joanie Simon: And so when things like, what’s, I’m trying to remember now what’s the name of it? What’s the platform where everybody gets on Live and chats on and it was super exclusive for a hot minute?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Joanie Simon: Clubhouse.

Bjork Ostrom: It was Clubhouse. Yeah.

Joanie Simon: And so when Clubhouse comes along and I was like, “Oh my gosh, okay, to be a relevant creator, clearly I need to join every platform that’s coming along. I need to start doing this thing.” And so I Clubhouse-d and I instantly realized there’s something about that platform that literally I would do an hour on it and then I’d be useless the rest of the day.

Bjork Ostrom: Done for the week.

Joanie Simon: I was exhausted.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Joanie Simon: The mental gymnastics to participate in Clubhouse to me was just … And some people love it, which is fantastic. And so I don’t want to tell people don’t go after Clubhouse, but for me personally, I was like, “This is not a fit. This is not where I’m going to invest my energy. And this is not furthering for me personally the goals that we have for the business.”

Joanie Simon: And likewise the same with TikTok. Would I love to have some fun and get creative on TikTok? Yes. But do I know I also don’t have the energy and enthusiasm for that particular outlet that I would need in order to find success there? Yeah. So, we’re going to continue. For now, YouTube is really … Continues to be long-term where I find energy, where I find inspiration, what I get excited to get out of bed in the morning to do.

Joanie Simon: It’s hard work, but it’s also really fun and rewarding and it’s that equal balance of value to the audience while also being value to me personally.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And it’s one of the things that you said that you get a lot out of is the education piece. And I know that a lot of people will be interested not only in your story of growing your business, but also in how they can become better photographers. That’s what you teach people about.

Joanie Simon: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Your courses, the content that you’re creating. What I’d be interested to hear you talk a little bit about is do you have, like if you were to … I think the easy example would be like, “Hey, here’s some tips,” like what are the tips that you have for photographers. But one of the ways I was thinking of it was almost even an audit.

Joanie Simon: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Like if you were to come in and you were to … You didn’t know anything about a photographer because we’re speaking to a lot of people generally who know photography, maybe some are really great, maybe just some are beginning, what would you say would be a checklist of things that you’d walk through to say, “Here are the opportunities that you see knowing what you know for people to improve their photography.”

Bjork Ostrom: Maybe the low-hanging fruit, and we can work down kind of a list of different ideas that you have around how people can potentially improve as a photographer. So, would that be something we could do is just talk through what some of those are?

Joanie Simon: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Great.

Joanie Simon: Absolutely.

Bjork Ostrom: So starting with number one, what would be the first thing that you would look at as an opportunity for people to improve their food photography?

Joanie Simon: Yeah. When I think about improvements to food photography, certainly there’s the aesthetic components, and that being aside, I feel like so much of, from a food blogging perspective and thinking back to how can we create consistency in something that we’re going to continue to be able to show up to day in and day out because you know you have to do this photography thing, and even if you don’t love it, how do you do it in such a way that you have control over it and you don’t have to waste your time?

Joanie Simon: Because I do see a lot of food photographers, food bloggers getting started out there who they’re kind of poking around in the dark. Right? Because that’s easy to feel like that. You’re like, “I think I’m doing it.” But there’s some really little key things that can give you a lot more control over your camera and over your situation.

Joanie Simon: And so for me that very first starting place to really gaining control is shooting in manual mode, which can feel like a monumental challenge from the outset because it is, especially for folks like me who I would say I’m not a numbers-oriented person, I’m not a sciencey kind of person, right? I’d say much more right-brained.

Joanie Simon: But at the same time, once you force yourself to do that discipline and figure that out, it really does yield so much more control that then you know what you’re doing, right? That we’re not guessing because I feel like you just lose so much time in the photography process with just like, “Ugh.”

Joanie Simon: I just think back to there was this shoot that I did for an early on client. It was a corn dog client and I was still shooting an auto mode when I was shooting for this client. And I just remember the shoot took hours and hours because I was like, “Why are these images just not bright enough or why are things blurry?” Because I just didn’t understand.

Joanie Simon: And so that foundation of shooting in manual is just going to give you so much more control and make your life a lot easier because then you can make those choices.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I love that. And it is a bit of a numbers game. Right? You have to understand how does changing this number, let’s say aperture, impact shutter speed.

Joanie Simon: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And then how does shutter speed impact aperture? So, what do you see as the biggest hurdles for people when it comes to manual mode, the things that, or even the light bulb moments where somebody is like, “Oh now I get it.”

Joanie Simon: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s this thing is really hard to understand, but once somebody unlocks that, then they can kind of understand manual mode in general. Could you pinpoint that?

Joanie Simon: Yeah. It’s just like you said, it’s the interrelatedness of each of those functions that you’ve got that exposure triangle, the aperture, the shutter speed and the ISO and how those three things independently operate, but then they also operate together.

Joanie Simon: And I think that it is, to me I think back over my career and the things that I’ve learned in photography and it’s like it can be really hard to understand it conceptually, but then you really, just you need to get in there and start to do the work.

Joanie Simon: And I tell the story of when I was learning manual mode and I just still, my brain was like, “I am not making this connection. I do not know why I cannot put this all together.” But I was like, I knew enough, right, I knew enough to kind of in general get the concept.

Joanie Simon: And so I was shooting at a food festival for six hours and I promised myself, I said, “I’m going to put the camera in manual mode and I’m not going to …” Now granted this is a little risky to do this on a page shoot, but whatever. Here we are. Right?

Bjork Ostrom: You got to do it at some point. So yeah.

Joanie Simon: Yeah. So, I rip off the band aid and because, I think, that situation too, where I was kind of forced to have to perform. And you kind of, if you can sort of artificially create these situations where you have to learn something, there’s a compelling reason.

Joanie Simon: I think this also goes into why I think sometimes traditional education isn’t necessarily the most helpful because there’s not a compelling, immediate motivation to do that. And so in that day, that six hours, when I said, “No, this thing’s in manual mode and I’m going to have to figure this out.”

Joanie Simon: Suddenly things started to click because I was doing the work, and because I had to, because I knew at the end of the shoot, I had to deliver photos to a client, and then that muscle memory was built.

Joanie Simon: Because honestly then, once you get … That’s the beauty of a lot of these skills in photography is that once you’ve built that muscle memory there, then suddenly it’s like, “How did I not know that?” Right? Like you’ve stepped into a whole new world. And so it does feel like such a monumental thing to overcome, but kind of forcing yourself.

Joanie Simon: I love to create scenarios for myself that force me to have to learn things, which I think the education I’ve gained as a photographer in teaching on YouTube has been invaluable. Like the things that I’ve learned because people would come and say, “Oh, I want to learn about this. Or I want to learn about focus stacking or what.” And I go, “I don’t know what that is, but I’m going to go look it up and then I’ll make a tutorial about it.”

Joanie Simon: Because you learn so much through that teaching process. And so creating opportunities for that as well, I think can really up-level your skills.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. There’s something about creative pressure. I think the times that, similar to you, that I’ve learned the most is when I have a deadline and I have to do something, and it affirms the idea of do then learn, not learn then do.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think so much of what we do as entrepreneurs and business builders and creators happens through the process of doing, it’s not first learning and then doing. So, the encouragement to people being like, “Hey, step out, commit to doing it and learn along the way,” and the creative pressure around that.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think the other piece that I really appreciated within that is this idea of teaching and teaching as a form of learning. And maybe one of the best ways to learn is by teaching because you have to have a certain level of mastery in order to feel comfortable going in front of somebody, whether it be a small group or thousands of people on YouTube to say, “Here’s how you do this.”

Bjork Ostrom: And we’ve seen that too with the work that we’ve done. I think some of the things that I’ve learned the most is when I’m writing an email or a blog post or even in a podcast, those are the times when I’m learning the most versus saying like, “Oh, I’d really love someday to learn this thing,” and making a note to go back and learn it or to attend a class or a course.

Bjork Ostrom: Those are important, but doing those as much as possible paired with the actual execution of them, I think is really significant. So, manual mode really important.

Joanie Simon: Yes, manual mode.

Bjork Ostrom: So, prioritizing manual mode, figuring out how the interplay between shutter speed and ISO and aperture works. Is there any quick tip that you’d give to people or I’m guessing you have YouTube content that we could link to that’s maybe the best place to start.

Joanie Simon: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I’ve got … So, I’ve recently started, because one of my big focuses for the year ahead is obviously I’ve got a wealth of information on YouTube and it’s years of videos, but I’ve never backed that up with blog content and people are like, “Oh Joanie, the low hanging fruit @thebiteshut.com.”

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Joanie Simon: I’m like, “I know. I know.” So, that is a big focus for 2022 is to turn a lot of that into blog content. But what I have created I’m in just the final stages of a test group of a beginner boot camp, which really is like you have just bought your first DSLR or mirrorless camera last week and you literally don’t know what any of these buttons mean.

Joanie Simon: You don’t know how to take the lens off, all kind of really starting from the basics, working through operating the camera as well as Adobe Lightroom and basics of editing, getting focus, all sort of those foundational concepts. And so that is a free blog series.

Joanie Simon: So, that is … There’s currently a group of that running, but it should be all ready to go by March. So, I will be sure to send you a link to that. But there is a landing page for it in the meantime so that you can get notification if you opt in before it’s ready.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. That’s great. So manual mode, really important. How about number two? Like when you think of people who are mastering, getting on their way to master photography, it could be food photography or food styling. If we’re in pursuit of a beautiful photo, manual mode is one of the most important things, understanding how to use your camera to change, manipulate the image in a way that allows you to do it, and that you can’t just do with automatic.

Bjork Ostrom: What’s the next thing that you say would be really important to master or understand in pursuit of beautiful outcome from your photography?

Joanie Simon: Yeah, it’s definitely light, right? It’s the big thing that every photographer says is their favorite topic. It’s their favorite thing. And so whether that’s natural or artificial, the light is really then what changes the game. And my favorite part about light is that it follows very predictable rules. That it is legitimate physics.

Joanie Simon: So, it’s not going to change. It’s not going to deviate. If you understand the foundational principles of light in terms of the size of your light, the proximity of your light to the subject, the quality of that light, is it hard, is it soft, understanding those kinds of things so that you can diagnose when you’re working in natural light, that you can diagnose the kind of light that you’re working in, or if you’re working with artificial, how to manipulate the light that you have in order to get the look that you want because it is so interesting.

Joanie Simon: Folks, one of the things that I hear a lot of people complain about is my images don’t look crisp. They don’t look sharp. And a lot of times we love to blame our lenses and say, “Oh, it must be because I have a crappy lens.” And I go, “No, no, no. The kit lens that comes with your camera is plenty good. It’s a great lens. The problem is most likely your light.”

Joanie Simon: And once people really get a handle on those foundational concepts of again, the size of the light source, the proximity of the light source, the amount of diffusion, all of those things, once you have a handle on that, suddenly you’re like, “Oh my gosh, these images are so sharp. They’re so clean.”

Joanie Simon: And that is owing to the light much more so than the glass that you’re shooting within your lens. So, it can make … Nothing breaks my heart than seeing people who don’t have a handle on light and think they need to go buy different cameras and buy different lenses and buy all this gear.

Joanie Simon: I’m like, “No, no, no, no, no it’s coming right through your window. You just need to know how to manipulate it and understand the way that light works.” And that’s going to really change the game.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And it’s interesting because I’m guessing manual mode also impacts light. Once you understand manual mode, how to change your aperture and your shutter speed, one of the primary functions of what that’s controlling is also light, but also depth of field.

Bjork Ostrom: It actually brings up a question that Donna, from the Food Blogger Pro Podcast Facebook group asks, we always pull in some questions, we’re starting to do a better job of this.

Joanie Simon: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: She said, “Should I be using a narrower aperture to capture the full frame of my overhead shots? My shots are blurry and I want the whole frame and focus.” She said, “Struggling with this, help.”

Joanie Simon: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: So, what would your advice be? It kind of maybe touches on manual mode stuff, but also potentially maybe lighting a little bit. And then there’s another question from Mika here around lighting that I’ll ask after that.

Joanie Simon: Love it. So, we’re talking top-down shot, right? Our flat lay situation and you want focus from the top to the bottom. You want everything in focus. And so I think that one of the things that’s important that I didn’t realize when I first started working with cameras is understanding that the depth of field is really based on a flat plane, which is parallel to your camera sensor, which I just kind of think of as the LCD screen on the back of the camera.

Joanie Simon: So, if you just imagine your LCD screen is your plane of focus, which direction is that focus, is that pointed. So, if we are in that overhead position pointed straight down and you have your aperture set, say for example, F 4.5, that’s not necessarily a huge depth, right? You don’t have a huge area of focus.

Joanie Simon: And so if you’re top-down and you have some fairly tall things, like if you’re shooting, say for example, a cake overhead and you’re getting the top of that cake and you’re at F 4.5 and that plane of focus is flat, and so maybe all of the top of your cake is in focus, but then your surface, maybe if you’ve got some sprinkles off to the side and you’ve got some other props off to the side, those maybe out of focus, because they are lower than where that depth of field is placed.

Joanie Simon: So, you are going to want to go if you want focus from the top to the bottom or if you’re shooting head-on from the front to the back, you’re going to want to work with one of those higher aperture numbers, something like F9, F10, F14. Can I take it up from there until you get everything in focus?

Joanie Simon: But the thing to also keep in mind is that the more focused you have from top to bottom, the smaller the opening inside your lens is going to be, the smaller your aperture. This is where … It’s always funny to think about photography. It’s like you got to step into the world of backwards land, right? Because you’re like a bigger number is a smaller opening, and a bigger depth of field or a smaller depth of field, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Joanie Simon: So, it’s like all backwards. But all that being said, the smaller that opening is, the more focus you get from top to bottom, the less light it’s letting into the camera. And so you’re going to either need to compensate with one of your other camera settings or you’re going to need to introduce brighter light to that scenario.

Joanie Simon: So, that is just one of those trade-offs, is that the deeper you’re going to go with that focus, the more light you’re going to need.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. You can really start to see how those four all impact each other, shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and light.

Joanie Simon: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: One of the things I like to think about is if you have a camera and there’s a yardstick attached to it, or maybe three-yard sticks, so it’s like this if you have, there’s lots of variables within this. But if you have a really small number, like 1.8 on that yardstick, there’s going to be maybe one inch that you can slide, is maybe even less, a half an inch that you can slide and say like, “Here’s what’s going to be in focus.”

Bjork Ostrom: And every time that number gets bigger, 2.2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, that it maybe goes from an inch to two inches to three inches. I don’t know what that actually is.

Joanie Simon: Sure.

Bjork Ostrom: But that number on the yardstick of what you can actually have in focus gets a little bit bigger, that visual has always been helpful for me. Do you know what that number actually represents? When they say F stop, what does that actually mean? Do you know?

Joanie Simon: F stop relates to the amount of light that is being let in. So, for example, and this is where it’s like, “Okay, numbers and maths.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Joanie Simon: But effectively one full stop is double the amount of light. And I’m trying to remember the exact correlations. We can get into the minutia, but yeah it’s effectively the amount of light that’s being let in.

Joanie Simon: And so then the impact that those F stops have in terms of aperture, because when we get into things like working with lights and things like that, we’re also then communicating those in stops. So, stops of light based on the output of my strobe or things like that.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it.

Joanie Simon: So yeah, but it’s for sure.

Bjork Ostrom: And the thing that’s confusing about it is that the higher the number, the less light.

Joanie Simon: Correct.

Bjork Ostrom: And in pursuit of manual mode and understanding that, that’s one of the things that is counterintuitive to your point.

Joanie Simon: Yeah. One little bonus though there, and something else to consider is the distance that you’re shooting from your subject, that the further away you are from the subject, the less pronounced that impact of the depth of field is.

Joanie Simon: So, in situations where I’m looking at a shot and I’m like, “I want less, I want less perceived depth of field. I want to get a bit more in focus and maybe I’m at the F stop. I’m at the F number on my aperture that I want,” then maybe I’ll back up a little bit or if I want to accentuate that and I’m already like say, for example, I want kind of that glowy, magical bouquet effect on the edges, but I’m already at the whatever the lowest number it is on my lens.

Joanie Simon: Like if that’s the F 4.5 in the kit lens, you’re like, “Oh, but I really want that magical thing like those people who are shooting at F 1.8 have.” Well get closer to the subject because it will make that depth of field more pronounced the more physically close that you are to that subject.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Mika’s question is actually about light as well. And she says, “How can you make sure that your artificial light looks natural? Is that done through editing or are there things you can do while shooting?” So, do you have a preference first of all, do you like shooting in natural light, artificial light, it depends.

Bjork Ostrom: And then if you are shooting an artificial light, how do you do that well where it looks not like artificial light?

Joanie Simon: Yeah, totally. So, I pretty much shoot 99% of the time in artificial light. It is the control themed in me just loves the control and the consistency factor that I get from artificial light that from the first shot to the last shot makes my process in editing a lot easier.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Joanie Simon: But where I feel like my aha moment in working with artificial light was in understanding when somebody says to me that artificial light looks artificial, I was like, “Well, what is it about it that looks artificial? And what is it about natural light that makes you think it’s natural?”

Joanie Simon: And so much of it has to come down to… it’s not the actual light itself because really light is light, whether it’s coming from the sun or it’s coming from a bulb, it’s a matter of what are we modifying that light with.

Joanie Simon: So for example, a lot of food bloggers, myself included, my very first light that I ever bought was one of those low ego, little tabletop lights. And the problem with those is that you really can’t manipulate them. You really can’t change that light. It sort of is what it is. Whereas the lights that I recommend, I’ve got a gear guide with recommended kind of different budget tiers and things like that, depending on the kind of work that you’re doing, but different modifiers that go with those lights.

Joanie Simon: So, what is the softbox that you’re adding to that? Or there’s a lot of different things that we can do, but typically softboxes or scrims, what are we shooting that light through so that then it appears more natural because I always also push back on people and say, okay, well the natural light that I see from The Modern Proper versus the natural light that I see from Sally’s Baking Addiction versus somebody in Northern California versus somebody who’s in Texas, that’s going to look different.

Joanie Simon: And so by being able to quantify well what does natural light look like to you? For me, there’s a certain amount of contrast in the shadows, but we want a certain amount of softness. So, when we talk about light and the very first instant to me, like game-changer of making artificial light look more like natural light is getting a really large modifier because the larger the light source, the softer the shadows are going to be.

Joanie Simon: So, when we’re shooting in natural light, most of the time we’re working with a north or a south-facing large window. I recently saw Tieghan at Half Baked Harvest had a little setup of where she does her photography. And it was like, yeah, that totally checks out. It’s like this giant, big old window. Right? And you’ll see that with a lot of food bloggers who are shooting in natural light.

Joanie Simon: And so in that scenario, you’ve got a really large window, which is a really large light source and most likely that’s north or south, which means you don’t have direct line of sight of the sun. Right? Because the sun, even though it’s really large, is super far away. So relative to our subject, it’s a very small light source creating hard light, which checks out, right?

Joanie Simon: Like if you go outside at noon and you put your food under that direct sunlight, you’re going to have really hard shadows. And so looking for a really large natural light source, well how do we do that in artificial land? Well then we get into large softboxes. My personal favorite one that I think creates a very natural window light look is a 31-inch by 47-inch softbox and it’s kind of rectangular and it looks like a window.

Joanie Simon: So, if somebody’s like, “I want to recreate the look of the light that I get out of this window.” I say, “Well, what’s the size of the window you’re working with? Is this like a big Arcadia door? Is this a little like keyhole window?” And how can we then purchase a softbox for our light that then modifies our light to have that same sort of shape and size?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s almost like if you have that huge natural window, natural light window, great. For a lot of us, we don’t. And even if you do, to your point, it’s helpful to be able to control that because eleven o’clock today is going to look different than eleven o’clock tomorrow, especially in Minnesota, like it’s snowing, it’s cloudy right now. Yesterday, it was super sunny.

Joanie Simon: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And so you can control that a little bit more. You had mentioned that you have a gear guide. I think that would be something super helpful for people because I think one of the things that always comes out of a conversation like this is which one, which softbox should I buy? Right?

Bjork Ostrom: Where should I go for my … What should my first purchase be if I’m going to do artificial light. Do you talk about that in that gear guide?

Joanie Simon: I do. Yeah. I break it down into if a budget is your concern and the base least expensive packages around $200, because I know not everybody is looking to start getting heavily invested in light. And I don’t think too it’s wise to necessarily go all in and spend lots of money as you’re learning these things.

Joanie Simon: So, there’s a good like basic package and it’s for Canon icon, Sony, Fuji, and then there’s sort of like, “Okay, now if these are some additional considerations based on what you’re needing and then here’s some of the …” Like if you want to get wild or do some different styles, you really love that Chiaroscuro dramatic dark shadows and dark all around with just this sliver of light, like here’s the soft box that does that.

Joanie Simon: So, it really breaks down those different styles and puts it into kits, because I remember when I was trying to figure this stuff out, I’m like how many different parts do I need and what goes with what? So, I’ve simplified all of that all with links and information where to get that stuff.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. We’ll link to that in the show notes. Is that something that people purchased or free download or?

Joanie Simon: It’s free.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Joanie Simon: It’s just on my website. Yeah. It’s all affiliate links.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Joanie Simon: So, there’s some affiliate marketing there.

Bjork Ostrom: Great. Yeah. Smart. Love that. So, manual mode really important. Light after that, artificial light, especially if you want to be able to control that. Some people might have the opportunity to use natural light, maybe if they have the right window, the right size, the right location.

Bjork Ostrom: What would be next on your list? When you think of the opportunities for people to level up their photography, is there kind of a number three thing that you’d identify as a really important area to focus on?

Joanie Simon: For sure. I would say get yourself tethered. Get yourself tethered to a computer, whether you’re shooting into lightroom or you’re shooting with a software like Capture One or even something like Canon. Any Canon camera comes with the Canon EOS software, which is free on the Canon website, which just …

Joanie Simon: Image management and all of that aside, just purely the ability to be able to set things up so you can see what’s happening on a larger screen because the LCD screen can be just … It can be just so hard to know what’s going on, what are you really seeing and doing that in tandem with shooting on a tripod?

Joanie Simon: I would say I love some freehand shooting and I love the creative expression and the exploring the scene, lots of folks out there like, “You’re not going to get me on a tripod.” But then I would say though there is so much power in being able to compose a scene when you are on a tripod.

Joanie Simon: I take a lot less shots because I know my focus is set. I know the composition that I’m working toward. And then if I take a shot and I like it, but I just want to change one little thing, everything’s still where it’s at and I can see with this tethered ability, it’s really …

Joanie Simon: To me that was that third level up. I learned manual mode and then I learned lighting and then once I started tethering I’m like mind blown.

Bjork Ostrom: This is awesome. So, what does that actually look like? So, you have your … If you’re going to describe the setup, you have your tripod, your camera’s on the tripod, is it a standard tripod or is there any type of kind of funky arm that you have attached to it that allows for more flexibility or is it really just a camera on top of a nice tripod?

Joanie Simon: Yeah, I would say I have a video. I can definitely send you for links to breakdown the different options in the land of tripod because there certainly are some personal preferences in that department. But for me personally, and what has been I would say a good food blogger setup as well is having a nice tripod for your side shots and for your three-quarter shots.

Joanie Simon: Plenty of other folks in the food blogging space also get one that has the articulating arm that then can pop over. I always found that challenging though, because I could just never get that high enough for tabletop status where the legs were always in the way.

Joanie Simon: And so incorporating a C stand is an additional rig for in the overhead, which is not as expensive as other solutions out there. And it’s fairly straightforward as far as just a couple little parts and pieces, which I can get you links to as far as to mount that overhead because we, especially, if you are a big fan of shooting overhead, it’s just nice to not.

Joanie Simon: I’ve just gotten lazy over the years. I’m like, “I don’t want to handle this. That’s exhausting.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Sure.

Joanie Simon: So, that sort of combination set up if you have the space and the room works well or you can just do a really nice, you know yeah, good tripod with an overhead stand. But then you’re going to get a USB cord that’s specific to your camera that’s meant for tethering. And so you’re going to want to look at Tether Tools is one outlet.

Joanie Simon: Their website’s super easy to navigate and they break down like you’re shooting with the Canon 5D Mark IV, here’s the cable because every camera’s going to have a different port on it. I’ve also worked with area 51 cables. They’re kind of a smaller group, but really good quality cables.

Joanie Simon: And so you do want to make sure to get the right cord and then you just plug that into the USB onto your computer and then boot up a software that’s intended for tethering. So for Canon, they’ve got the Canon EOS software, anybody using Adobe Lightroom, that will tether directly to with a live view functionality.

Joanie Simon: So, that ability to see what your LCD screen looks like, but you’re seeing it on a computer and the very first time you do it every time that somebody does it for the first time and then you’re sticking your hands in it, and you’re like, “Look, I can see my hands in it.”

Bjork Ostrom: “This is awesome.” Yeah. Right.

Joanie Simon: “It’s so cool.” I’m like I never get tired of that. It’s so fun. So yeah. And there’s lots of different software out there depending on what you want to do. There’s plenty of folks though too with wireless solutions. I personally have not delved into that as much, I’m a firm believer it’s probably the elder millennial in me that really likes a cable from a connectivity standpoint.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Just a little bit more, probably a lot more reliable when it comes to that.

Joanie Simon: Yeah. Reliability and stability, but there are software out there like CamRanger, which have the ability so that you can be connected to an iPad or to a laptop wirelessly and be able to see that way as well. So, there’s lots of different solutions.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. That’s great. Another question coming in from our Food Blogger Pro Podcast group on Facebook, Christina, I think I’m saying that right. And this is related to some of the stuff that you’re talking about and I’m guessing you get this question a lot, software. What software would you recommend for image editing?

Bjork Ostrom: Like if somebody’s getting into it, you maybe have a Mac, can you use photos for editing, would there be another way that you’d step into it? Is Lightroom really the go-to place where 90% of photographers are using Lightroom. Any recommendations around best image editing software?

Joanie Simon: Yeah, for sure. I would say always base it on what you can afford, right? Because these things all cost money and there’s definitely free solutions out there or nearly free solutions. But for something that’s going to give you a lot of features and there’s also a lot of education available around and is a great way for helping you organize your images, because the further you get into the world of food blogging, the more images you’re going to end up with.

Joanie Simon: And so having a good catalog system, Adobe Lightroom is going to be a great one. I think that it’s a good intersection of user-friendliness, while at the same time still being a professional photo editing software. And so kind of getting you in that world.

Joanie Simon: It’s $9.99 a month for the photographer package, which also comes with Photoshop, which I would say Photoshop is another level. Right? And that’s going to be more doing surgery on your photos, which honestly, for me personally, I don’t do as much in.

Joanie Simon: I can get the majority of the work done in Adobe Lightroom in terms of adjusting exposure and color and all of those other things. So yeah, Lightroom to me is a great place to start and a great place to continue for the rest of your food photography journey.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Joanie Simon: But there is also, I personally have moved recently, well about two years ago into Capture One because they do have some advanced features in the tethering department, which I really appreciate and enjoy. It’s also a great quality raw editor as well, but it also behaves very similar to Adobe Lightroom.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. That’s great. So, we’ve hit manual mode. We’ve talked about lighting, tethering being really important so you can see kind of the full picture of it. The idea of tethering really being like you uncouple yourself from the camera. You’re able to be in the space a little bit differently. You’re able to compose things differently, see things differently. Is that right at its core?

Joanie Simon: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Obviously software is really important post-shoot. Anything else that you’d add to the list of like, “Hey, here are the big bullet points, the big considerations for anybody who’s looking to level up their food photography,” and things that they need to really be aware of and improve?

Joanie Simon: Yeah. I feel like you can throw all sorts of technique in the photography department at a food photo, but really so much of it too just comes down to the styling and that styling is definitely an art. And so the art of teaching styling I think is kind of a bit more mysterious and not as straightforward as being able to teach camera settings.

Joanie Simon: And I feel like that’s something I get a lot of questions about and I’m just like, “Oh.” To try to teach that nuance of art and things like that. And so I think that that is something that you have to keep in the back of your mind and continue to work on, but also so much of that.

Joanie Simon: And I think fortunate for the food blogger audience is that you have culinary technique. And so the great food stylists who I work with, that come into the studio and I watch them and they have backgrounds in culinary. They’ve been to culinary school or they’ve worked in kitchens and they have the experience to understand how the food behaves and that really helps to inform.

Joanie Simon: But I would say too along those same lines, one of the pitfalls they think is this desire to just want to throw so much into the photo. And I think especially when you’re first getting started, really feel free to let the food be the photo.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, right.

Joanie Simon: We don’t need to throw everything in the kitchen sink at these shots. If the food looks delicious, that’s really, that’s what’s important.

Bjork Ostrom: What it’s all about.

Joanie Simon: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. So, here’s my last question for you. This is actually coming. So Leslie, on the Food Blogger Pro team helps to build out some of the show notes that we have and questions and she dropped this in. I don’t have much context around this, but month-long vacation from social media, YouTube, Instagram, tell us what that was like and what the reason was behind that.

Joanie Simon: Yeah. So good.

Bjork Ostrom: It was great. It was like a mind reset.

Joanie Simon: It’s so healthy. It’s so good. The rationale is just honestly getting burned out and being at a place where I’m feeling just so overwhelmed anytime I’d go to make a video or I’d go to open Instagram, I’m just like there’s a feeling of anxiety there and just … And not having, feeling like I was continually doing and producing, but not necessarily with the depth and richness that I wanted to bring to it.

Joanie Simon: And so knowing that so much of the path that I’m on right now was born out of taking a month-long break in the transition from a day job into a creative career and being like, “I need to go back there. I need to do that again and give myself some permission.” And guess what? The Internet’s not going to fall apart.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes, right.

Joanie Simon: It’s also going to be there when I get back and who knows, because I’m just finishing it up here and I’ll come back in March. But I’ve taken breaks from Instagram before and people are like, “Oh it tanks your numbers. It does all these things.” And I’m like at the end of the day, the numbers are not as important as the preservation of my energy and my creativity.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, right.

Joanie Simon: And it’s just been really incredible. It took about a week for me to feel like, “Okay.” Like I could tell I had been a little too, way too connected to it because it took about a week until that impulse to pick up the phone was gone and then suddenly there’s just certain parts of, oh there is still real life, like this is-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Joanie Simon: This is a good, healthy place to be. And that then the creativity and the energy started to come back in. And so I think that for me in reentering those spaces and thinking about how can I create more boundaries around these platforms and the content I create and the time I spend there, how can I do better in that?

Joanie Simon: And I think that it’s always going to be a challenge because I think that these platforms are oriented to want to suck us in and take all our time and keep our eyeballs glued. And so I think that too, for me, it’s also thinking about kind of that long term strategy of how do I disentangle from some of these things, because I don’t want to have to feel beholden to this and I don’t want to have to feel compelled to do these things.

Joanie Simon: And good news is, my business is still standing. There’s still sales coming in. There’s still people interacting in the communities that I provide off of those platforms. And so that is all still there. And so I think that, yeah, some healthy boundaries with social media, we’re still in such early stages of these things that it’s really hard to know what is the impact and what’s it doing to us.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Joanie Simon: But being willing to walk away and take breaks is really important, I think.

Bjork Ostrom: I love that. I think that’s such a good reminder. I saw somebody in tech, I don’t remember who it was, tweeted and they were saying their belief was in 30 years, they’re going to look back at social media as we do now smoking and being like, “If only we knew the impact that it had,” and everybody was doing it and everybody thought it was okay, but then now looking back, it’s like, “Oh wait, it’s not okay.”

Joanie Simon: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And then that was smoking 30 years ago.

Joanie Simon: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: What I love about that is I think there is this truth that you said like, “Hey, people are worried hey your numbers might decline or you might lose traction.” But I think the ultimate impact is burnout is like you falling out of love with the work that you’re doing.

Bjork Ostrom: And to bring it full circle, when you talk about pursuing things that give you energy, if you lose that energy, I think your energy around the work that you’re doing and the creative things that you’re putting into the world is one of the greatest multipliers that you can have on your work.

Bjork Ostrom: And if that starts to dim or go away completely, that’s worst-case outcome. So, at all costs do what you can do to preserve that.

Joanie Simon: Absolutely.

Bjork Ostrom: On that note, where can people follow you on Instagram and YouTube?

Joanie Simon: Totally.

Bjork Ostrom: On all the social networks.

Joanie Simon: All the social networks, all the places. Totally. So @thebiteshot. So, bite like the final shot in a shot list, right? You take a bite out of the food. So TheBiteShot on Instagram and youtube.com/thebiteshot, but all roads lead back to thebiteshot.com.

Joanie Simon: So, you can hop on there and find the gear guide as well as the overview of all the gear and some of my more popular tutorials that are pretty well suited towards those just getting started in food photography.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. It’s been so fun to watch your journey along the way.

Joanie Simon: Thank you.

Bjork Ostrom: And to see kind of those initial interactions with spinning up the site and then starting to hear people mention some of the stuff that you’re doing. And now it’s like, “Hey, this is an established part of this industry and it’s having a real impact.” So, really cool to see that. Thanks for sharing your story Joanie.

Joanie Simon: And thank you so much. I would say I wouldn’t be sitting here in this role if it hadn’t been for the things that you’ve done and the groundwork that you’ve laid in the blogging space. That was definitely an inspiration to me. So, I want to say thank you.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, well thanks. Yeah, really appreciate it. It’s one of the great things about doing something for a long period of time. You’re probably getting to this point now with what you do, where you have people who come in at a certain stage, and if you do it long enough it’s …

Bjork Ostrom: My dad owned a greenhouse growing up, a little seed becomes a tree that then can … There’s other trees that come off of that. And if you’re around long enough, you see businesses and people and creative pursuits get to the point where it’s like, “Wow, this is an established anchor. This is a tree.”

Bjork Ostrom: And I feel like the work that you’re doing is that. So, I’m cool to be able to see that and have a really small part in that. So thanks.

Leslie Jeon: Hello. Hello, Leslie, here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We really hope that you enjoyed this episode of the podcast. I wanted to really quickly mention something awesome that all Food Blogger Pro members have access to, which is our deals and discounts page.

Leslie Jeon: So, if you are a Food Blogger Pro member, you can access this by going to our homepage and then just clicking deals once you’re logged into the site. And essentially what we’ve done is that we have partnered with lots of amazing companies to offer our members exclusive discounts on their products.

Leslie Jeon: And so we have deals for lots of companies like WP Tasty, NerdPress, Slickstream, Link In Profile, Tailwind, ConvertKit, InfluenceKit. The list goes on and on. And a lot of these are companies that we know bloggers are already working with or are familiar with. And just by being a Food Blogger Pro member, you get access to different deals and discounts on all of these different companies and their products.

Leslie Jeon: So, if you do want to become a Food Blogger Pro member and get access to these deals and discounts, you can easily join by going to foodbloggerpro.com/join. And there you’ll be able to look at our membership and learn more about it and join our community.

Leslie Jeon: I really hope that you enjoyed learning a bit more about our deals and discounts. It’s one of the awesome features of Food Blogger Pro I think a lot of people might not know about. So, we wanted to quickly mention it in today’s episode, but I think that’s all we’ve got for you. Thanks again for tuning in and until next time, make it a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by our sister site Clariti, C-L-A-R-I-T-I is how you spell Clariti, all different iterations of how people say it, but it’s Clariti because it helps you to be clear on what it is that you need to be working on and really gives you direction around how you can go around improving and updating and tracking the content on your blog. We built it, because we had been managing everything in a spreadsheet. So, my guess is there’s two people listening to this podcast. One would be, you are people who track stuff and you probably track it in a spreadsheet, maybe Airtable, maybe Notion. And my guess is, it’s a lot of manual work. There’s another group of people who just aren’t tracking anything and that’s okay. You’ll get there eventually. But Clariti’s going to be the tool that’s going to allow you to do that more easily. It’s going to allow you to not spend as much manual time doing the tracking, updating, improving, and just generally understanding the lay of the land with your content.

Bjork Ostrom: And one of the things that I think is most important, a lot of times we talk about hiring on this podcast, but one of the things we don’t talk about enough, and I probably should talk about it more, is some of the first positions you should hire for are software. It’s not an actual person, you’re hiring software to come in and do a lot of the work that you are doing. And that’s what Clariti is for us as the Pinch of Yum team, Food Blogger Pro team. We use Clariti to take manual work away from our day-to-day tasks and we automate that. It’s one of the easiest ways to have your first hire.

Bjork Ostrom: So, if you’re thinking, “Oh, I hear people talk about hiring a lot. Who should my next hire be?” My encouragement for you would let your next hire be a tool like Clariti, where you’re going to spend 25 a month and you’re going to save an incredible amount of time. That’s what it’s all about. So, if you want to check it out, if you want to learn a little bit more about what it is and how it works, you can go to clariti.com/food, and you can deep dive into the ins and outs of Clariti just by signing up for that list. And that’s not going to sign you up for the app. It’s not going to sign you up and process any payments or anything like that. It’s just going to allow you to understand the tool better through some onboarding emails that give you a little bit of context around what Clariti does and why we built it. So, again, that’s clariti.com/food if you want to check that out.

Bjork Ostrom: And as a last note here, we’re halfway through this 25 forever deal. So, when I say you can think of hiring Clariti at $25 a month as a little team member, who’s in the background working for you, that deal’s not going to last forever. We’re just wanting to get to our first 500 users as we’re in the early stages with this, you’ll still get a lot of value out of it. But the great thing is, as the value within Clariti increases, as we build out more features, as we build out more functionality, you will be locked in at that $25 price as a thank you for signing up early, for being somebody who’s using the tool early on, giving us feedback, but also finding a lot of value out of it.

Bjork Ostrom: We’ve actually had two people this week, it was last week actually, that followed up and one person said, “I LOVE,” it was all L-O-V-E capital, “This service,” and somebody else said the same thing in the Slack channel, which you can join and be a part of that after you sign up for Clariti to see how other people are using it, and the questions that come up and offer any insider feedback along the way. So, thank you to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Bjork Ostrom: Hello, hello. This is Bjork. You are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast and today’s interview is with Clara Kapelembe Bwali, and she has a company called Black Garlic. She’s going to be sharing her story, her entrepreneurial journey and things that she’s learned along the way. Specifically, she’s going to be talking about what it was like to open kind of a catering business, a food stand, essentially making food for people and selling that to them and having some success with that, but then moving and having to kind of uproot a business when she had to uproot her location and eventually stumbling into the world of photography and figuring out how to capture incredibly compelling pictures and product photos for companies, food companies. And she’s going to be talking about her passion for that, why that was something that she really was compelled to do and how she went about doing that and connecting with brands and building her business.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s a really fun interview. And I think that it’ll take a lot out of it, not only the inspiration from Clara’s sharing her story, but also some tips and tricks along the way of things that she’s learned and some of the mindset components that she has as a business owner and somebody really pursuing not only the success of a business, which would be the financial side, but also pursuing impact and purpose and how that’s a major driver for what she does. So, it’s going to be a great interview. So, let’s go ahead and jump in. Clara, welcome to the podcast.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Hi, how are you?

Bjork Ostrom: Good. Doing great. This is our first-ever podcast with a Zambian guest. So, we should have shipped you out like a medallion or award, or kind of like the-

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: A T-shirt or something.

Bjork Ostrom: … Olympics, a T-shirt. Yeah, exactly. But it’s really fun. It’s one of the things about the internet that’s so awesome, that I can be sitting here in Minnesota, you can be sitting there in Zambia, and we can have a conversation in relatively real-time. There’s not much of a delay. It’s the internet. It’s awesome. And speaking of the internet, you have a business and you have built that business and you focus on food photography and food styling. So, tell me about your story. I know that when you first started, the business name has evolved a little bit as well, and I really love the heart of it from what I understand, which sounds like really giving an opportunity for Zambian brands to have good photography. Is that kind of the heart of what you’re doing? Tell us a little bit about it.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Yes. Okay. So, my business, well, the hobby, I would like to call it a hobby, started in 2016. I really didn’t think much of it. I was just a new wife trying to do recipes. Then, I started a Facebook group where I could share some of my recipes on the internet. Then, fast forward from that, I started selling some of my food, people would come through because we were currently living in South Africa by then. So, our place was near my university. So, it was students and people from different countries. So, I started selling some of my foods like lunchbox weekly packages for students. So, I did that for a year and then come 2018, we moved back to Zambia. So, when I came to Zambia, it was a bit of a different environment, I had to readjust. So, I started selling cakes, catering for weddings and a bit of everything in food.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. When you say it was a different environment, was it like different food environment or just different in terms of like what you’re selling in the business? What was different about it?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Okay. Different in the sense that I had been away for school for maybe five years. So, it’s coming back and finding people that are already doing the business. I’m just trying to find my feet and readjust into the business world. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. My guess is, previously, when you’re at school, you had clients, people who would come, you started to develop a rhythm. You knew, “Hey, this week, I can expect to sell this much. This will be a slower week. This will be a faster week.” And when you change locations, suddenly clients are maybe different, maybe the foods you’re making are different. Holiday schedule maybe looks a little bit different. Is that kind of what you were adjusting to when you had to change locations?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Yes. And also just finding new clientele. I mean, I was moving from one country to another country. The people here already had their people who they make cakes from, who they do catering with. So, I had to start finding new clientele from scratch.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. How did you do that?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Social media. So, I’ll just go out on Facebook, on my WhatsApp, on my Instagram, just advertise everything that I was selling or the menu for the week and slowly but surely I got my own clientele. So, fast forward to that, I think I did that for a year. And then I got bored.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. What about it was boring?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Because it felt like every next person was doing the same thing I was doing. Everyone was baking. Everyone was cooking for weddings. Then, it just got saturated. And I felt like I was moving in circles and not growing. So, I decided to sit and think, “What is it that I can do that’s different that everyone is not doing?” So, for the longest of time, I always had a thing for pretty pictures, well-presented food, just pretty food has always been my thing. So, I sat and thought, in Zambia, most businesses, most food businesses would either, A, hire a photographer from another country to take pictures of their food and style.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, so in that case, somebody’s flying in, they’re coming in for a day, they’re not Zambian. So, maybe they don’t know the aesthetics in the same way. Yeah.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Yes. Or they’ll buy stock images and then just slot in their product. And for me, that really didn’t sit well with me because, A, that’s not their picture, two, they didn’t use their product. So, it felt fake for lack of a better word.

Bjork Ostrom: Either way probably, if you’re flying somebody in who they might do good photos and be able to capture what they have, but maybe not in the exact way that you’d want to, maybe stylistically things a little different, or if you’re doing stock photos, and Photoshopping in a picture of a sauce. It’s like, “Ah, the photo kind of looks good, but also it doesn’t, it’s not real technically.”

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Exactly. So, from there, that’s how Black Garlic was born. I said, “You know what, this whole using stock images and the internet must come to an end. We should be able to use Zambian photographers, Zambian food bloggers, and just use local people.” So, that’s how I started. I started pitching myself to companies, “Hey, listen, this is my idea. Can we try?” It was a bit hard, but when I got my first yes, the yeses started coming.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So often I feel like that’s what it takes. And I think so often people wait or people quit before that first yes. It’s hard, you’re grinding, you feel like it’s not working, nobody says yes. And it’s like, maybe this isn’t the right thing. But if you continue with it after you get that first yes. A lot of times it becomes easier. It sounds like that was the case for you. Why do you think it was easier after that first yes?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: I had something to show.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Because essentially you had your first-

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Yes, I had my first-

Bjork Ostrom: … portfolio feature. Yeah.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Yes. So, my very first client was one of Zambia’s largest fish supplying companies. So, they supply bream fish from Lake Kariba countrywide. So, it’s a brand that’s in every province in Zambia. When you think of that name, it’s everywhere. So, at least it was a big name. So, at least people would take me seriously from working with that fish company. And then yes, I started pushing. In the beginning, obviously, you’d get clients that you would have to do a battle for products and you do the photography, but I kept building my portfolio just like that. Keep trying, keep pitching. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: What does that look like in those early stages? If you’re to look at it, let’s say, in that first stage, where you’re in the haven’t gotten to your first yes stage, can you talk about your mindset, how you were approaching brands, even how you were positioning yourself? Because it sounds like not only were you trying to sell yourself, but also you were trying to sell an idea that maybe wasn’t in place, which is you need to have somebody from Zambia capturing Zambian products. So, you’re selling on the idea of that as well. What was that like?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Okay. So, one thing I said to myself, I said, “Listen, Clara, you know what you want to do and only you can do it. So, sound like you know what you’re saying.” Even though I had no idea. I had no idea, but I had to write my proposals in such a way that I sounded like a professional, like I knew what I was talking about, even though I had zero idea, I just had a concept, but I had to lay down in such a way that when I present that proposal, when I walk into that meeting, I walk in with confidence and just sell my idea.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. What was it that gave you confidence? If what you had to do in those meetings and in those interactions was to be confident in yourself, be confident in the idea, even though maybe internally, it sounds like internally, maybe not at 100% confidence, but externally you wanted to present that, that’s a hard thing to do. So, what would your advice be for people who maybe aren’t confident, but they need to inspire confidence within themselves or at the very least kind of fake it until you make it?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: So, for me, what really had me going is looking at all the food bloggers around the world, all the food photographers, and that kept me going. I said to myself, “I’m sure these people were at a place where I’m at now. And they’ve pushed and they’ve worked. And they are where they are now.” So, for me, just looking at work from good photographers all over the world, food bloggers, I said, “My idea, it’s not so farfetched. It’s something that has been done before. I’m not pitching an idea that’s totally new. All I have to do is be consistent. Pitch my idea, make it make sense. And just get that…” I was only praying for just that first yes. I knew once I got that first yes, it would open doors for me everywhere. Yeah. So, when I got the first yes, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. When you got the first yes, what was that last thought?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Yeah. So, I was saying, when I got of the first yes, it was easier for me to talk to clients to pitch my idea, because at least now I had something to show for it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That makes sense. One of the things I love that you shared and I think is worth talking about and the pointing out is that you were able to see people who had done something comparable to what you wanted to do. Maybe they’re a food stylist or food photographer. And the point that they at one point were where you are now, I think that’s really important for people to remember and sometimes we lose that. It doesn’t mean they had all the same variables or all the considerations. We all have a different equation that makes up our life, but we all start at the same point, which is the beginning. And for some, it’s easier because you have, as an example, if you start a business, when you have kids, it’s probably going to feel different than if you start a business when you don’t have kids, that’s a variable. But those two people are starting the business at the same time.

Bjork Ostrom: And to know this has been done before and a huge part of it in what you said, which I love so much, is consistency and showing up and continuing to do the work. So, in that stage, what did the work look like for you? What were the things that you were doing on a day-to-day basis? Were you emailing brands? Were you crafting your pitch? Were you working on the proposal? Were you practicing your food photography? What did it look like kind of pre-revenue in your business?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Okay. So, remember I told you prior I had an existing business?

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: I had a business name already. Yes. So, I had to clean up. By clean up I mean deleting all the pictures, rebranding myself, rebranding how I do things to look like the professional that I wanted to be considered as. So, all the not pretty looking pictures, I had to change my logo, I had to change the feel of my business. So, what I had to do pretty much was I ghosted myself from the business. So, there was no Clara… Some people didn’t even know who I was.

Bjork Ostrom: Uh-huh (affirmative). Essentially you made yourself look like, and you were, you pivoted into kind of an agency.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: And the business before was the catering business, so you were making food, preparing food. That was a business that you had, you had some traction there. But you said, “You know what, I’m getting bored of this. I want to shift. It’s getting a little bit saturated. I see an area of opportunity within food photography and food styling for Zambian brands. I’m going to pivot into that.” And that’s when Black Garlic came about. Is that right? That general story.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: So, pretty much I was learning how to take pictures. I was learning how to write proposals. I was pretty much learning on the job. It was me and YouTube, me and videos online. Just practicing.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. What were the places you went that were most helpful? Were there she channels or accounts or videos or is it just like watching everything when you search food photography, and then watching all of that content?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: You know how sometimes when you go to YouTube, you watch one or two videos, but there’s that person that speaks to you that you feel very comfortable with? I think Bite Shot. She’s amazing.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah. I think we have an upcoming interview.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: She’s amazing.

Bjork Ostrom: And have had some conversations as well on the podcast. So, that was a channel that you liked and appreciated?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Was there anything that was… And that’s Joanie Simon. She has a book out as well that’s really good.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Yes. Joanie Simon. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Was there anything that you felt like was an unlock? I use that term a decent amount on the podcast, but just this idea of like, I think in life or in business or in skills, you’re at a plateau for a little bit, and then you kind of unlock a new thing, something you learn. Maybe it’s a mindset. Maybe it’s a opportunity. Were there any unlocks along the way from an education perspective around learning food photography and food styling?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: So, obviously, in the beginning, when you watch all these videos, they have gear, they have all these expensive cameras, they have props. In the beginning, I wanted to be exactly like them. But when I sat and said, “Madam, listen, you are a beginner. You need to start from somewhere. And you can use what you have in the house. You don’t need an expensive camera. You don’t need a million and one plates. You just need to work with what you have.”

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: The moment I changed my mindset, I didn’t have expensive lighting, all I had was natural lighting and a phone. And I started.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes, that’s awesome.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: The moment I said, “Start and you grow as you go.” Everything changed.

Bjork Ostrom: This is going to be worth the price of admission for some people listening. And it’s that concept right there that you shared. And I think about this a lot, there’s maybe a tweet from somebody that I saw really similar to what you were saying, which is, and there’s going to be some people who need to hear this, listening to the podcast. It’s, “Do then learn, not learn then do.” And obviously there’s some industries where that doesn’t apply. Surgery, flying an airplane. Right?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Obviously.

Bjork Ostrom: But in our world… Yeah. In our world, in the creative world, people can get stuck in learn and they don’t do. But what the key and what I hear you hinting at a little bit is the best way to learn is to actually do it. And the best way to do it is to start today. And for you, you were starting with the phone, the camera you had on your phone, and the light from the sun. Everybody, almost everybody, my guess is everybody listening to this, because it’s got to be on a phone or a computer, has the ability to do that.

Bjork Ostrom: So, you start with what you have, and they talk about that with photography all the time, how that’s so important. What did the next step out of that look like? As you continue to unlock certain things, do you say, “Great, I’m going to now book a… When I get my first yes, when I book a deal, I’m going to use some of that revenue to buy artificial lighting.” Or what did the early stages of business growth start to look like once you committed to moving forward with what you have?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: So, I think the biggest step was when I landed a deal with a chicken company. So, they wanted me to do content for their calendar, like a whole calendar. Can you imagine?

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So, they’re releasing a printed calendar and they want you to document the photography for it. Got it.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Yes. With their products. And then they also needed me to do videos, like short two-minute videos of food. So, at least, I got a good pay from that. So, I said, “With this money, I’m going to buy some lighting, some props, some backgrounds and some…” Yeah, just little things to make my work more from basic to the next level. So, I’ve always been that person that, at the beginning of the year, whether big or small, I write down my goals. So, by the end of the year, I want to buy a new phone, I want to buy a camera. I want to buy this brand of toaster, for example, I just write it down. So, as a year goes by and as the revenue comes in, I make sure I’m ticking off the boxes to help my business grow.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s one of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about with the work that we do in our businesses is just being strategic about investing back into the business. And I don’t know Zambian tax law. And I barely know US tax law. But have people who do. But my assumption, I think, tax law kind of works like this in general, or does Zambia work in a way where you have a business expense and that goes against business revenue. So, you can be strategic in a way that if you didn’t have a business, you buy a phone and it’s like you’re buying a phone. But when you have a business, it’s a business expense. My guess is that generally how it works within Zambia? I would guess.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Yes. Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So, idea being that you kind of have this separate category. So, when they talk about investing back into your business, one of the things that’s kind of strategic about it, and for anybody listening you can think about this is like you have these expenses for you, you talk about the phone and that can become an expense within the business. So, you’re not paying taxes on that. So, that’s a strategic thing to say, “I think this money is better spent within the business.” And obviously it depends on if you… For some people, might not have the ability you need to say like, “Hey, I have this revenue. I’m going to use that for, whatever, mortgage payment or car payment or whatever it is.” But if it’s disposable income and you’re putting that back into the business and you can grow the business faster and be more strategic about how you’re growing and scaling that.

Bjork Ostrom: So, when you look ahead, what are some of those, you mentioned some of them, some of the goals that you have, but I’d be curious also to know, now that you’re at a point where you do have that portfolio, you go to Black Garlic, blackgarlic.digital, and you can see some of those clients, you have that portfolio, you’re building that out. What do you see as you think about the future of the business? And I talk a lot about hopes and dreams, but what are your hopes and dreams for Black Garlic as you look a year or two, three years out as you continue to build this?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Honestly, looking forward, I want Black Garlic to be a household name. So, a household name in Zambia and internationally, when somebody thinks of a Zambian recipe, they think of Black Garlic. I want to be that person that pushes my country’s cuisine to the world. Because I’m sure, before me, did you know about Zambia?

Bjork Ostrom: No. I mean, from the research for the podcast, yeah.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Yeah. So, you pretty much didn’t know, but you probably heard about Nigeria. Yeah?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Jollof rice.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, I knew about Zambia the country, but didn’t know about Zambia in terms of like if you were to quiz me on facts about Zambia, I’d be like, I wouldn’t any of them. Familiar with it as a country. But especially from a cuisine. I was like, “Oh, I wonder if there’s any Zambian restaurants in Minneapolis, St. Paul area.” That to me was kind of a new thought, it’s not something that I’d ever thought of or looked up or whatever it might be. So, what does that look like? How do you do that? What does that look like? How do you move that forward? I mean, it seems like first step is helping the existing brands solidify their brand and their voice and helping them do better. But what does it look like for the actual brand of Black Garlic to develop and to become a known entity?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: I would like to… It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of hard work. But I’m not giving up. So, I share my recipes with magazines that are not only from Zambia, American ones, from the UK. Just name it. So, the more recipes are out there or the more people talk about me or the more interviews I get, the more the recipes or the more Zambia is known. So, like I was saying, I think we probably just, as a country, haven’t been as loud about our food. I know Nigerians. Nigeria, for example, they’ll go to the UK and they’ll open a Nigerian restaurant, for example. I’m sure you’ve heard of jollof rice, and everything else, because they are loud about their cuisine.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: So, for me, I want to be loud about our Zambian food. So, it starts by recipes, by interviews, by proudly sharing Zambian content, so that the more people see it, the more aware they are of Zambia, because they’re sitting at home and saying, “Oh, we have nice food.” Oh yeah. And then what? So, for me, I know I have a lot of work and I’m not giving up, I’ll push, push and push.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. This podcast can be an opportunity for that. I’m curious to know, for anybody who’s like, “Cool, love that idea. Where did they start?” What would be some, for the Ostrom family, Lindsay and Bjork and their kids, hanging out in the suburbs of Minnesota, where Zambian some recipes that you’d say, “Hey, check these out. Look at these three as a good place to start.”

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Okay. So, you know how we share cuisines among countries? But one thing that’s really unique to Zambia, we call it African polony. It’s called chikanda. It’s from where? It’s from a tuber, I think, is it an… I don’t know how to pronounce that? Is it an Orchid? O-R-C-H-I-D, how do you say that?

Bjork Ostrom: Orchid?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Yes. That.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Yes. So, it’s a type of tuber that you pound and you mix with groundnuts, and then when you’re done, it has a consistency of polony. Do you know polony?

Bjork Ostrom: I don’t, but most food people probably do.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Like a salami of some sort.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, sure.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Like a thick salami, like sausage of some sort.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s great. And I pulled up, there’s actually a Zambiankitchen.com and there’s a recipe here for that. So, that would be uniquely Zambian.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Yes. And then we also have lumanda, you can search for lumanda, L-U-M-A-N-D-A. lumanda.

Bjork Ostrom: And those would be two good starting points for anybody who’s like, “Hey, I would be interested.” And then Zambian Kitchen comes up again. So, whoever this person is, they have the corner on all Zambian recipes. Looks like her name is Lydia. So, from an ingredients perspective, you maybe wouldn’t know, but I’d be curious to… If the ingredients of chikanda would be available, that would maybe be one, I’m sure online too, you could find it.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Yes. I’m sure you’d find some online. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And buy it online. So, we’ll link to those in the show notes for anybody who would want to venture out and they can take you, if they attempt-

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: They try.

Bjork Ostrom: … to make some of that. So, yeah, if they try, they’ll document it. You can give them some feedback on the photography. So, what I see you talking about, it’s kind of twofold. One is, you have your business and you’re growing this business and, businesses, in order to be foundationally strong, have to be revenue-producing. In order for it to be not a hobby, but a career, you are making money from it. But it’s also, in some ways, it sounds like a campaign for the country of Zambia. You want Zambian food to be known and to share that. And I think it’s business at its best, where you have a really strong mission and a vision. And along the way, you have the ability to support that through revenue and dollars coming in.

Bjork Ostrom: So, kind of a one-two combination, it’s both campaign around a specific thing, mission, vision, and revenue to support that. Simon Sinek says, “Money is the gas that,” he says it better than this, but it’s like, “The gas for the business vehicle. And the purpose of a business is to get somewhere.” And what I think is really cool with what you’re sharing is you’re talking about trying to get somewhere. It’s not like you’re just trying to accumulate a bunch of gas. But you’re using gas to power this vehicle. So, what does that look like to balance those two things for you? Because you need to be focused on thinking about, “Hey, how do I make money from a business perspective?” But also you are thinking about the mission and the vision. And what does it look like for you as you overlap those and trying to do both of those things at the same time?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: I think one thing is certain, when you can’t draw a line between your mission… When you have a general passion for both, it kind of helps you do two things at the same time.

Bjork Ostrom: For both revenue and mission, vision, like business-

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: And passion.

Bjork Ostrom: … Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: So, I’ll give you an example. So, let’s say, for instance, in a month I would probably have two clients, but I don’t only post content when I’m getting paid for it. Trust me, I will show up every week, at least three or four times, whether the content is paid for or not.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: So, when I put out content for a business and I’m obviously getting paid, I also take time to just create recipes. I share the recipes for free. So, I get people in my inbox asking me how to make this and just pretty much connecting and have no problem with that, because I really, really love what I do. So, I’m getting paid, but I’m also helping and growing at the same time. Yeah. So, I don’t only put out content if it’s paid for, I also put out content to teach, to share with other people. So, that helps me move at the same pace the business and the passion.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s great. Idea being that even in the season, let’s say you have a week or two weeks, where you’re not doing a shoot where you’re paid for it, or it’s sponsored or where a brand is hiring you to come and document stuff. You’re still publishing content around Zambian food and recipes with the mission of that getting exposure, not with the mission necessarily of add revenue or increasing followers for sponsor content. It’s like, “Hey, the reason I’m doing this is because I want people to know about this and I can be supported along the way by the fact that I get revenue from these businesses when I’m working with them to document their brands and to work with them.” Which is really cool and inspiring.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think your point about both and is such an important thing to point out. And what I’ve seen within this world is sometimes people can get into it and the only thing they want to do is make money. And they’re like, “Oh, cool. I heard somebody started a food photography business and they made a bunch of money doing it. I want to do that.” Or, “I heard somebody started a food blog and you can create passive income from it. I want to do that.” And then you’re like, “Wow, this is a lot of work and I don’t like it.” And then you burn out. Or on the other side, somebody’s like, “I love doing this. It’s perfect. It’s awesome. It’s a great fit for what I do, but there isn’t the opportunity to create revenue from it.” And in that case, it’s in the category of hobby.

Bjork Ostrom: And to your point, there’s a season for that, where it is considered a hobby. You talked about that earlier. When you are building it and getting traction in the early stages. And sometimes it might stay that way, it might always be a hobby. But a lot of times people want to switch that over into something that is revenue-producing. That is more of a business. And like you said, the ideal is when those overlap. It’s your passion, it’s your interest. It’s your mission. It’s your vision. And you’re able to figure out a way to create income from that, which is cool to hear you doing that.

Bjork Ostrom: So, how about for people who they would look at you and they’d say, “I want to start doing that. I want to do a similar thing to what Clara is doing.” And you had said this earlier, the great thing is everybody starts in the same place. So, if you were to go back and you were to start over, what would you say to somebody who’s at that stage to maybe accelerate, to make traction faster? What would your advice be for somebody who’s in the beginning stages?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: I think after the two years, one thing I would say for sure is think like a professional. One thing, I think there’s this… Listen, businesses are different, but if I was a business and I was trying to hire out somebody to do work for me, I’d expect them to be professional as they could be. So, on your page, for example, if it’s strictly a food blog, I don’t expect you mixing it with a night at the club. You know what I mean?

Bjork Ostrom: Not compatible, right.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Yes. So, sometimes you need to carry yourself a certain way to be taken seriously, for lack of a better word. And then, there’s also this, I used to call it this insanity that happens when you’re starting. So, the picture is not so great. The lighting is off. It’s messy. But you feel like if I don’t post, I won’t grow. Think through your content. You’re better off posting once a week. The picture is amazing. People will see it for a week and they’ll talk about it. Don’t feel the need to constantly post below par. So, when you post, this might sound like draining or toxic, but you should always aim that your next post should be better than the previous post.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Not so much, but you know what I mean? Like you kind of need to maintain a standard. I can’t post a great photo today. And then the next one is dark and people can hardly see, and then they’re asking, “Is it chicken? Is it fish?” People should look and they know, “Okay, this is chicken.” You know what I mean?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, finish that thought and then I had a follow-up on it. Was there something else?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Yeah. So, I just wanted to say, from the beginning, I know everyone is a beginner, but carry yourself like a professional.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s awesome.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: That makes sense.

Bjork Ostrom: I heard an investor talk about this and he was talking about how he was an angel investor, so early-stage companies, companies that haven’t had any investment yet. So, he kind of has to have… There isn’t a lot of traction, there isn’t a lot of revenue he can look at. So, you kind of have to develop almost like poker instincts around if somebody’s going to be successful or not. And one of the things that he talked about was, he didn’t use these words, but it was kind of this idea of how you do anything is how you do everything. And he talked about it specifically in terms of how somebody would email him. What did it look like if somebody was… How did they craft their email? Was it formatted? Did they have any spelling errors in it? Did they follow up?

Bjork Ostrom: So, what I hear you saying is like, you need to be professional in what you’re doing, because that makes an impact and that can come across in emails. It can come across in how you’re showing up to the meeting that you have, what it looks like when you jump on the Zoom call. And when we’re interacting with the brand, everything that we do in that interaction is a clue to them in regards to how professional we’ll be. How quickly do we respond? How much detail do we have in it? How helpful are we? I think sometimes people think of the pitch as the only thing that matters, but it really is a small slice of the pie, which is the cumulative interaction that you’re having with an individual.

Bjork Ostrom: I see that as really true, I was emailing, just today, the COO of a company, he’s since left the company. But it was maybe like a $25 million company. This really big, in my world, a really big company. The email that he crafted was like really well-written. It had bullet points in it. It was really thoughtful. And I was like, “Oh, this is just how you operate in the world.” And that’s what I hear you saying. The other thing that I think is awesome, and it reflects something that we talk a lot about, it’s actually the name of our parent company, which is TinyBit, and it’s all about showing up and getting a tiny bit better every day forever.

Bjork Ostrom: What you said is a reflection of that, where it’s not how do you get up and ship a piece of content every day, regardless of the quality, it’s no, how do you get up and try and make things a little bit better than it was the day before. And don’t feel like you just need to push stuff out into the world if it’s not awesome and if it’s not helpful. I think that’s a really important reminder for us, where sometimes we are like, “It’s Tuesday, I got to release a video,” or whatever it might be. But to think really strategically about the quality of the content, I think it’s just a really great reminder as well. So, what do you find to be most helpful to continually improve? How do you do that and where do you go to help yourself continually get better?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: So, I have an amazing support system. My husband, my mom, my friends, and then through Black Garlic, I have met some amazing people. I’ve built a tribe of people. I think after me, you need to interview them.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Please check for Wood Kitchen.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Wood Kitchen. Yes. It’s a husband and wife duo. They’re also food bloggers and amazing. They got interviewed by Facebook even.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. Wood like W-O-O-D.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: And Kitchen Zambia.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Yeah. And I see some videos here right at the top that pulled up. So what is that? How have you done that? Because I think some people are like, “Gosh, I would really love to have like people who get it, friends.” Even just this morning, I was at a local meetup here and it was called women’s… It was like a women’s business circle, I think, is what the name was. And it was like, “Oh my gosh, awesome, super helpful for me.” I learned a ton of stuff. They’re like, “Hey, can you come and talk about, they asked about Clariti specifically, which is a tool that we’ve been working on within TinyBit.

Bjork Ostrom: But I came and I was like, “Whoa, I have some things that I need to take action on.” And even though the idea was like, “Hey, Bjork, can you come and talk about this thing?” From that group, I learned a lot in the hour that I was hanging out with them. So, there’s real value in that, but I think sometimes people struggle to figure out, “How do I make those connections and how do I get those people in my life?” Obviously, your family is your family, but outside of that, how did you make those connections?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: It’s important, if you want people to love you or if you want genuine people, I think it’s important that you’re also a genuine human being, if that makes sense. So, let’s say, for instance, a person like Bite Shot, right? She’s amazing. And if it had to be a situation that I want to connect with her, it would be unfair on my part where I just want to take, take, take, take from her. So, let’s say, for instance, I don’t know, she posts that she’s not feeling well, for example. I should at least be able to ask, “How are you doing? How are you feeling?” Rather than, “Which camera should I buy?” Just taking, taking, taking. Yes.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: So, when you’re a genuine person, I think you can build genuine relationships with other people. But the mistake we make, most of us, when we find people that are successful or they’ve been ahead before us, I think we tend to believe, or we tend to act like they’re not human, if that makes sense.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: So, we always want to take, take, take without actually trying to build a relationship with them. So, I think build a relationship, then everything else you then partner, you then collaborate. Like for The Wood Kitchen, we had one of Zambia’s very first cooking master classes. So, we had 20 people, it was sponsored. We had goody bags. It was at amazing. Unbelievable. So, through the internet, we’ve been able to build a friendship and now we are partnering in these cooking classes, for example. So, I think it’s very important as you try to build internet friendships, internet collaborations, be a nice person. Be a nice person.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s a really good reminder.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: I can’t stress this enough. Oh yes. Just be a nice person. You can’t expect to be giving all the time, giving your own away… Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: I think sometimes we forget. It’s like we throw out these things that we’ve learned on the school playground growing up, like how to be a good friend. Then, when you introduce the internet, we sometimes can forget about that and it’s like, hey, the best way to be a good friend is to not be a friend who’s always asking for stuff. But to be a friend who reaches out when it’s your friend’s birthday, or like you said, if somebody’s not feeling well, to ask how they’re doing, to check in on them.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Yes. Ask, “How you’re doing?”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. To be a friend to give and to not even necessarily have expectations from that. When I think of the groups that I’ve been a part of, of creators or people doing similar things, a lot of times it comes from me saying like, “Hey, can we all gather around and do lunch together once every couple months?” Pre-COVID, I had a group of three friends who kind of had similar businesses, online businesses, and we’d meet up. The ask from it wasn’t like, “Will you do this thing?” But it was more like, “Hey, can we hang out?” And essentially be friends who are doing similar things together and facilitating that. That’s the other piece. I think sometimes people think about, “How do I get to be a part of this group?”

Bjork Ostrom: And I think oftentimes it’s you facilitate it. That’s the best way to create one of those groups is for you to create it as opposed to try to break into one of them. And pulled up Wood Kitchen here, we’ll link to them as well in the show notes. Cool to hear that you did a collaboration with them. So, as we wind down the interview, obviously, people can follow along with you, blackgarlic.digital, and there’s some links to social there as well on the site. But I’m curious to know, if you had a conversation with yourself, if you sat down in 2016, as you’re winding down your first business and starting this one up, what would be the advice that you’d give to yourself if you were able to go back in time and have a conversation with yourself?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: I think the mistake that I made in the beginning was trying to be everything. So, I wanted to be a baker. I wanted to be a cook. I wanted to be a food blogger. I wanted to be a food stylist. I wanted to be so many things. So, I didn’t mention, even as I rebranded Black Garlic, I was still taking some orders, like a bit of catering. So, I think a year ago I made a decision to stop completely, because it was taking too much of me. Catering is different. And then food photography and blogging is also different. So, if I could advise myself, do one thing and be good at it. You can’t be everything.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s awesome. And I think it’s hard, because a lot of times we think that other people are everything. We look at somebody else and what they’re doing, and we’re like, “Oh my gosh, they’re doing it all.” And so often they’re not. Sometimes I think about that even with like… So, our site, Pinch of Yum, a food and recipe website, Lindsay does a lot of the content for that. But I think sometimes people look at that, they think, “Oh, you guys are doing all of these different things.” But it’s comparing somebody who’s just starting with us and we’ve been doing it for 11 years. So, it’s like, we have a team and the reason we can do video with every post is because we have a full-time videographer, Emily, who’s awesome and does videos for us.

Bjork Ostrom: So, I hear people talk about that too, with somebody just out of college, graduating university and saying like, “Hey, I want to be where my parents are.” And it’s like, “Well, they’ve been doing this for 30 years and they’re in different place.”

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: I think sometimes we can do that in this world as well. And focus being such an important thing, love that. I think that’s really important and a great takeaway. So, blackgarlic.digital, where are the other places that people can follow along with you, Clara, and stay in the loop, not only on your photography and the things that you’re doing, but also to spread the good word about Zambia and all the good things that it has to offer for the world?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Okay. They can follow me on Instagram. My Instagram is BlackGarlicZambia. My Facebook is Black Garlic and my Twitter is also Black Garlic. And my TikTok is Black Garlic Zambia. I think I started TikTok a month ago. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Do you have a favorite platform?

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Instagram.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay, good. Yeah, Pinch of Yum is just starting to get into TikTok. And I sent my friends, who are heavy TikTok users, the other day. I was like, “This is a very strange place. And I don’t know. I feel like it’s walking into a party and I feel like I’m wearing a panda suit.” Everybody’s like, “What are you doing here? You don’t fit in.” I don’t know how to act.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: One thing I love about TikTok is the fact that you can be yourself. You don’t have to be too serious on TikTok. That’s why I love it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah. It’s not-

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Especially Instagram of three, four, five years ago, super polished, beautiful images, which is a good thing. But yeah, TikTok feels a little bit more of you put on your comfortable pants after you get home from work kind of feel.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Yes. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Which is great. Yeah. I love that. Clara, thanks so much for coming on the podcast, it was really great to talk to you and so fun to learn more about your story and shine a light not only on your story, but also the wonderful country and people of Zambia. Thanks.

Clara Kapelembe Bwali: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been amazing.

Alexa Peduzzi: Hi, hi, Alexa here, from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the podcast, and if you want to go even deeper into learning how to monetize, grow your food blog, your food business, we highly suggest you check out our Food Blogger Pro membership at foodbloggerpro.com/join. It’s there that we share all of our course content about monetizing, photography, video and everything that food creators need to know in order to move the needle on their business.

Alexa Peduzzi: We also hold live Q&A’s every single month, as well as study halls, where we get a chance to break into small breakout groups, and connect with each other in a really intentional way, talking about specific topics like creating recipes, keyword research, and more. It is just one of the most positive places on the internet, in my opinion. We have a ton of testimonials from some of our members. We’ve helped over 10,000 bloggers do what they want to do better. And that just feels so good.

Alexa Peduzzi: So, this testimonial from Tammy from Organize Yourself Skinny says, “This month, after 12 years working full-time in higher education, I resigned from my position to become a full-time professional blogger. This was a decision I did not take lightly, but in the last seven months I made more money blogging than I made in my real job. And I decided it was time to take the leap. I strongly believe that because of the knowledge you share within your income reports and also on Food Blogger Pro that I was able to take my blog to a professional level. I have been and continue to be inspired, motivated, and educated by the information you so selflessly and graciously share with all of us.” Thanks for that awesome testimonial, Tammy.

Alexa Peduzzi: We just so appreciate learning about your journeys and being able to just be a small part in helping you get to where you want to go. So, if you’re interested in becoming a Food Blogger Pro member and getting access to all of the content we currently have for our members, which is a lot, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com/join to learn a little bit more and get signed up there if you’re interested, but otherwise we’ll see you here next week on the podcast. And until then, make it a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is actually sponsored by our sister site, Clariti. I’ve talked about Clariti before on the podcast as a tool that we use, so it’s just come up naturally, but also as an official sponsor, as an official advertiser on the podcast. The reason that we’re advertising on the podcast is because it is a perfect fit for the people who listen to this podcast, people who are thinking about how they can optimize and improve their existing content. That’s why we built Clariti. It really came out of this need for us, as we were working on Pinch of Yum, to have a tool that would facilitate our projects and the work that we needed to do on posts in a way that we were doing but with a giant and spreadsheet.

Bjork Ostrom: We created this tool called Clariti. It’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I, so it’s Clariti with an I. The simple premise of Clariti is to build something that will allow you or to have an… It’s a software app that will allow you to look at your content at a high level, and you can filter and organize and understand your content, and then you can build projects around the things that you need to do. What does that look like? How does that practically work? I can give you some specific examples of what Pinch of Yum is doing right now. One of the projects that we have is adding internal links to posts. The reason why that’s important is because you want to make sure that the content that you have on your website, on your blog, links to other places on your site.

Bjork Ostrom: Now, of course, you want it to be relevant content, content that makes sense to link to. But if you don’t have any internal links on a post, that potentially could be an area for you to optimize. It could be something for you to look at and to add internal links. For Pinch of Yum, what we did using Clariti is we filtered and we said, show us all of the content that doesn’t have any internal links, or in your case, you could say maybe just one internal link. You might want to add two, three internal links to that post, so you could filter using Clariti. And then you could take all of that and add it to a project called add internal links.

Bjork Ostrom: Another project that we’re doing is simply adding alt text to images that don’t have alt text. We have 772 different posts on Pinch of Yum that have an image that is missing alt text in some way, so we’ve filtered using Clariti and we said, show me all of the posts that have at least one image with alt text missing. And then we took all of those posts. Using Clariti, it takes 30 seconds, we said, create a project where we are going to look at these pieces of content and find those images and add alt text to those. There’s lots of different things that Clariti can do. We’re still early stages with it. Because of that, we’re offering what we’re calling 25 Forever campaign.

Bjork Ostrom: We’re allowing the first 500 users who sign up for Clariti to get their plan, to get a subscription to Clariti for $25 a month Forever. We’re not going to raise that. Even down the line when Clariti becomes more full-featured, and it’s already pretty powerful with the things that you can do. But even when it becomes more full-featured and we increase the pricing, maybe we change it based on how many page views you have or how many posts your site has, whatever it might be, anybody who signs up in this early stage will continue to get that $25 a month Forever plan. If you’re interested in doing that and getting that deal, you can go to clariti.com/food.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food, and that will bring you to a page where you can sign up and we’ll follow up with you once you’ve signed up expressing your interest. We’ll talk through how you can do it, how you can sign up, and really what comes with a Clariti subscription. Thanks to Clariti and the Clariti team for sponsoring the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We have… It’s kind of a tight family here with the TinyBit companies, but it is an official sponsorship. We want to thank the Clariti team for sponsoring the Food Blogger Pro podcast and for building an incredible tool that we’ve been able to use across the TinyBit brands. You can check that out by going to clariti.com/food, and thanks to Clariti for sponsoring the podcast.

Bjork Ostrom: Hello. Hello. This is Bjork. If you’re listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast, really excited to share this interview with you today with Alisha Cohen from LISH Creative. She also has a course called Slay the Flatlay, and she has a lot of experience in the things that we want to be good at. We want to be good at creative media. We want to be good at growing a social media following. We want to be good at working with brands and businesses. Alisha has done all of those things in many different capacities, and she’s going to be talking about that, sharing her journey as, not only a creator and a creative, but also as a business owner and the things that she has learned along the way.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m going to keep the intro as short as possible because I want to jump into it and make sure that we get as much time with Alisha as possible. But I did want to share one last thing. We are actually hiring for, speaking of creative and creativity, a content specialist at Food Blogger Pro. Maybe you’re in the stage of your journey where you still want or need a full-time job, or in this case, it would be part-time. It’s 20 hours a week, but you want your side hustle and you also want another hustle, but maybe you want that hustle to be in a space that is aligned and overlaps with your interests.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s a really good chance that this job could be that. You can find out by going to foodbloggerpro.com/job, and you’ll see the listing there for the content specialist. Essentially this person is somebody who should be really good at understanding the things that we talk about, social media, WordPress, the ins and outs of the business of publishing, blogging and social media, and also a talented writer. The other thing that you would have the potential to do that would be great would be creating content for Food Blogger Pro. That could be written content, as I talked about, but also potentially video content.

Bjork Ostrom: So, pressing record on your screen and using a screen recorder to talk through some of the things that you know or that you are learning. You can go to foodbloggerpro.com/job. Again, it’s called a content specialist. It’s starting at 20 hours a week. You can read more about the specifics of what’s included with that and what the position looks like. But I think there might be somebody in this audience, the podcast audience, that could potentially be a good fit for that. We would love to work with you, and my hope would be that you would also love to work with this team at Food Blogger Pro and TinyBit. A quick little plug for that.

Bjork Ostrom: Now let’s jump into the interview with Alisha. She’s going to be talking about all of her work as at an agency, but also of course creation and photography as well. It’s going to be a fun interview. Alisha, welcome to the podcast.

Alisha Cohen: Hi, thanks so much for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. We’re going to talk about all things business building, as you’ve built an agency, and all things photography and branding, because that’s a huge part of what you do. But what I’m curious about is, number one, the name of your agency. When you kicked that off, when you said, “Hey, you know what?” My guess is you yourself had some experience in doing this. You could do more freelancer contractor-type stuff, but you said, “Oh, I want to evolve this a little bit,” my guess is. It still has a little tie into your name. That’s a foreshadow on explaining the name, but really building a business around that. When did that happen? And what was the reason for doing that?

Alisha Cohen: Sure. The name comes from my name, like you said, Alisha, but the thing that’s funny about it is that most people pronounce my name incorrectly. And so, most people say Alisha. And so, by going by Lish, Lish has been my nickname forever back when I played sports, all through high school, so it’s a foolproof way for people to say my name correctly.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s like a forcing function. Here’s the part that you need to say that usually people say incorrectly.

Alisha Cohen: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: At what point were you like, “Hey, I want to create a… I want to use this nickname as the inspiration for a business,” and said, “I want to really lean into this.”

Alisha Cohen: Yeah. I was working in the advertising industry after I had graduated college with a marketing degree. I always freelanced on the side, even when I was in college. I was freelance writing, freelance social media. Not really photography back then, it was mainly copywriting and social media. But then when I was working my full-time job, I started post thing on Instagram just for fun things that inspired me. My day job wasn’t allowing me to be super creative or colorful, so I was like, “Oh, I’m just going to take pictures of sprinkles and donuts and fun things that bring me joy.” It started to take off.

Alisha Cohen: This was back in 2014, I want to say, maybe 2015. Eventually, brands started reaching out to me asking me to take pictures for them too. I didn’t even own a camera at the time. I was just using my iPhone being a little bit of an art director, I guess you could say, but I really didn’t know what I was doing, but I really just never said no, asked for help when I needed it, took a couple of online classes here and there, watched a ton of YouTube videos and just kept creating photos for clients until I had enough business that I was able to leave my full-time advertising agency job, which was almost exactly six years ago from today.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. Congratulations. It’s awesome. Coming up on the anniversary, was there an actual date? Do you remember what that was, your last day?

Alisha Cohen: It’s January 23rd, I think was my last day.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay, almost six years of doing this.

Alisha Cohen: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Bjork Ostrom: When you were in the process of the education process, and we’re always in that stage. But really in the early stage of learning and refining your skills, what type of content was it that you were consuming? How was that most helpful in those early stages?

Alisha Cohen: Yeah, it was as basic as it gets. It was like, what’s the best camera for beginner? And then it was like how to learn manual mode. What is ISO? I literally knew nothing at that point. I would say… And then I started experimenting with some lighting, and it wasn’t… I think it was three years until I actually started using better, more professional lighting. Like you said, I’m still learning to this day, but I would say probably the first three years of my business was really, really learning. And then once I got to know lighting better, I feel like there was a turn in the work and it just got a lot better. And then I was able to attract better clients because the work was better.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Don’t you feel like lighting was really an important piece to the puzzle?

Alisha Cohen: Yeah, I think that… Well, I think the first piece was shooting in manual mode. I feel like that was a huge turning point just right at the beginning, right when I was starting. And then the using artificial strokes was the next turning point for me and adding the stop motion capabilities to our services was huge.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about why manual mode was helpful? For those who are in those early stages, what is manual mode and why is it important to understand how to use that?

Alisha Cohen: Yeah. The problem with auto, it’s great if you’re just a hobbyist. But if you’re trying to get photos that are worthy of a blog or a cookbook or just really beautiful stuff…

Bjork Ostrom: Product for a brand…

Alisha Cohen: …product, it just helps you manipulate the light better and it gets you to the point where you don’t even have to know editing that well. I think that was it for me. I would get photos right off the camera that looked great that barely needed editing. That’s a difference with manual mode. You can get it exact to your lighting conditions.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes, so you have… Essentially, it’s more control. I think of in the world of an analogy would be like in the world of construction, there’s probably people who could come in and use a saw and the hammer in a certain way. But if you really know the tool and the ins and outs of how to use that tool, you’re going to be able to create things much better than me who’d come in and be like, “Oh, I know a saw.” But in actuality, all I know is how to turn it on and off. It’s just kind of like what auto is. It’s like you’re turning your camera on, but you don’t know how to actually use the tool other than just pressing the shutter button, which is okay to your point if you’re going to shoot pictures of your kids or friends. Or you’re traveling and you just want to document.

Bjork Ostrom: But if you want to get to the point where you’re really fine-tuning to the vision that you have in your head, you need the ability adjust all those different settings. So, that’s a really important piece of it. Speaking of the vision that you have in your head, photography is really two pieces. One is the mechanical hardware, and two is the artistic representation of what you’re capturing. How much of that do you think is just within somebody? People say, “Oh, I’m not a creative person. I’m not an artsy person.” Versus how much of that can be something that you learn? Was that part of what you were learning or do you feel like you had some of that stuff innate?

Alisha Cohen: Yeah, I definitely had some of that. I did a little bit of set styling, set design in my advertising agency job, and I always had a vision for photos. But the problem was my skills were lacking. Like you said, it really just depends on the person. Sometimes they have the technical and not the artistic side, but I really do believe that everybody is creative in one way or another. I think it’s really important for people to find that style that really speaks to them and that represents them, and that’s something that had me standing out. Even when I wasn’t very good technically, the fact that I had a very bright, colorful, clean style, that was attractive to people even if maybe the technical side wasn’t there.

Alisha Cohen: Maybe they didn’t even notice that the technical side wasn’t there because I was using all these bright colors and styling and props and everything like that. It’s definitely something too that you develop over time, like your taste level, your style. You can be influenced by a lot of things, like you can look at a lot of Pinterest and stuff. There’s some… It gets tricky sometimes with the lines between inspiration and copying, you know how that goes, but I think it’s good and healthy to look at work and to see what really speaks to you. Maybe you’re taking pieces of things that really represent your style.

Bjork Ostrom: The analogy that I use often is I think a lot of musicians start by learning other songs. If you’re learning the guitar, the first thing you’re going to do probably isn’t going to be a song that you write, but you learn how to play your favorite songs. Usually what you’re trying to do is like, “How do I do this exactly like this artist wrote this song?” That is a tool for learning, but it’s not… You might even cover it and go out and play and say, “Hey, here’s this Free Bird. I love this song.”

Alisha Cohen: Absolutely, mm-hmm (affirmative).

Bjork Ostrom: But what you shouldn’t do is be like, “Here’s this song I wrote, Free Bird.” People are like, “That’s not your song.”

Alisha Cohen: Yeah, exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: But using that to then say, “Oh, they did verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge. Maybe I could do verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge if I write a song.” Finding inspiration in that way is almost like a vehicle to learn. What were the things that you… When you were doing set design, what were some of the things that you learned that you incorporated into how you shoot now?

Alisha Cohen: Yeah, I think just like a lot of the way colors work together, I realized I really love monochrome sets, so I kind of weaved that in. But again, I also wasn’t a trained set designer, so that was something that I really learned on the job also because I was a marketing major. But it really is just experimenting. I think the biggest thing you can do with photo styling is experiment and see what you like best. Move your props around 10 different ways and decide, what do you like best? And then pretty soon you start to just start. You get in that groove.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes, that makes sense. Do you have any framework for making decisions around colors? I know there’s color wheel. My dad was an art teacher, so he often talked about colors and contrasting or complimentary colors. Do you have that? Does that exist within your decision-making process or is it more of like, Hey, I’m looking at these colors and these feel like they could go together in a creative, fun way? Or is it like, oh, these are… When I think of the color wheel, it’s here and here. A music example would be like, Hey, I know the keys in this. The key of C. Here’s what’s going to be the chords that I can play within that.

Alisha Cohen: Yeah. I would say it’s based for me mostly on my clients, so I always am going to ask for their brand color palette and then also based on the products or the food. If it’s a pink beverage, what colors are going to compliment the pink beverage? If it’s a blueberry pie, what colors are going to compliment the blueberry pie? Like I said, I love monochrome, so I would love to do shades of blue around the pie, sometimes mixing in textures here and there when appropriate. But I really do rely on the product itself, the subject that I’m shooting and then the brands and their guidelines.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that makes sense. The other thing you had talked about was artificial lighting and how important that was. I know Lindsay, my wife, our background is we have a food and recipe website called Pinch of Yum. She does all the photography for that. She started to experiment a little bit with using a strobe light for artificial lighting. Her friend, Steph, who has a site called Girl Versus Dough is doing a cookbook shoot. So, they got together and Steph was like, “Here’s how I use a strobe light.” Lindsay was like, “Oh my gosh, this is awesome.” Has never done that, so she started to experiment with it.

Bjork Ostrom: What is that like for you? If somebody’s interested in trying that out, do you have a recommended gear that’s your favorite type of gear? Why do you like that versus say natural light or a light that’s just always on?

Alisha Cohen: Yeah. I do use continuous light, which is a light that’s always on, for some stop motion work that I do, but I really prefer strobes over everything just because of the amazing output that you can get for the price that the strength of the light. These are really, really strong lights. And so, having a stronger light gives you a couple of benefits. One of them is that you can shoot at any time of the day. It doesn’t have to be prime daylight. I was also living in Pittsburgh when I first started, and it’s a terribly cloudy city. I never felt like it was bright enough outside for me to get these photos that I needed.

Alisha Cohen: So, that was huge from that regard. But also you can set your camera settings a lot differently when you have a strobe versus natural light. Because when you have a strobe, you can get your f-stop really, really high. If you’re doing a really detailed flat lay with tons of props, you can make sure that all of that stuff is in focus. Whereas if you’re having natural light with… It’s less powerful. You have to do that blurred background look with a lower f-stop in order to get the lighting right. So, it gives you a lot more flexibility and focus.

Alisha Cohen: For me, that’s really why it’s a game-changer. You can also manipulate it a lot easier. It’s hard to put a modifier on the sun. You can’t add an umbrella to the sun. You could diffuse the window light somehow, but it’s definitely easier to just add an umbrella to your strobe or to simulate natural light by not using an umbrella at all, like a harsh, bright sunlight look. So, there’s definitely more flexibility there as well.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s almost like another element of manual mode, which is the layering in light as a controlled variable within your photography. Whereas to your point with natural light, you can maybe do some things. You can put in a reflector or you can maybe dampen the light somehow or diffuse it, but it’s more limited. It’s coming in from one angle, and you’re not going to be able to shift that unless you wait six hours. And even then, you don’t know if you’re going to get what you need to get. Do you have a favorite type of strobe light? Could you think of the brand of what it would be off the top of your head?

Alisha Cohen: Yeah. I really like GODOX brand strobes. I like to tell people that the lower-end cheaper strobes are totally fine if you’re just doing photography just starting out. If you want to use strobes for stop motion, you do need to invest in a higher-end model because the higher-end ones will give you a more consistent output. I hear a lot of times people will buy the entry-level strobe and their stop motion, it gives you kind of like a flicker effect where one frame is a little bit brighter than the next frame. And so, a higher-end strobe helps even that out, so that is something important to know.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. The point with that is the light needs to be exactly the same with every frame in order to make it look more like that combination of a movie, but also still images.

Alisha Cohen: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Bjork Ostrom: I’m curious to know, you’ve talked about stop motion a couple of times. What is it… How are brands using that? And what does that look like in terms of a type of media that people could consider, creators could consider? Is that something that you see? For this podcast, it would be food creators. Maybe they have a following on TikTok or Instagram, a following on their blog. What does stop motion look like? Or is it more brands? Like Land O’Lakes wants to do a cool butter thing of the butter melting on a piece of toast or something. How do you see those being successful?

Alisha Cohen: I think both creators and brands can utilize stop motion, especially now that Instagram has told us that we are no longer a photo-sharing app. We want you to share videos. So, it’s a lot of brands and creators are using it on their feed instead of a static image. Some of these, it would be more considered like a Jiff, so it’s only a couple of frames. But just that little bit of motion can really make a difference and get you higher engagement. Brands are using them in ads mostly. Instead of still image ads, they’re using stop motion. Like a recipe blogger, there’s so many opportunities to do stop motion when it comes to food and recipes.

Alisha Cohen: You could show yourself adding all the ingredients to the bowl, the bowl mixing, snapping your fingers and the cake being made. There’s a lot of opportunities there. Not only is it just like stand-alone videos and the feed, but I see stop motion being utilized in reels and TikTok a lot. It’s not necessarily like the whole reel is a stop motion, but maybe just that part at the end, like I said. Like the snapping part is maybe the stop motion element. Now, Instagram and TikTok are making it so easy to just do that on your phone, so that’s something that is definitely more accessible now with these apps.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about that? When you say it’s easier to do it on your phone, how do you actually do that? Somebody’s like, “I want to create that on my own. It’s just me.” They’re not going to be able to hire somebody. People know how to do a photo, edit in Lightroom. You know how to do a video, edit it in iMovie. Where do you do stop motion?

Alisha Cohen: So, stop motion on an app. There’s an app called Life Lapse App. It helps you put those still frames together. But the important things that you need to have, and this goes for on your camera or on your phone, you need to have your camera or phone on a tripod so that it’s absolutely not moving. They make tripods for phones. They also make those little clamp arms. I don’t know if you’ve seen those that hold the phone. And then you need a way to trigger your phone without touching it, so there’s little remote shut button that you can buy for $8 on Amazon that you click that button instead of touching your phone.

Alisha Cohen: Because when you’re touching your phone, you may move the phone and we don’t want that. And then the final thing goes back to lighting actually. You need consistent lighting or else you’re going to get that weird flicker effect. We talked about natural light. It is really hard to do with a stop motion, unless you have a super clear day without any clouds and you’re doing it fast so it’s not really moving in the sky. So, your best bet is going to be some kind of artificial lighting. There are some continuous lights that I recommend, like an LED.

Alisha Cohen: GODOX has an LED that’s pretty reasonably priced, and that’s going to give you a lot more power than a ring light. You could use something like a cheap ring light if it’s something fast, maybe for a reel or something like that, something small rather, but I definitely recommend more of a continuous LED for that type of content.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. I know a lot of people are interested in improving their photography. You talked about how important it is to learn along the way. You actually have a course. We’re going to talk about the business side. But before we get too far away from photography, you have a course that covers a lot of this stuff and the best practices that you’ve learned, a great name for it as well. I’ll let you talk about that.

Alisha Cohen: Yeah, thank you.

Bjork Ostrom: But if people want to dig deeper into that, can you talk about where that is and where they can find it?

Alisha Cohen: Yeah. You can find it at lishcreative.com/course. The course is called Slay the Flatlay, so a little play on words there, and it is basically everything I’ve ever learned about photography styling and stop motion. And then there also is a course within it that helps you take better social videos. It’s going to cover everything on the camera, and then also how to take better videos on your phone, how to edit them and post them on reels and that kind of thing. And then it includes a nine-page gear guide with the exact links to all these products that I’ve been mentioning and also gives you a range, like low end, middle end, high end for a lot of those things as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. That’s great. We’ll be sure to link to that as well. How about the agency side? You said six years ago, you stepped out and you said, “You know what? I’m going to do this on my own.” What was that moment like when you… like your first day where you sat down and you’re like, “Okay, this is my job now.” What was that like?

Alisha Cohen: It was scary. It was definitely scary at first. I would say the first year was really just learning and trying to find clients and that getting by, that kind of thing. It was really just me probably for the first two years. And then after that, I started bringing in a lot of independent contractors. I still work with a lot of independent contractors, especially in the areas where I wasn’t super experienced in. I mentioned editing before, that was one of the first things that I outsourced because these people are much better than I am at editing.

Alisha Cohen: So, not only is the work better because they’re better at editing, but it saves me time to focus on other areas of business. There’s like 10 or 12 editors that I use for different projects here and there. Photo editors. I now have a video editor on the team, and it’s just grown as I’ve seen a need for things.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. How do clients find you now? You talked about in those early stages having to figure out how to get clients. What was that like? And then what does it look like now? I know you have a social following: TikTok, Instagram. Are they coming in through there?

Alisha Cohen: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: What was it like early stages? And then what is it now?

Alisha Cohen: Early stages honestly was still Instagram. That’s what allowed me to start my business. That’s where people were initially finding me. I did reach out to some local brands. I got some retainer clients that way. I think I got a couple of my first clients through some Facebook groups for freelance female entrepreneurs, those types of places. But now it’s really just Instagram and more increasingly is TikTok. I started posting there last December, so about a year ago, and I have over 400,000 followers there, which is absolutely crazy to me.

Bjork Ostrom: What was that like? What do you feel like was the growth lever on TikTok?

Alisha Cohen: I think I was in it a good time. I think I was posting there early enough, and also I was super consistent with it. I did, it was a six-week sprint where I was posting four to six videos a week. Wow. And so, I think it was just like, I just dumped content in there. It was all good content too. That was really all I did, kind of an effect of the pandemic really. I had a really slow December last year and I was like, okay, this is what I’m going to do to try to drum up some business. I’m going to just create really awesome content and try to grow this channel. It really worked.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I think there’s something to be said about, and it sounds obvious, but doing good work in the world. It wouldn’t have happened if the content you were putting out wasn’t awesome.

Alisha Cohen: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: So, it starts with that. It’s doing good work in the world, finding a platform where you’re able to put that work onto. It would’ve been a lot different if you were publishing those videos to Twitter versus TikTok. So, there’s some element of figuring out what that platform is, the best fit for it. And then the third piece would be knowing what you want that content to actually do. I’m curious in your case, did you know like, Hey, I want to create content that is like the content that I’m going to be doing for brands, and then hope that a brand would see it and say, “Hey, can you create this for me?”?

Bjork Ostrom: Or are you creating content to try and reach brands like, “Hey, here’s best practices for lighting when you’re doing a product shoot.”? Or was it like a product shoot of food that a food brand would come and say like, “Hey, can you do this same thing for me?”?

Alisha Cohen: Yeah. A rule of thumb that I like to tell people, not just for TikTok, for any social media is to really only share the type of work that you want to be doing. Even if I do a shoot for a super masculine brand, I’m never going to put that on my portfolio. I’m never going to share about that on Instagram, because that’s not the type of work that I ultimately want to be doing. So, really, I just try to do really fun, really creative work.

Alisha Cohen: It’s almost like attraction marketing, I would say. I wasn’t trying to reach companies on TikTok. I don’t even think I knew that that was going to be an effect. I think I was more so posting on there for my course, teaching people things, and then the brands were just an added bonus honestly. I was trying to go after more of the education audience on TikTok, and then I found out that brands were watching that as well.

Bjork Ostrom: What do you think that looks like? Is that somebody who’s at a brand on the platform trying to understand it better and seeing something that aligns with how they want their content to exist in the world? And then they shoot you a DM and they’re like, “Can you photograph our stuff?” Is that essentially how it works?

Alisha Cohen: Yeah. What people don’t realize is that these are just normal people with normal accounts. They’re not always following you from the brand account. They’re following you from their personal account as a personal human. For instance, one of the women who is on the production team at Bath & Body Works followed me on TikTok. Of course, I had no idea who she was until she sent me an email saying, “Hey, I’ve been watching your TikTok, and we want to start posting on the Bath & Body Works TikTok. We need somebody to help out with that.”

Alisha Cohen: I was the first person that they thought of for that. So, that’s how it works. It’s like somebody that… You won’t know that they’re watching. You never know who’s watching your social media, and that’s why I always think it’s important to put your best face forward for everything that you post online.

Bjork Ostrom: There was a blog post I wrote way back, and the title of it and the concept I think about a lot is who, not how many. It’s this idea that you could be really early, and you could feel like what you’re doing isn’t worthwhile because you don’t have a certain number of followers. Followers are important, and obviously it’s going to increase the reach of your content, but what you don’t know is who is consuming that content. If you’re creating really good content, people can understand that and see that and will respond to that even if you don’t have a lot of followers. There’s been people who…

Alisha Cohen: Right, absolutely.

Bjork Ostrom: … I’ve been able to see early in their career and you look at it and you say, “This person is really good.” And you know if they stick with it, that eventually they’re going to have success. It’s just a sixth sense that you have after seeing content long enough.

Alisha Cohen: Right, absolutely.

Bjork Ostrom: My guess is that it’s a similar thing for you where, Hey, you know regardless of where you’re posting, what really matters is who is following. To your point, you don’t know. It’s somebody’s name. It’s not going to be Bath & Body Works corporate account because they probably have to go through this approval process. Can we follow this brand? Can we not? But for somebody who’s just using it offhand, they can follow whoever they want on their own personal one. Is that… If you were to rank order in terms of the most important platforms for you, would TikTok be the most important or Instagram or word of mouth? What does that look like, both on the deals with brands side, so for the agency, but also I’d be curious to know in terms of students who go through the courses that you’re creating?

Alisha Cohen: Yeah. I think most of the students are coming from TikTok. And then usually, if they follow me on TikTok, then they may also follow me on Instagram and really start diving deep into the blog. And then they’ll get on the email list. That’s how we get them into the funnel of the course. For clients, I would say right now, it’s a mix between TikTok and Instagram. I think Instagram is still important because I have a lot of established clients and previous clients or potential clients that follow me on there already. So then when they see my stuff there, they’re reminded. But you mentioned word of mouth and referral, and that really has been huge for my business. I don’t think it’s something that we talk about enough.

Alisha Cohen: Everybody wants to know how to get clients, but the important thing is treating your clients really well and doing really amazing work and making their life easier. When you do that, they will hire you again and again and again. I now have some relationships with clients that I’ve been working. I’ve been working with them since 2018, 2019, long-term relationships. That ends up being the best for both parties because you get to know each other. There’s less of that learning curve. And then they also will recommend me to their friends. Or they switch companies and that new company needs somebody. That happens a lot too, especially marketing, PR. People don’t stay at those jobs forever typically. So, I do see a lot of that where people are moving companies and hiring me from somewhere else.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I have a friend who does video, and he works with a lot of agencies that hire him and then they work for bigger projects like for Facebook or Bumble or whatever it might be. He consistently says I did. He doesn’t have a website. He doesn’t really have social media. After seven years, it’s him and a friend. Just picked a name, Parka Studios, a Minnesota brand, but he says the same thing. He’s like, “What really matters is my connections with these individuals and me being somebody who they want to work with.”

Bjork Ostrom: That in and of itself is going to be… It enough to sustain his business without any online presence. Then you think of adding in an online presence. That becomes a multiplier. I’m curious to hear you reflect on, what does that mean to be somebody who’s good to work with and to make somebody else’s job easier? What does that tangentially look like?

Alisha Cohen: That means putting your opinions and creativity to the side and doing what’s best for the client and their brand. That took me a long time to learn, I think longer than I’d like to admit. There definitely have been some instances along the way that things don’t go well. There’s miscommunications here and there. And so, not only listening to your client and working for your client, but also adapting your process as you go so that you don’t have those miscommunications in the future.

Alisha Cohen: Here’s an example. When I first started, we do these highly detailed shot lists, and we tell exactly what the photo’s going to look like in the concept. But at the beginning, I would have a column that would say background color and I would just write pink. Well then I realized there’s a lot of interpretations of pink, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah.

Alisha Cohen: And so, I need to put the exact Pantone colors of the background color that we’re going to be using. Because I once had someone be like, “Oh, well I thought it was going to be more of like a peach.”

Bjork Ostrom: This pink. Right, right.

Alisha Cohen: Yeah. And so, that’s an example of something in my six years of business that I’ve adjusted as we’ve gone along to make it easier for clients to know what they’re going to get and to meet their expectations.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s awesome. One of the things that I love about talking to you with your story is we try as much as possible give exposure on the podcast, even though it’s called the Food Blogger Pro podcast, give exposure to other ways that you can be building a successful business. Sometimes in our world, people think, “Hey, I want to create content online, monetize it through ads or sponsored content. That’s the avenue I want to go.” In your case, you’re using social. You have the agency branch. You have the course branch. You don’t need to do advertising because you have these other mediums, which is really, really cool.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m curious to hear, what were some of the things that you didn’t know about the world of having an agency doing creative content with brands that you now know to be true that you’d say, “Hey, if anybody else is thinking about starting a video business to shoot food video.”? Or maybe somebody wants to do restaurant photography. What are the things that you now know to be true about the world that you do that you didn’t know before?

Alisha Cohen: Oh, that’s a great question. I think… I don’t think I thought that my business would adapt as much as it has and adapt to fit the needs of my clients, which goes back to getting referrals and things like that. I thought once I learned photography, that’s great. Well now everybody’s asking me for video, so now I’m becoming a video production company too. And so, that’s something that I didn’t anticipate, but I’ve let happen. I think some people are just like, “Oh, I’m good at photography. I’m going to stick with that.”

Alisha Cohen: My advice would be don’t be afraid to learn new things, to hire people to fill gaps that you have because we need to continually be meeting the needs of clients and change as the industry’s changing. Just in the past year, think about how much social media has changed and the type of content has changed. Even if you’re just blogging for yourself, you still need to know how to make reels now. Brands are asking influencers to make reels, and you got to learn. And so, that’s something that I didn’t necessarily expect to happen but that I’ve tried my best to embrace as we’ve gone along.

Bjork Ostrom: When you think of… I’m thinking of this as it relates to talking about working with independent contractors and the team that you have, which fluctuates based on the project, my guess is. I’m curious to hear your stack of tools that you use. With communicating with brands, with communicating with the team, just personally, would you be able to list off and say like, “Hey, these are the things we use and we love.”? Whether it’d be like Asana, Basecamp, Lightroom. I think people are always interested to hear what those things are.

Alisha Cohen: Absolutely. We use Airtable for all of client concepting, and we use Canva a lot. If we need to make a mood board for a client or if we want to lay out a mock-up of what the photo’s going to look like, we’ll use Canva for that. And then among my internal team, we’re using Asana daily to track tasks. Those are tasks related to client shoots, tasks related to the course, all on Asana. And then I have a social media manager also, and we use Plann, P-L-A-N-N, to schedule.

Alisha Cohen: All of the Instagram and TikToks that we have, we use Airtable for that as well to plan it and then schedule it and plan. So, really like Airtable, Asana and Plann I think are our three main ones. And then of course for photoshoots, we do in editing and things like that in Lightroom and Photoshop and those givens.

Bjork Ostrom: What do you like about Airtable? And how is that different than Google Sheets?

Alisha Cohen: Oh, Airtable’s the best. I like to say that it’s like a spreadsheet on steroids. I like that you can up upload images to it and not make the columns all crazy. You can customize the type of each field. One field’s going to be an attachment with an image upload, and the next you could do a multiple select feature and where it’s all color-coded. You can drag and drop cells, which I think is a huge game-changer. It’s just very user-friendly. I haven’t ever talked to anybody that doesn’t like it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, for sure. We hear that quite a bit. I’ve dabbled in it a little bit, but I know some people who are power users and they just think it’s the best. So, it’s cool to hear you talk about that. On the agency side, for anybody who’s interested in the education piece, I want to make sure they check out the course. There’s also folks who listen to the podcast who are brands, more product-oriented and then also just creators who might need help. For LISH, how much of that is brand work versus a blogger who wants to have somebody help with photography? Is it all of the above?

Bjork Ostrom: If you were to say your focus, you talk about producing the content that is similar to the brands that you want to work with or the content that you want to be doing, what would that in case people want to reach out and connect with you?

Alisha Cohen: Yeah, I would say our specialty is food, beverage, lifestyle and beauty brands. And so, that’s mainly who we’re working with to produce photography, stop motions, and short-form videos. That would be like TikToks and reels, even some YouTube videos here and there. That’s really our bread and butter, lots of social ads. Most of these brands are very colorful, feminine brands. Like I said, there are some exceptions. But for the most part, a focus on color is a big thing that you’ll see.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome. You won’t be doing a photoshoot for Kiss, the band, probably. You could.

Alisha Cohen: No.

Bjork Ostrom: You could pull it off, but that wouldn’t necessarily be in the focus category for you.

Alisha Cohen: Right, right.

Bjork Ostrom: For folks who want to follow along with what you’re up to, obviously TikTok and Instagram would be great places. You can plug those. And then the best place, if anybody does want to work with you on the agency side, how can they get in touch with you?

Alisha Cohen: Yeah, you can email hello@lishcreative.com. You can learn more at lishcreative.com. @lishcreative on TikTok, and @alishylishy and @lishcreative on Instagram. There’s a personal and a company one on Instagram.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. We’ll link to those. Alisha, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Alisha Cohen: Thanks so much for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: Let’s wrap one more big thank you to Alisha for coming on and sharing her story. I just want to give one more plug for that content specialist position, foodbloggerpro.com/job if you want to check it out. I would love to hear from you. Like I said, I think there might be somebody here in this audience, a podcast listener, that would be a really good fit for it. We already know that you are a learner, that you’re motivated, that you’re interested in getting a tiny bit better every day forever because you listen to this podcast.

Bjork Ostrom: And so, if that sounds like you and if you’re interested in a position starting at 20 hours a week but it would have the potential to grow, head over to foodbloggerpro.com/job. That’s it. Have a great week. Bye-bye.

Bjork Ostrom: Hello. You’re listening to The Food Blogger Pro Podcast. this is Bjork. Today we’re going to be talking to Ana from Ana’s Baking Chronicles, and she’s going to be talking about her journey into blogging full-time, what that was like and the kind of stress around doing multiple things at once. How she had to pull that off. She’s going to be talking about doing her master’s degree, doing a cookbook. She was working full-time at her dad’s business, which was in a very involved position. And then also working on her side, building her Instagram following to almost 45,000 followers and how she was able to manage all of these things. That’s a portion of what we’re going to be talking about. She’s also going to be sharing photography and how she documents such beautiful photographs and the significance of photography for capturing attention. And a great example of that is somebody coming to your site, seeing beautiful photography and thinking this person could document and create a cookbook, which she’s going to be talking about what that journey was like for her. So she’s an extremely talented content creator, very talented photographer, and we’re going to be digging into all of those things and trying to pull out some little pieces for you, the podcast listener that you can apply to your work, whether that be kind of the day to day in and out daily grind, or whether that be your art, your photography, your videography, whatever it might be. It’s going to be a great conversation. So let’s go ahead and jump in Ana, welcome to the podcast.

Ana Zelić: Hi, thank you for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, It’s going to be a great conversation. We’re going to be talking about a few different things. One of the things that I’m most interested in hearing about with your story is something that whenever we do these podcasts, we have a little preamble. We have a little conversation, then we hit record and we record it again. But I want to touch on some of the things that we actually talked on before we hit record. First of all, want to hear a little bit about your story because within the year, you’ve transitioned to focusing on your blog, your Instagram account, and writing a cookbook and doing that full time. So before you were doing that, what was your focus? What did your days look like? And then we’ll talk about what the transition was after that.

Ana Zelić: Well, I’ve actually had quite a few transitions before this one. My biggest one was actually transitioning from a full-time student to a full-time adult who has a job. And I got the job. I started working for my dad right after I graduated. So that was also kind of stressful. But then…

Bjork Ostrom: Was it stressful because of the work or was it stressful you’re working in a family business with your dad? Or maybe both?

Ana Zelić: Both. It was both because it was literally a month after I graduated so I didn’t have much free time to focus on the blog. And I really, I just started my blog three months before I graduated. So it was all very fresh.

Bjork Ostrom: Did you know at the time you… Hey, I want to start this blog and I want to build this into a profession? Or was it kind of a side hobby or what was it?

Ana Zelić: Definitely not. I mean, I actually started a blog after one creation website, food website contacted me and asked, oh, if I have a blog because I posted my cakes on Instagram and after that, I got that idea on, maybe I could make a blog. But-

Bjork Ostrom: And how long had you been building your Instagram account at that point?

Ana Zelić: At that point it was April or May 2018. I maybe had like 200, 400 followers. Really nothing. It was just a high side hobby for me while I was finishing my school. And after that I really started focusing more on that because I always liked baking and everything. And then I made my blog it took me a full month because I didn’t know anything about WordPress domains and everything like that.

Bjork Ostrom: Everybody can relate. There’s so much to learn.

Ana Zelić: Yeah. And it’s taken me like a full month to actually like push my site live. But one thing that I did know was that I really wanted to write in English. So even though I didn’t know at the time that I had like this opportunity to maybe make that my profession, every choice that I made, I kind of make sure that if I ever go to that point, I’m like I had a good start.

Bjork Ostrom: Interesting. Smart of you to say, Hey, I’m going to start this and I’m not going to view it as my profession right away, but I want to leave the door open, if it should find success in a certain way, so that foundationally, I have the ability to kind of scale and build. And was the idea with writing in English that you wanted to focus on the US market for sponsor content or advertising, or was it more of just reach in general? What was kind of the thought process with that a hard decision or not?

Ana Zelić: Honestly, it was an easy decision and it’s kind of not based on any of what you said, because a lot of the things regarding the baking, especially cakes sure, I’ve actually learned in English. So a lot of terms and the baking vocabulary that I knew was actually in English. And I just felt this a sort of freedom of writing in a foreign language. It’s not like I’m to totally vulnerable. It’s I have this mask of a foreign language.

Bjork Ostrom: Interesting.

Ana Zelić: And then of course the second reason is, I mean, everyone speaks in English so if eventually if I made this into a job, then the reach would be wider.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s great. And that has happened you’ve mentioned having 200, 400 follow followers on Instagram and now I think almost 45,000, is that sound right?

Ana Zelić: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And growing your blog and also doing a cookbook deal. So you did talked about the transition of going from kind of student to working full time and I remember that transition myself when out of school. I was like, oh my gosh, I show up at 8:00 and then I’m just here until 5:00. It feels such a weird transition compared to what it’s like as a student, when your schedule isn’t, you still have long days, but it’s not the same.

Ana Zelić: Strict. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, what was it that you were doing with your dad in terms of business and what did your job look like in that role?

Ana Zelić: Oh, I mean, I started like any regular junior. I mean, there wasn’t any sort of method to exam in the beginning. They really wanted me to get to know the base processes. They are IT firm. So they do the software and stuff. So my goal is to make sure to collect all the information, so the developers can make the best app possible because I graduated in economics. And their goal kind of with me he told me that later on was to navigate toward a finance of the firm and then everything later on. But I couldn’t let go of my blog so it was hard because my blog was just more creative and more challenging for me than staying in an office. I mean, if I didn’t have the blog, maybe I would’ve been more in interested in that field, in that work, but I feel like I’m destined to do some more creative work and just office research work.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. And Instagram account and the blog, Ana’s Baking Chronicles. I want to make sure to mention that. At what point did you know that a cookbook deal was going to happen and had you made the decision to transition into focusing on your blog and your Instagram account before that? Or was it after the deal and you were like, okay, I know this is going to be focus for me. I need to have the space and time to do it. It’s really hard to keep up a blog, Instagram account, write a cookbook, and to work a full-time job.

Ana Zelić: Yeah. Cookbook deal was not a planned at all. It was actually a shock to me, and it came after I made the decision to focus more on the blog. And so 2019, yeah, the summer or autumn, I kind of started pushing more and more content focusing on my Instagram, on the blog, on building traffic, because at that point or what I’ve said until that point, I didn’t really know anything like keyword research. I didn’t do anything. So most of my traffic was actually luck. I think I picked very like lucky keywords that ended up ranking first. And then after that point, I just I knew about Mediavine and stuff so I really focused on just growing my traffic while working. So there were times when I would take images at 6:00 AM, just before work. It was challenging.

Bjork Ostrom: The time that you had it’s your early mornings, lunch break, late at night.

Ana Zelić: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Very relatable.

Ana Zelić: And then I think it was March last year, I got this email and at first I thought it was a scam. It was a scam. Who would ask me to like write a book. At that point it seemed kind of incredible. And then I googled the publisher and then I realized, oh, they are real. And I actually have one of their books and then I was just shocked, positively.

Bjork Ostrom: What was that process like in terms of going through a cookbook deal, creating the content for it? And any advice that you’d give for people who are in a similar position, either looking to do a cookbook deal or people who are still early on, but want to set up a foundation of success so somebody might reach out to them and say in a similar way. My guess is there is something that stuck out about the content that you were creating that made people think, hey, there might be potential for a cookbook deal here. So any advice that you’d have for people either about the process itself, or potentially how to create content that might catch the eye of a publisher?

Ana Zelić: Well, I think one of the main reasons was maybe my of photography at the time. I was also very focused on just developing my photography skills. So I think that since I knew how to present my food in a nice way, that might have caught the eye of the publisher as well. But I don’t have like any, I feel real advice, except that I just feel that if you’re doing what you feel is right, and what you want to do and if you just put all of yourself else in it, I feel like there will come a time when your hard work will be recognized. At some point

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It takes a lot of it, right? It’s hours and hours and there’s the concept of 10,000 hours. This idea of 10,000 hours is what you need to become kind of an next or a master in a certain category. And that’s a lot. It’s like a full-time job for five years is 2000 hours a year, five years, 10,000 hours. But to your point, I think if you are getting better, if you are doing good work, and if you’re putting that work into the world, there’s a really good chance that people are going to come across that and recognize that as good work. In terms of your photography journey, what did that look like in terms of where you started? Did you have any ideas about photography or no best practices? And then how did you quickly learn in order to get to a place where a publisher can look at it and be like, oh my gosh, this is great photography. We should work with this.

Ana Zelić: Yeah. Well, I started very early on learning about photography even before I started kind of posting on Instagram and before my blog, because I’m a kind of person that I really need to learn as much of the basics, as impossible, before I venture into something. Part of it is because I don’t want to majorly embarrass myself, but I do have perfectionism issues definitely. So I actually started learning on my own. Joanie Simon, actually, I started watching her videos in the late 2017 and she taught me how to use a camera in manual mode before I even got the camera, because I really…

Bjork Ostrom: You were way ahead of it. You don’t even have the camera and you’re learning how to use it.

Ana Zelić: No, it’s the way I am. I just thought if I learn a lot about it, maybe then I will knew, okay, no, this is for me. Or I really want to do this, or this is the camera that I want to get. I need like a base of information and then I can build on. And then I started myself learning and shooting, and then I saw it was just summer, I think 2018, Foodtography School was having a sale. It’s from that’s a Broma Bakery course. But at the time I was just finishing my school. I didn’t really have any money. And so one major point for me with when I got my job, half of my first paycheque went into that course. So, yeah, I kept making these in investment decisions when I thought they were right. Even though I didn’t quite know I really want to do this, but I feel like underneath it all, subconsciously I kind of did know that this is what I want to do.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s one of the recurring things that we hear people talk a lot about is investing in education. They just like, I want to learn this thing. I want to get better. I’m going to go through a food photography class course. I know Lindsay has done multiple in-person photography classes where you just block out the time and you say, I want to learn about this. Most recently, I’m going through a course and it’s like Food Blogger Pro, but except for Food Blogger Pro it’s like Growth University, that’s what it’s called. So it’s all about software and SaaS in growing software businesses. And it’s really fun to learn. And I think sometimes I forget how great it is to learn. I’ve been away from school probably longer than you have. And so it’s fun for me to get back into that, but it’s a really common and theme that we hear on the podcast is people saying, I had this thing that I wanted to learn. I wanted to get better at it. And there’s options to your point talking about some YouTube classes and content and that you can go through and occasionally courses you can go through as well. For you, what do you feel like were the biggest takeaways? I heard you talk about manual old mode, how to control your camera so you’re not just shooting an automatic and really adjusting aperture and the shutter speed-

Ana Zelić: Shutter speed. I saw everything.

Bjork Ostrom: I saw, yeah. What were the other pieces that you felt like were helpful in your photography journey to help you understand how to take better photos?

Ana Zelić: Well, shortly after photography school, I actually enrolled into Artificial Lighting course from Joanie, because it was winter then and was I was working online. Just, I couldn’t squeeze everything that I wanted to shoot over the weekend. So I quickly realized this is what I want to know. So one of the, I think biggest takeaways from my photography is definitely learning how to manipulate light because oftentimes it’s light that makes a great photography. I mean, of course you, you do need composition also editing skills. I feel like there are some people who feel like editing is like photoshopping in a negative way, but it’s not. It’s just camera doesn’t see what you see. Camera sees in her own ways. But I want to use that camera to make my own vision and I just need editing to make that happen.

Bjork Ostrom: You use Lightroom or Photoshop? What is your preferred tool to edit in?

Ana Zelić: My preferred it’s a Lightroom. I mean, it’s much easier and intuitive than Photoshop. I did started learning Photoshop last year because I needed to do some composites for my book, but I’m not really still like Photoshop savvy like I am in Lightroom. I would say, definitely lightning. Sorry.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. That makes sense for sure. At the end, the significance of lighting and the impact that light can have on a final image. What do you use for your artificial light? Do you have like a set of lights that you really like? What does that setup look like?

Ana Zelić: I actually still have the flash that I bought when I enrolled in the course two and a half years ago, actually more, almost three. It’s just like a mid-range Godox, but I do have two or three softboxes. I have a really big one. I Think it’s 47-inch, one. And then I have some smaller ones when I want to recreate like a small window and stuff like that.

Bjork Ostrom: And Is that the idea with the softboxes? So if anybody were to see me, you’d see over my right shoulder I have actual window, but that potentially could just be a fake window with a big softbox and nobody would really know. Is it kind of the same idea where you’re essentially replicating what a window would look like when doing a shoot?

Ana Zelić: Yeah. Sometimes I would just physically move the light, maybe slightly in front over the food, but to still be a sidelight so that there’s that shadow. A window would naturally create on the back. And yeah, I love to play with light and shadows. I feel like when people want to create light and airy images, they often shut down shadows totally and I feel no. You need some contrary contrast, it’s still light. It’s still airy, but you need that three-dimensionality to really make the image pop.

Bjork Ostrom: So you have a big softbox. It’s kind of like a light. Do you have a reflector on the other side or do you put another kind of less powerful soft box? And then how does the flash play into it as well?

Ana Zelić: So I only use one source of light, one flash. I don’t have any other. I do have a reflector that I will use occasionally, but I won’t put it totally next to the food because I still want to keep some of that shadowed. But there are times when I just don’t use reflector because I want to make some drama when I want to make it’s a really sunny summer day. But, I mean, you only really need one light and then you can use whatever you have at home to block some of that light or reflect some of that light.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So when you say a flash, is the softbox the flash? Is that’s what is that what’s flashing or the soft box always on and then you have another flash somewhere else?

Ana Zelić: Inside that softbox you have a flash unit. So that flash unit is, how do you say it? It exists on its own. It’s unit for itself. And then I have three softboxes of different side sizes that I put onto the light stand and then that flash just flashes the light onto that softbox, which then disperses the light onto the screen.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. So you have one light source?

Ana Zelić: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And then you can switch out the type of softbox, depending on what you want the light to look like. So, what is interesting, you only need one light source if you’re only going to have the light coming from one direction and so you were saying before, you might want to have it look like a small window, in which case you’ll put that flash behind a smaller softbox, or if you want it really to be dispersed in kind of diffused in a big area, then you’re going to put the larger softbox.

Ana Zelić: A large one. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. In terms of styling, I feel that’s another really important piece of photography that people don’t often talk about. Is there anything that you’ve learned about styling that has been helpful in regards to capturing a photo in the way that you want it to look like?

Ana Zelić: Definitely. I mean the photography school has taught me a lot of basics that I kind of see on some of the images, but I didn’t know how to name it such as layering technique or just composition techniques in general and stuff. So yeah, the course has taught me a lot. So once you start kind of using those bits that you learn, you’ll just at one point you’ll stop thinking about it and you’ll just do. You’ll just not naturally know I want to create a curve or I want to make some layers to create some of the dimension in the image and stuff.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s almost like house building where I could go and look at a wall that’s been framed up and I could see, okay, I understand that to be a two by four. I understand that to be a nail. I understand chip rock, but then what it takes is somebody explaining it and saying, here’s actually how you assemble that. Here’s some tips on how to do that well. And then you can take it and say, great, I’m going to like do it exactly you’ve done it a few times, but once you get good enough, you can start to say, okay, I know best practices. Here’s what I’m going to do that’s a little bit creative. I’m going to do create a little corner here that’s unique in terms of how the drywall goes on or whatever it might be. I don’t actually have any clue on how to build a house, but it feels like that’s one of the things that, to your point naming something, does is it allows you to understand what the tool is and then for you as a creator, you have that in your kind of tool belt that then you can refer to and give back to.

Ana Zelić: I love that. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think a lot of times as creators, that’s one of the primary benefits we get from watching other people do their skill; is to see, oh, here’s how you assemble that. Here’s how you create that. What do think in terms of the start to finish process? What do you think are the most important tools for you as a photographer? My guess is Lightroom. Are there other things that you use that are, whether it be a gadget or software, that you use that help you with your photography?

Ana Zelić: Well, since I started shooting my book, so about a year ago, I really ventured into tethering. By that point I was just shooting blind or just on the, on the small LCD screen. But I think seeing my scene on a big screen definitely helps because instead of just clicking that shutter hundred times, you just need to click it two to three times because this is what I need my scene to look. So I use actually Capture One for the tethering because I shoot with Helicon, or as would in the US say, Nikon. So their software is not very good so I do use Capture One, which also has the ability to edit images like Lightroom. So I would say, in the past year that tethering, has really helped improve my comp composition, my choice of colors and stuff, because I could see what I was creating. And I also started just thinking it more through.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. So Capture One is a tethering software. So you run that on your computer and then… Can you talk through the actual. This will be you tapping into your IT previous life, your IT work. But can you talk through actually how that all works. And then what screen are you using to do the tethering?

Ana Zelić: So Capture One, I think is primarily photo editing app just Lightroom, but it has that ability to connect your camera via HDMI or whatever cable you have. So you can connect your camera to your computer, and then you just enter capture one and then the app application should recognize your camera. And then you should just hit live view. There’s a little button and suddenly your computer screen is showing your camera’s LCD screen.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. It’s almost like-

Ana Zelić: Sorry. And then you can also change the ISO, the shutter speed and the aperture directly on Your computer on that app. So you basically don’t need to use your camera. It just serves you to show the image on the computer.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s almost then the back of the camera becomes this huge screen and you’re able to kind of control and manipulate that. Are you shooting off of a tripod usually as well?

Ana Zelić: For that, yeah. For that I’m using actually a C-stand when I do a flat lays. So, yeah I will actually mostly use tethering when I do flat lays, but actually when I did my cover image of my book, I did shoot on a tripod because I really wanted to capture the smoke and the canton candles and I took 15 images or so with that.

Bjork Ostrom: So speaking of, your book’s coming out soon. Can you talk about one thing that you learned in the process of doing cookbook? What was your takeaway? We kind of touched on that a little bit, but this will be kind of, as we wrap up here, another touch point. Is that something you would do again? Was it harder than you thought, easier than you thought? What was that process look? How did you manage doing that and keeping your blog up?

Ana Zelić: Well, to answer your last question, I didn’t really sure manage to do that and keep my blog alive. I mean, that is just how it worked for me. I know that some people maybe have better. They just better manage their time or I don’t know. For me, I feel I underestimated it a bit, the whole book process thing or I just thought that I would be quicker but I just couldn’t be because my book is half of them is layer cakes and you do need quite a bit of time to make a layer cake. Just for it to chill to make the buttercream to solidify, decorated in the right way and not to mention all the testing prior to the final version. So even if it was a bit hard, I’m really grateful for that opportunity because I’ve seen firsthand how to work with a publisher, how the deadlines work, how to work with a designer team, how to create cover. There are all these small little processes that you just pick up on and I also learned how to write better recipes instructions, which will be beneficial for my blog.

Bjork Ostrom: What’s an example of that? How did you change in terms of the recipe writing from start to finish?

Ana Zelić: I mean, I didn’t change that much. I was always trying to be very descriptive and very detailed but for one, I learned that when you write your ingredients, in the bowl put the flower balloon. That you should always mention the, you need that article. You shouldn’t just try to put flower. Put the flower, put the baking powder and stuff. So I just maybe picked up some of the expressions because I’m good with basic ones. But when I tried to explain some decorating techniques, then my editor really came in handy because she knew how to translate better what I really wanted to say and explain.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s interesting because I think in our conversation, there’s kind of two ways of education. One is the previous way you described, which is information gathering, learning how to shoot manual before you get your camera. It’s really having as much information as possible and then moving forwards. And the other one is you probably never, would’ve been fully prepared to the point where you would’ve said, okay, I have everything I need to write a cookbook. So you just do it and a lot of the learning comes from doing it, moving into it.

Ana Zelić: Yeah, definitely.

Bjork Ostrom: And I’ve seen that. I can think of countless ways where over the last five, 10 years that’s been true for us as well. How do you do a podcast? Well, you just kind of start and you put the pieces together as you do it, or how do you hire somebody to be a part of your team? Well, you kind of say, what do I need to figure out next in order to move this along? You’d figure out that little thing and you keep moving forward with it and I think that’s inspiring to hear you really to do both of those things when you can to think, to prepare to research. But then also to say, I’m just going to dive in. And in this process of doing it, I’ll learn a lot from it, which it seems was the case. So when does it come out? How can people buy it? And we want to make sure that you get a chance to give it a shout-out. And then what is the name? Thanks.

Ana Zelić: So the name is actually game on my blog name so it’s The Cake Chronicles and it should come out November 30th in North America and for the rest of the world there will probably be a small delay due to the shipping time and just the pandemic and everything.

Bjork Ostrom: Weird operation logistics world we’re living in now.

Ana Zelić: Current global events, that’s what I call it. But yeah, I just so far so good that everything is going, according to plan, I’m also finished with a small bonus ebook for all pre-orders. I’m just waiting for my editor to just confirm it. I really wanted to give some extra to the people who support me and yeah, you can buy it on Amazon. I actually have a whole page dedicated on my blog with all the links and information on how to buy it.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s cool. We’ll link to that in the show notes and big congratulations to being on the side of it. I’m sure it’s fun to be talking about it as opposed to just working on it.

Ana Zelić: So definitely, yes.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s ready.

Ana Zelić: This is the fun part.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay, right. Ana, if people want to follow along with what you’re up to. Where’s the best place to find you?

Ana Zelić: Yeah. Currently, on my Instagram, you can find me at @anasbakingchronicles or my blog anasbakingchronicles.com but you can always also shoot me an email. I’m pretty good at replying. I think so.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Hey, thanks so much for coming and sharing your story. We really appreciate it.

Ana Zelić: Thank you so much for having me. I really had a nice time. So thanks.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s a wrap for this episode. Thanks so much for tuning in as a reminder, just go ahead and hit subscribe or follow if you haven’t already in your podcast app of choice, Spotify, the Apple Podcast app, or you could just go to foodbloggerpro.com/podcast. We will always put up the episodes there and some people to actually just read through them. So we have the show notes accompanying every podcast episode and that also includes the transcript. So if you just to sit and read as opposed to listen, you can do that as well when we have that available on foodbloggerpro.com/podcast, as well lots of other elements. So go ahead and explore. Dive in there. The Food Blogger Pro team does an incredible job rounding up all the different places that we are around the web, putting it in one spot and making that available to you and that’s foodbloggerpro.com. Thanks so much for tuning in. Our hope with this is that we can help you get a tiny bit better every day forever that’s why we exist, and that’s why we show up here each and every week. We’ll be back here next Tuesday. See you then.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by our sister site Clariti. You’ve heard me talk about it a few times now on the podcast, and it’s a tool that I’m really excited about. We’ve been spending a lot of time and energy thinking about how we can build Clariti as the go-to source, the tool for bloggers who want to learn how to organize, optimize, update their blog content in service of growth. That’s what we’re after. And we’re looking to build a tool to help bloggers do that. And it came out of some of the things that we were doing for Pinch of Yum. Clariti gives you insights into the way your content can be stronger and more valuable for your readers, either through automatic suggestions… It’s not really suggestions, it’s just information like, hey, the alt text is broken here, or alt text is missing. You need to go in and fix that. Or the links are broken, you need to fix those.

Bjork Ostrom: So not only does it help you optimize your library of blog content, maybe you have multiple hundreds of posts or, for some of us, even thousands. But once you do that, it’ll help increase your traffic, SEO ranking, revenue, but it also helps validate your updates with a direct integration with Google Analytics. So what we’re doing is we’re saying, hey, we want to, we want to tie all of this together. So we want bloggers to have the ability to not only understand their content, to see the hundreds or thousands of pieces of content that they have, to also see some areas they could improve that. Maybe there’s some things that are broken or missing that you could add.

Bjork Ostrom: We want to allow people to also create campaigns, so if you do have things that you want to improve, great. You can create a campaign around that and say, hey, these hundred pieces of content, we want to optimize these hundred pieces of content. You’d use in Clariti what’s called a campaign.

Bjork Ostrom: But we’ve also just released a new feature that integrates with Google Analytics. So now you can make a note, you say, hey, I made this update, and you can start to see what are the pieces of content and how have they performed over a certain period of time. So you can look back and say, over the past 30 days, is there any content on my site that has gotten zero page views? None of us want that, but maybe that’s a consideration around, should I have this piece of content on my site? Or should I treat this a little bit differently? If it’s just there and kind of taking up space, maybe I want to either republish it or just remove it. Some people do that with their content. They say, how do I filter out this content? Or maybe you want to look back and say, hey, over the past seven days, what’s the piece of content that’s been doing the best?

Bjork Ostrom: Or 30 days, what’s the best piece of content that’s been doing the best? Maybe I want to focus on some monetization efforts on that. Could I add a video to that piece of content that is going to earn higher ad revenue? So you have an ad player like through AdThrive or Mediavine, you create a video player and add that. It’s a great way to optimize revenue, to start to think strategically around some of those decisions. And we’re building Clariti as a tool to help people do that, ourselves included. So Clariti is C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com. And all of this happens automatically. So you set up your blog with a plugin that we have, you connect your Google Analytics, and all of your posts’ information appears within Clariti, it integrates with Google Analytics, and our goal is to make it as simple as possible to understand that.

Bjork Ostrom: And what we’re doing is we’re offering early access. We’re calling it 25 Forever Plan for Clariti. For anybody who wants to sign up early, be an early user, you can go to Clariti.com/food, F-O-O-D to sign up and get on that early access list. We’re doing the 25 Forever Plan for anybody who signs up early as a thank you to signing up early, and also as a way to say, hey, no matter what down the line, when we increase the prices, your account will not go up. It’s $25 forever. You’ll be locked in. Even if Clariti goes to a more expensive price, point, $50, $100, whatever it might be, as an early user, we will honor that 25 Forever Plan that you signed up for. So again, it’s Clariti.com/food. We’re excited about this. It’s going to be something that we’re focusing on, not only for ourselves to use for Pinch of Yum and the other sites that we have, but also for our users.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s one of the things that we love doing. We did that with WP Tasty as well, is building a tool, spending lots of time, money, energy, resources, building the thing that we use ourselves, in this case for Pinch of Yum and for the other sites, but then offering it up for other people to use in a way where you don’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars building this thing. You only have to spend $25 a month if you sign up for the early access program. So Clariti.com/food is the best way to get there. Thank you to the Clariti team for sponsoring the Food Blogger Pro Podcast.

Bjork Ostrom: Hello, everybody. This is your host and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. My guess is that you know that you’re listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Just feels like something that I should say every time that we start.

Bjork Ostrom: Today’s interview is with Kimberly Espinel, and she is from The Little Plantation. Her focus is food photography. She actually wrote a book, Creative Food Photography. It’s a beautiful book, and we’re going to be talking about food photography, and actually going into the interview, I thought, hey, we’re just going to focus in on food photography 101, what gear do you need? What settings should you use? But what I found as we moved into the interview is that we actually started to talk a lot about creative business, and how as creators we can move into doing business confidently. And some of the mindsets and frameworks that we can think about as we venture into that world as creative people. Kimberly is going to be talking about some of the things that she’s learned, and also some of the things that she does with the students that she works with and how she helps them along.

Bjork Ostrom: So if you are a creative person, who’s interested in photography, building a business, and you want to do that well, you want to do both the creative and the business side really well, this is going to be a great interview. We’re excited to share it with you. So let’s go ahead and jump in. Kimberly, welcome to the podcast.

Kimberly Espinel: Hi, Bjork. I am super excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, this is great. I always talk about this. It’s really wonderful when people come to the table, you have your mic, you have your sound insulation all around you. It’s awesome. You’ve done this before. So you have a podcast. Tell us a little bit about that as we get into things. What’s the focus for that, and how long have you been doing it?

Kimberly Espinel: Yes. So my podcast is called Eat Capture Share, and very similar to yours, it’s really aimed at food bloggers as well as food photographers. People who are really into the visuals of food, that’s the focus. But we look at the social media side and the marketing and the business side of things, as well as the creative. So it’s kind of like that. I started the podcast two and a half years ago now, and I felt there was a woman of color voice missing, that just took a very female perspective on both sides of the coin, the creative and also the business side of what it actually means to be a food photographer and food blogger.

Bjork Ostrom: When you work with students or in a workshop, and maybe it depends on what the actual workshop is about, do you find yourself talking more about the creative, or more about the business or is it like, it depends, and both are equally as important?

Kimberly Espinel: Yes. So I would say that the vast majority of students that come really come for the creative. I would say actually up until the pandemic, 85% of the things that I shared was more creative focused. But then the pandemic came, and what I noticed was that a lot of people were actually struggling to make ends meet. And also that as more and more of us are doing food photography and becoming food bloggers, that there were so many people teaching the creative side, and actually my gift is to share more of the business side, because it’s all good and well to know your camera and to know color theory and to be passionate about it, but then it’s a whole other ball game to actually make an income doing what you love. So I’ve shifted a little bit more towards that since the pandemic, and yeah, I feel like I’m stepping into what I’m called to teach.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s cool. I think of my dad, who does pottery, and he talks about his friends who also did pottery and ceramics, and some of those people in his network, they were doing it full time. And one of the things he would talk about is a lot of them also had this edge in business and operations, and it’s a really rare combination to be both an artist and also to understand business and operations.

Bjork Ostrom: I think of the work that… So Lindsay, my wife, Lindsay. You are vaguely familiar, I think, with the podcast so know our story. She does Pinch of Yum, and that’s the creative. And we have a team that we work with that does that. I do operations type stuff. That’s just kind of worked out that way.

Bjork Ostrom: For some people, they are creative, and they might not have somebody who is business-minded operations, or they might be business-minded and operations, but they don’t have somebody who they can work with to do the creative, and they don’t feel like they are the creative. I think of our friend who talks about left brain, right brain. I need to hire a left brain to help me. How much of it do you think is somebody learning those skills saying, “Hey, I feel like I am a creative. That’s what I love doing. And I know that I need to do the business stuff, so I’m going to learn it.” Versus, “I just need to hire somebody and they need to help me do it.” Do you have thoughts or opinions on that?

Kimberly Espinel: Yes. So, the best situation is that you hire for the areas where you’re weak in. So that could be business, it could be website development, it could be whatever the case may be. So that’s always the ideal scenario, but my audience, and I’m guessing a lot of your audience too, are at the beginning stages of their creative journey, where hiring out just isn’t quite within reach yet.

Bjork Ostrom: Realistic. Yep.

Kimberly Espinel: And so I think, I actually think it’s much more of a story that we’ve told ourselves. So we have that struggling creative, struggling artist. That that somehow has stuck with us. And then also, a lot of people go into creativities because they’re passionate about it. It’s not because they want to run a six-figure business. That’s not often the motivation. And somehow it feels that if you do pursue the financial side of things, you’re selling out or you’re not fully committed to your art or whatever.

Kimberly Espinel: I actually think that we’re in a really good position as creatives to be incredible business people. I believe that because I feel that business is about communication, and we communicate so much through our visuals. And it’s about thinking and problem-solving in a creative way. Like, how can I sell this, or how can I get to that brand? I think it’s fascinating. And I have to say, my background is, I was an adoption social worker for 15 years, so I did nothing business-related. And it’s not a language that I ever knew about. But I think once you crack that code, a whole new world opens up, and you can share your work with so many more people and have your work be so much more impactful that I would love us to shift the narrative and allow ourselves to be the business people that we can be.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That is so cool. Really cool to hear your backstory. So Lindsay and I, if you were to put all of our siblings together, we’d have more adopted siblings than biological siblings. So adoption is a really big part of who we are in our families, and just such a wonderful thing. So thanks for your work in that realm.

Bjork Ostrom: When did you know that you wanted to make a switch, and how did you know the switch that you wanted to make was to this kind of hybrid world of food photography, food media, but then also creative business?

Kimberly Espinel: I would say my route to becoming a creative business owner, a food blogger, food photographer was really by a back street. That’s how I would say. Because I loved my job. I loved what I did. I saw myself doing that for the rest of my life. And then I gave birth to my son, and that really threw everything on its head, because as you will well know from having had siblings who have gone through the adoption process, it’s not as sort of job… I did adoption and fostering as well. It’s not a sort of job where you can go at 5:00 PM, see you later.

Kimberly Espinel: If you have a family who are struggling or a child who’s run away or whatever the case may be, it’s just not a clear cut nine to five. And then also, I live in London, in the UK, and the way that things are set up, it took me an hour to get to work. So it really meant that I wasn’t seeing my child for 12 hours a day. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Everybody finds a path that works for them, but that set up didn’t work for me. And so I realized that I wanted…

Bjork Ostrom: You had this realization, I love this thing, but it’s not working for me. And so then what?

Kimberly Espinel: Then what? Exactly. So I really did a lot of soul searching, and I was like, okay. I want a career that fits around the needs of my child. What am I passionate about? What would I like to do? So he was born in 2010. That was kind of when food blogs were emerging, when they’re becoming a thing, Joy the Baker and all the things. I read them, I marked them. I loved them. And I’ve always been passionate about food. So in fact, what I did is I decided to retrain as a nutritional therapist. So that’s what I did, and then I decided, let me start a food blog so that I can document. I switched to a plant-based diet, and then we document those recipes, start a food blog so that I can attract an audience. And by the time I graduated, I was getting paid work as a food blogger and as a stylist. Then I actually decided, you know what? This, I love this. So I went all in and that’s kind of how it all came to be.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s really cool. One of the things that I love about that is, and one of the things that I think we often see, is people starting out saying, “Hey, I’m going to go the path of nutritional work.” You start to do that. And in deciding confidently that’s where you want to go, there is this other world that’s introduced to you. And that allows you to then have the opportunity to shift a little bit and to say, “Actually, this is where I want to go.” The point in that is encouraging people to not get too bogged down in saying, “What if I don’t pick the right thing?” But to be light on your feet and say, pick somewhere, but also be open to the subtle shifts and changes that might come as you learn more about yourself and your passion and your area of interest.

Bjork Ostrom: But along with that, you have to pay the bills. So what did it look like for you as a business owner to say, “I know that I’m interested in this, and here’s how I’m going to make this work from a financial perspective?” Were there decisions you had to make along the way? Did you say, “You know what, I’d really love to do this, but it’s not working, so I’m going to do this thing that is more financially viable.” You knew the creative, so what did the business side look of it and the decisions along the way with that?

Kimberly Espinel: Yes. So when I started my nutrition studies, I moved from working full-time to part-time. So I still had my adoption work. I had that income stream, so to say, and I also have a partner who worked full-time. Yeah, but as the blog was developing and gaining momentum, I started getting approached by brands for sponsored content, and I styled a cookbook and lots of little, little jobs came to be, so that, by the time I graduated, I had proof of concept. I had an income stream. It was nothing to write home about, wasn’t as though I won the lottery or anything, but…

Bjork Ostrom: But we say, if you can make a dollar, you can make two. And so if have a thousand dollar month, you’re like, “Wait, if I do this a little bit different and change this and do more of this, then maybe this could work.”

Kimberly Espinel: Exactly. So that’s exactly that. I was just like, “You know what? This is possible.” So what I did is I gave myself a year. I said, “You know what, let me give myself a year. I’ve got enough in savings. I can do this.” So I just gave myself a year.

Kimberly Espinel: And then the other thing, to piggyback onto what you said before, is I also looked at my blog stats and I looked at the content that was performing really well and the content that wasn’t resonating. And ironically, when I wrote about nutrition, people weren’t that interested to hear that from me. But when I wrote content around food photography, I had lots of blog hits. Then I also had somebody randomly contact me saying, “I’m going to be in London for a couple of days. Will you teach me food photography?” And I’d never considered that. Then she came and she paid and I was like, wait a minute. All of these pieces are telling me something. So I shifted my content more towards food photography, and that’s really when things took off, as it were.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s interesting. It feels like a really good example of having your ear to the ground and saying, what are the little movements and changes that I see happening around my business and the content that I’m creating? And there’s this combination of stick-to-it-ness, especially in the world of publishing, of content, and creative work, you have to commit to the thing for a long period of time. But to contrast that, you also have to be willing to change to the needs of people. There has to be this intersection of what you’re interested in doing and directionally where you’re going, with what do people need and what will they pay for, whether it’s a sponsored content, whether it’s a workshop, and finding that balance between those.

Bjork Ostrom: So do you have any advice for people who are at that point, where they’re trying to find, what am I good at, what am I interested in, and what do people actually need and what will they pay for and finding that intersection?

Kimberly Espinel: It’s called ikigai or something like that. There’s that Japanese-

Bjork Ostrom: I’m not familiar with that.

Kimberly Espinel: Yeah. There’s a Japanese term for it. I don’t want to butcher it, but I think I’ll maybe if we can put it in the shownotes — it’s these three circles and where they all collide is the… I think the one part that a lot of food bloggers at the start of that journey skip is the tuning into what your audience wants. And that can either be, very obviously you can see the posts that people comment on on Instagram, especially, or the stuff that’s pinned more on Pinterest. But I do like to dig deep into two other areas. So one is blog stats or an Instagram, you also have insights. So I tend to do that at the end of the month. I kind of look at my Instagram stories, my posts, the newsletters I send out that have the best open rates.

Kimberly Espinel: And I try and see is there a common denominator, and then really hone in on that. And then also very boring, but very necessary is actually look at my spreadsheets. Look at where is my income coming from? Did I have a client who booked me for food photography? Can I contact him or her again and see if we can work together again? Or is there a preset that I sold that’s selling really well? Can I push it to the front of the blog? All those little things, that I do take out time at the end of the month to do the review, and I feel it’s made a huge difference. Where I didn’t do that at the start I didn’t do. I was just like, I’m just going to post anything. So there is some thought process and some intentionality behind to make growth happen.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I think sometimes what we can do is we can get so heads down that we just churn out stuff. We get in production mode. We photograph, we do video, we write blog posts, we do social, we respond to everybody, whatever it is. And I think the act of reflecting and analyzing sometimes doesn’t feel like work, but I think of the analogy of, if you have eight hours to cut down a tree, you sharpen your ax for seven and you cut for one. I think there’s something to be said about that. Maybe that’s not the exact spread of time, but even for some people to say, well, just take at least an hour to sharpen your ax.

Bjork Ostrom: Especially with knowledge work, it feels like some of the work of knowledge work is just thinking about work, which seems a little bit like work inception. But what does that look like for you? Do you schedule that time? Do you say, “Every Friday at the end of the month, I’m going to do this.” Or is that just naturally a way that you operate now where you take out your spreadsheet and you say, “For the previous month, here’s how much work came in and what areas. What can I do more of? What can I do less of?”

Kimberly Espinel: Yeah. So, Bjork, I don’t know if you want to cut this out, but I can just tell that you’re excited about talking about this. Like this is the stuff that you love…

Bjork Ostrom: Great. We’ll leave it in. That’s your coaching ability to glean insight on this, which is awesome.

Kimberly Espinel: This is the geeky stuff. This is the geeky stuff, but this is where it all happens. So I’m obsessed with journals and productivity. I have three journals, and one of them… Again, maybe we can put the link in the show notes. I love it, because it has at the front, it has your goals. So for me, I always have an income goal that I set for the year. And then it has your daily goals and your priorities around that. And so I really try and tie those to, if my income goal is X, Y, Z, what can I do today to move the needle forward? I got to look at my stuff.

Kimberly Espinel: I do that daily. I check my income daily. I do my accounts. And part, I also think that helps my mindset. So if I feel like I’ve just lost a client, or I did a discovery call with a student and they didn’t book, sometimes we can feel down, but then I go back and actually no. Somebody bought my presets today. It’s a little boost, and I think we need that when we’re working for ourselves, to know that we’re moving forward. But I check daily, and then I check at the end of the month because of the accounts that I do. So it’s a daily thing, just a checking in, and just… Because I think if I see that there’s something that’s happening in my business, it just makes me feel like there’s abundance. And then just at the end of the month, so I can rejig things. It’s very boring, but I do it daily. Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: And so is that you manually going in and saying, “Okay, here’s where I sell presets. Here’s where they’re available. I sell them through Gumroad.” Or whatever service. Copy that, paste it in to the spreadsheet, and then just repeat that? Is that essentially what that process looks like?

Kimberly Espinel: Yes, essentially.

Bjork Ostrom: Then to reflect on that and to look and say, “Great, this is going well, this isn’t going well.” Or it’s more introspectively saying, “This is working well for me.” So even in these moments that aren’t going well, that you have traction, you have positive stuff happening.

Bjork Ostrom: So you have this spreadsheet, and you do that on a daily basis. You enter this stuff in. Can you talk about how much time does that take? Is that like 15 minutes? Is it an hour? Is it two minutes?

Kimberly Espinel: I have to say, for me, I don’t have to do it, because I have an accountant. I have to say, I’m now at the stage where I have an accountant. But I do it, as I said, because for me it’s about feeling like there’s abundance. It shifts something in my mind. I find it helpful. And then the same way, if I have a month where my sales aren’t so great, so where the business side is, then I don’t need to freak out. But then I feel like I have some sort of power, that it isn’t all outside my control. That I can say, “Okay, last month we did this in revenue. And this month we did half. What shifted, what changed? Did I send out fewer newsletters? Did I do fewer blog posts? Did I lose a client, or whatever it is?” It gives me the sense that I’m in control of my destiny.

Kimberly Espinel: Again, when you work for yourself and you don’t have a boss telling you how amazing you are, it gives me power. I found it empowering. So I will take out whatever, half an hour in the morning to plan my day, to do my spreadsheets, to do all the things, because it fuels me for the rest of them and it gives me direction, because if not, what I find is I could use that start of the day to scroll on Instagram or… It is so seductive. It’s so wonderful. But that anchors me, if that makes sense.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s great. Yeah. I think a lot about people who talk about the first half-hour, hour of your day being your… It’s kind of setting the direction for the day. And one way you could do that is to scroll through Instagram or to pop open your email and just kind of browse through that. But to say, “Hey, what’s important for the business? Well, in this case, revenue. Where are the places where that’s coming from? Great. Here’s where it’s coming from. How does that inform the decisions I’m going to make today in terms of what I do and work on? Great.”

Bjork Ostrom: It reminds me a lot of when we would do monthly recap reports for Pinch of Yum and say, hey, here are the things that worked or the things that didn’t work. But that rhythm for me was really helpful as a forced exercise to reflect on what we were doing, what we weren’t doing, what was working, what wasn’t working. And it’s something that I miss about doing those. We could replicate it, but we haven’t. So it’s something that makes a lot of sense.

Bjork Ostrom: The piece that I’m curious about that you talked about before was this idea of treating… Any time that you have an issue or a problem that you come up against, instead of thinking, “Oh, this is a business problem. I don’t do business. I need some help with this.” Instead, saying, “Hey, this is a creative problem. This is a problem that I can come up with a creative solution for.” I think that mindset of curiosity, the mindset of creativity as it relates to a problem. Maybe it’s not a business problem, maybe it’s a puzzle, and you get to figure out the puzzle. How do you do that? What does that look like for you as you’ve come up against… You gave the example of, hey, revenue was half this month than what it was before. Instead of being like, “Ah, this is the worst.” How do you stay light on your feet and be creative in regards to that as a problem that you can approach creatively?

Kimberly Espinel: Yes. I’m going to say something before that, and it might seem a little left field, but I hope it’s connected. And I say this again because I’m listening to what I hear my audience tell me on Instagram Stories. So another thing that I do is I, and again, this, I hope it makes sense. This comes because I’m an immigrant, I’m a woman, I’m a woman over 40, I’m a brown woman. So there’s always a lot of negativity that I’ve experienced. So what I’ve always done, is I’ve always had really positive self-talk. So I always say, “I’m an amazing photographer. I’m an amazing teacher.” I tell myself that just to give myself strength, and I notice that a lot of people have a lot of negative self-talk. I’m not good enough.

Kimberly Espinel: “Oh, I’m not really a food photographer. All these clients said no, because what I offer isn’t amazing.” I don’t get into that. All I have to say is, so if there is a day where I’m not earning enough, I don’t think, “Oh my God, I’m crap. I don’t know what I’m doing, or I’m not good enough.” I think there’s something that isn’t working with my marketing or how I’m communicating this offer that I need to figure out. I need to figure out how, because what I offer, I feel, is the best I can offer. I feel I give it my all. I know that can be transformational.

Kimberly Espinel: So I know there’s nothing necessarily wrong with the offer that I’m putting on the table. There’s something else that’s not right. And I need to figure that out. Is it because my copy isn’t right? Did I not use the right photo? Was it the timing? I love the challenge of that. I love the challenge of that. But I think the foundation is that I believe in what I have to offer. And I think that it is really helpful when you’re stepping into a space, like we do as food photographers and food bloggers, that is crowded. It’s so easy to look left and right and think, she’s so much better. And so and so, their food photography classes… you can get into that. I try not to get into that. I try to go in with, I can do this. There’s just something that is awry, and I need to put my finger on it and sort it out. I don’t know if that makes.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s incredibly powerful. What I heard you saying, or at least a piece of it, is to not look inward and say, “What is wrong about me that this didn’t work?” But to say externally, “I know that what I’m doing is good. I know that it’s impactful. I know that the work that I’m doing is excellent.” So if there is some hiccup along the way where that’s not fully getting communicated, let’s look at that. Maybe it’s the copy, and the copy needs to be changed to do a better job explaining that. Essentially, looking at the external things and saying, “How do I give as clear visibility inward to what I’m doing, which I know is excellent and wonderful and worthy… ” Of whatever it is that you’re doing, being hired, paying for. As opposed to saying, “Shoot, how do I fix myself?” Is that a little bit of what you’re saying?

Kimberly Espinel: A hundred percent. And I’m saying that because a lot of creatives, that’s almost in our DNA, doubt themselves. I see this so much. People who create incredible work, stuff we want to lick the screen. It’s so gorgeous. And they’re so tough on themselves. And so that is why I also want to model that, because I want them to see… I think as food bloggers and food photographers, we bring so much joy into the world. What we do is so amazing, right? We get these ingredients and then we create something that’s beautiful. I don’t know how much you’re into the food photography side of things, but I remember the two or three food bloggers whose work I just fell in love with, where I was like, “Oh my God, I want to do that.” I want us to know the power of what we do, and I don’t want us to ever forget. I want people to know they’re doing amazing things. They’re making brands lives better. They’re creating incredible content. Their work is worthy. And I need to model that in order to teach that, if that makes sense.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. How much do you feel like the conversations that you’re having with photographers, creators, how much of it is mindset kind of reflecting on who you are, how you work versus, hey, here’s how you get better at shooting in manual, like really tactical?

Kimberly Espinel: I would say the audience that I’m now cultivating is moving more towards the latter, because people can just go on YouTube, and when we started, none of that existed, and now it’s just at the fingertips. But also there comes a point where you figure manual out, you crack that nut, so to say. And then the next stage is about really positioning yourself and distinguishing yourself. And that actually requires mindset, but also introspection in the same way that all that we’ve discussed about. How is your photography different? How are you going to stand out? How are you going to get noticed? How are you going to stop comparing yourself and imitating what has already been done to really fine-tune your own voice? That’s really the work that I’m doing much more now than quote unquote, just manual mode. Which is important, super important. But I think that for me, where I’m stepping into my role as a teacher is to really support people in finding their own unique, creative style.

Bjork Ostrom: What does that transformation look like? Where are people on that journey, usually? If you were to boil it down to, and then what does it look like once you’re on the other side? Are you ever on the other side?

Kimberly Espinel: Well, I think it’s a lifelong journey for sure, but I do think there’s steps that are noticeably… Transformational steps that everyone can see. So I think a lot of the times when students come to me, they’ve watched the YouTube videos and they’ve done all the things, and what they’re ending up is they’re creating images that look generic. That look a little bit like what everybody else is doing. So what I do-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. They’re really good, but they’re really similar to… I use the analogy all the time of songwriting, and it’s like, oh, that’s a really good song, but it kind of sounds like, Seal, Kissed by a Rose or whatever. It’s like, wait, this is the same melody.

Kimberly Espinel: Part of why that happens is because a lot of the times we are very external, which is normal. That’s how we’re set up as humans. We have our eyes at the front of our face. And we’re spending so much time on social media, so we’re consuming lot of content, and it’s very hard not to get influenced by that. In fact, when you’re at the start, it’s very natural to want to imitate and emulate the people that you admire. But then there comes a stage where we actually have to do the introspective work and to think about what is my unique gift, and how can I bring that to the fore? And that consists, for example, in looking at, I always say, look at your color story.

Kimberly Espinel: So are you on the cool spectrum? Are you on the warm spectrum? Do you find that you’re moving towards using analog colors or complementary colors, or how are you expressing colors for example? And that is one part of how you start creating your own look and your own feel. What I do is I ask people to play with different ways of working with color, for example, so cool and warm, and then different ways of combining colors and to write down which one do you like best? Which one got you really excited? Which image? Because it gives you lots of indicators of where you are.

Kimberly Espinel: And the same with editing, the same with light work. All these things can be manipulated and controlled and changed in such a way that it allows you to create a signature look that something will see your image and it’ll go, that’s Lindsey, that’s Kimberly. And I can really see that transformation. I also can see how people feel more confident in playing more boldly with color and really having a go at editing. There’s a messy phase in the middle where you’re trying stuff out, but then when you come out the other end, it feels really good.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. But I would imagine one of the fears, if I put myself in that position, is a lot of the reasons why I think we emulate certain people is because they have been successful. And there’s a safety in saying, this person did it this way, and they were successful doing that. So there’s a relative amount of safety in me doing it this way, because that’s how this person did it. That could be applied to photography, operations, best practices, whatever it might be, business or creative. So how do people feel confident in creating their own look, style, brand, knowing that they might not have examples of that being successful in the world?

Kimberly Espinel: So I think one is, you don’t necessarily have to share everything. You can do a lot of the things behind the scenes and only share something that you feel really confident with. I also think it’s nice to be part of a creative community of people who cheer you on, maybe who give you feedback. My courses, for example, we have Facebook groups, but you don’t even need that. You could have a community on Instagram, maybe a DM group, or a friend that you connect with.

Kimberly Espinel: But then also, I think, the other side of this comfort is where the magic happens. It’s part of the process, and sticking with a set formula, I think A, becomes boring very quickly, but B, I don’t think you can ever be as good as the person that you’re emulating. I just think there’s this… Yeah. There’s magic at the other side of trying and failing and trying and failing. And that’s where you want to get to.

Bjork Ostrom: I think about this with podcasting and I listen to certain podcasters and I’m like, oh my gosh, I love the way that they podcast, they interview. I think of a couple of different people who are really confrontational, edgy. I love listening to that. I know that’s not going to be me. So if I try and emulate it, I could put those jeans on, they’re not going to fit very well.

Bjork Ostrom: And I would imagine the same thing with photography. One of the things that you’re trying to do is emulate when it’s something that fits into who you are and matches what you’re about, in service of becoming the maximum version of who you are as a creator. How do you max it out, 100%. This is perfect alignment in my style, how I want to show myself and present myself to the world. It might have little elements of those people who have inspired you, but really it is you a hundred percent. Is that kind of what you’re trying to get through in that transformation?

Kimberly Espinel: Yes. Exactly. And I think one way that can be helpful in stopping yourself from emulating certain people, if you notice that you’re doing that, is either mute them for a little while and/or also start following work of people that are totally different than you, so that… There’s three creators who I really, really feel inspired by, and they’re all so different. And so there’s a little element of each of them that really resonates that I’ve pooled to create my own look. And I think that versus just following everybody who does exactly the same kind of visual storytelling as me, that probably wouldn’t have led to the style that I have now.

Bjork Ostrom: Who are those people that you appreciate, or just a couple of them?

Kimberly Espinel: Somebody called Gabriel Cabrera, he’s a Mexican Canadian food photographer who does a lot of really abstract artificial light colors, it’s neon green. It’s crazy. I love it. And I love colors, so I admire work like that. And then the other one’s Luisa Brimble. She does a lot of very natural, very unstyled and very homely. Like it feels homely. And that’s something I love to convey in my photography, is the sense of belonging and just a down-to-earthness. And then the one is Aran Goyoaga or Canelle Vanille. She does, a little bit moody, darker shadows, but still… and that’s very much me as well. So they’re so different. And yet each one of them has totally influenced the photographer that I am today.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s not exactly the same, but there’s a little bit of overlap. So you can find inspiration without feeling like this person is doing very similar work to what I’m doing, which I think, yeah, that’s great. So let’s say you get to that point, you’re kind of in this early stages, you get the technical expertise, which then allows you to use that technical expertise to refine your style. I think it’s kind of hard to refine your style if you haven’t refined the tool set that’s going to allow you to do that. Understanding your camera, understanding basics of styling, maybe some of the basics of composition, things like that.

Bjork Ostrom: So you go through these general stages, technical, style or brand refinement. And then you get to the other side. How do you translate that into a business, if that’s the thing that you want to do? For some people, they can stop there and feel really good about it. I’m a creator, I’ve refined what I do, I feel really good about it. But some people then want to take that and say, great, I want to use this in the marketplace to create an income in some way. How do you go about doing that in the world of photography?

Kimberly Espinel: A couple of ways. One would be… I’m very much a pro having a blog. I know it’s not quite as trendy anymore, but working on SEO and just thinking about what would my ideal customer be Googling? And making sure that you meet those needs and then it should show-

Bjork Ostrom: Do you have an example of that?

Kimberly Espinel: Yeah, for example, I have a portfolio page, and I’ve used all my keywords and tagged all my photos so that if somebody were to type in “London food photographer”, then it would lead very nicely to my portfolio page and also show examples of kind of work that I’ve done.

Kimberly Espinel: And then I do think posting regularly on Instagram, Pinterest, those kinds of places is really powerful. Just the way that things are now, posting just once or twice a week is very hard, but you need to post more regularly and make sure that you use all the hashtags, again, that people would be looking for. And also reaching out to brands. If they’re brands that you can see are working with other food photographers or food bloggers, being cheeky and DM-ing them or emailing them. I’ve struck gold that way and it’s worked for me, so I can definitely recommend it.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you share specifically what that looks like, and walk people through, there was a brand, you were interested in working with them, you saw that they had worked with other food photographers, you messaged them, and something came from that. How do you do that? How would people go through the process of making that work and any advice that you have for folks?

Kimberly Espinel: Yes. A good example I can share is another food photographer who I am friendly with, I saw that she was doing, I think it was a campaign with KitchenAid, I want to say. And so I DMed her. I mean, this is somebody I knew, I have to say, so I wasn’t fangirling or anything. And I said, “Listen, I noticed that you work with KitchenAid. I’d love to work with them. Are you happy to share the contact that you use?” And she’s like, “Yeah, of course.” And so then I DMed that contact, like, “Listen, my name is Kimberly. I saw that you worked with so-and-so. If you’re ever doing a campaign and looking for vegan food bloggers or whatever, do consider me.” And then they did. And yeah. So yeah, that’s how I…

Bjork Ostrom: A personal, warm connection. If there’s something to be said about, it’s like the basic premise of LinkedIn, “Hey, you know this person who knows this person, can you make the connection here?” And it’s manual and it takes work. And it’s not something that scales, but the idea is kind of relationship-based connections and that takes time. But it’s also impactful. So I love that. Yeah. That’s great.

Bjork Ostrom: Are there other ways that you’ve seen students or people that you work with find success as a creator, whether it be sponsored content, doing direct work with clients like, “Hey, I’m going to do a shoot at a restaurant, or for a brand.” Other ways that you see people having success for things that should be considered in the world of photography or creative media around food?

Kimberly Espinel: Yeah. What I always advise people to do is to create the content that their ideal customer would be looking for. So for me, for example, I love working with plant-based and vegan brands. If I look at the content that they love, it very much aligns with my style. It’s a lot of rich, deep colors to kind of emphasize the plant-based aspect. So I’m not going to use muted tones. I’m going to double down on that. So really looking at what would appeal to my ideal customer. And I also think if you’re at the very, very start of your journey, I know this is an unpopular opinion, but if you’re at the very start of your journey, you don’t have a portfolio yet, you don’t have experience yet, I think there’s nothing wrong with reaching out either to a brand or to a restaurant and saying, “Listen, I’d love to get some experience. Would you like some photos and doing some quote unquote, work for free?” Just to build up your portfolio, to build up your confidence, to build up some experience. And sometimes I’ve seen that happen too, is those free things can then turn into paid work as well. But then again, it goes back to thinking, problem-solving that business side to make it work.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. There’s a story from somebody who attended a workshop that we did, an online workshop. I’m trying to think. This was a few years ago. But I said the same thing. I’m like, hey, I’m totally okay with working for free. We did it. You don’t want to work for free in the sense where I think there’s a lot of negative connotations around working for free when a brand comes to you and says like, “Hey, we’ll do this in exchange for exposure.” Like, that’s one thing. But if you’re in the early stages, it’s like interning. And it’s like, I interned. I know a lot of people who interned now have very successful careers. As you’re getting started, you need something to put in your portfolio and say, “Hey, I created this thing for this brand. Here’s what it looked like.”

Bjork Ostrom: You can do that whether it’s you practicing without an official relationship with the brand, and just posting branded photos, or you could reach out to a brand and say, I’m interested in doing this. Would you be interested if I do it for free? And some would say yes, some might say no. In this case, the person did that. I think she actually did it in a post, talked about a brand that she loved, and then after, shared it with them and said, “Hey, if you ever need food photography help, would love to offer my services.” And they’re like, “Actually, that’d be awesome.” And it was like, oh, cool. It worked.

Bjork Ostrom: The follow-up to me after was like, “How much should I charge?” I was like, “Oh my gosh, that’s another conversation.” But yeah, I think that’s a great point, and something that should be considered if you’re in the early stages. Just don’t stay there too long. Eventually get to the point where you feel comfortable charging for your services.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m curious to hear, as we come to the end here, you have a lot of different places that you’ve created product services. You work with students, you do workshops, you have your book. What have you found to be most impactful from a business growth perspective?

Kimberly Espinel: Oh. I would say two things. One is, I love my digital products because, it takes a lot of work upfront to create them, but they are passive income streams. They’re things that I sell, to use the stereotypical things I sell in my sleep. I do love that. For me, the most lucrative is actually my food photography works. I have a handful of recurring clients that I create monthly content for. So that’s quite lucrative. And then finally, my online courses are much more profitable than my in-person workshops. And that’s just because there’s much more overhead in running in-person workshops.

Bjork Ostrom: Space. Yeah.

Kimberly Espinel: Yeah, exactly. The food. And it also takes more admin time to arrange everything. Where’s everybody staying, accommodation, all those things. But online courses just means you can serve more people. And, again, there’s that upfront cost of creating it, but once you’ve created it, it’s an amazing income stream. So yeah, those are kind of my three things.

Bjork Ostrom: And kind of as a lead-in, as we close out. I’m sure there are people who, whether it’s a course, whether it’s a workshop, whether it’s working with your coaching or your book, a lot of options, we’ll link to those in the show notes. How can people reach out and connect with you, work with you, and would there be a process, like, “Hey, start by signing up for the email list.” Or “Start by buying the book and going through that.” Or is it ala carte in regards to where people are on their journey, in regards to what it looks like to work with you?

Kimberly Espinel: Yes. The two best ways, I would say, is number one, I run an Instagram food photography challenge called Eat Capture Share. I’ve been running that for four years, and more than 3000 people sign up to it every season. And it is free. And what it does, it goes back to something we talked about before, is, it really… For one, I share a lot of my teaching with participants, and there’s also an Instagram Live show where we do teaching as well. So there’s a lot of value that you get for free just from that in terms of your learning.

Kimberly Espinel: But the second thing it does, and I think that’s a side effect I hadn’t anticipated, is a lot of really strong friendships are built, because for three weeks, you’re with this group of people who feel just as passionate about food photography as you do, and you set these really challenging tasks, and everybody’s cheering you on and commenting and following you. There’s just these really strong bonds that are built through that. So that is the best, and my most popular offering for sure. And that’s for everybody, beginners to professionals.

Kimberly Espinel: But I think for people who know their manual mode, who’ve done all the things, watched all the YouTube videos, then I would say the next part is my book, because it’s really about finding your style and finding your creative voice, and doing that introspective work. I think I shared my heart in that book and I really believe in it. I really feel that it’s transformational. And those are the two things, the two most powerful things I think I could mention.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s awesome. And it’s beautiful. It’s really well done. And so not only is it impactful in terms of the content, but also it’s a book you could set out and people who don’t do food photography could look through and I think really enjoy looking through it. So it’s a beautiful creation in and of itself and also impactful.

Bjork Ostrom: Kimberly, thanks for coming on the podcast, for talking through this stuff. Really fun for me to connect with you, and we’ll be sure to link up all of that stuff in the show notes so people can check that out as well. And you have your podcast. Maybe we can end with that in terms of where people can check that out and subscribe, because everybody listening to this, they’re going to be podcast people. So where do people go for that?

Kimberly Espinel: Yes, it’s called Eat Capture Share. We’re now in season six, starting again in late August. And as I mentioned before, we cover food photography, food blogging, the business side of things, and yeah. I’d love people to tune in.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. We’ll link to that as well. Kimberly, thanks for coming on.

Kimberly Espinel: Thank you so much for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s a wrap for this episode. Another big thank you to Kimberly for coming on and sharing her insights. As always, make sure to check out the show notes. There’s a ton of resources that we include, and I know most people probably listen to this when they’re driving in their car or working out or doing dishes. That’s kind of my podcast listening list. Those are the times when I’m most likely to listen to a podcast, but if that’s true for you, maybe make a mental note or an actual note on your phone to go to foodbloggerpro.com/podcast. And that’s where you’re going to see all of the different podcasts that we have. You can search for older episodes. It’s something that not a lot of people do, but it’s a great resource. If you want to dig deeper, if it’s an area that you’re interested in, or an area that you want to learn a little bit more about, that’s the best place to go. foodbloggerpro.com/podcast.

Bjork Ostrom: The best place to go if you’re interested in becoming a Food Blogger Pro member is foodbloggerpro.com/membership. If you haven’t ever checked it out, the good thing is you can do that in a relatively risk-free way, because we have a 60-day money-back guarantee. So if you get in and 31 days down the line, you’re like, “Wait a minute, maybe this isn’t what I thought it was.” You can just reach out we’ll process a refund for you. So it is low pressure, but potential high reward if you dig in, if you go through the content, if you engage in the forums. And that’s why we exist, is because we want to have an influence and an impact on people who are creators online in the food space.

Bjork Ostrom: And if that’s you, Food Blogger Pro is a great place in a great community for you to spend time in. And that’s really the key, is you have to invest in order to get out of it. We want to help accelerate any learning and traction that you have with your business. So again, that’s foodbloggerpro.com/membership. You can check that out.

Bjork Ostrom: And if you haven’t yet, go ahead and subscribe to the podcast in whatever app you listen to podcasts, there should be a subscribe, or I think Apple is actually calling it follow now, because I think for a long time, people got confused and thought if they hit subscribe, then they’d have to pay for it. But following along with the podcast is free. So go ahead and do that in whatever app that you use.

Bjork Ostrom: Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed the episode. We’ll be back with a new episode next week. Until then, make it a great week. Thanks.