Start Your Buisness- 1-2-1 session with Yan Preston

27/02/2020

Yan Preston is an award winning photographer based in the UK. Yan has won multiple awards for her projects including the Sony award for her professional landscape. At my university (Huddersfield) we are lucky enough to have Yan as a tutor to help support us through our practice. 

My 1-2-1 feedback with Yan about my project was helpful in starting to pull together all my work and categories them. Yan insisted that i had enough professional photos within my portfolio and to start to put together a website and begin treating myself as a photographer rather than a student. Yan discussed with me her journey of becoming a full time photographer and reassured me that it is a slow process but if you stick to it, it is well worth the work. She explained that in order to build up a client list i must take on any jobs even if they do not feel relevant, as you need to make a living and small jobs always lead onto more connections for bigger jobs. 

Yan advice to me at this stage of my practice was overall to start to build a brand for myself that i can then use for interviews post graduation. she also made clear that it is personality that wins over clients not the work its self, so to make sure i am always polite and explain myself well at interviews or social events. 

Although Yan work is entirely different to mine, She has tones of experience in freelancing and gaining work for herself, so her feedback was extremely helpful to me,  as to the stages i need to take to make this my full time job. It was also useful to here career advice, over advice of my images as these are skills which will develop over time and practice. 

https://www.yanwangpreston.com/home/river-stories-on-bbc