Conversations with Shelly Waldman

Today we’d like to introduce you to Shelly Waldman.

Hi Shelly, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I grew up in a household where my parents took a lot of photos. My mom was an art teacher at Rancho Cucamonga Middle School. She taught ceramics, paint and drawing and she was a big fan of photography. She studied photography in college at CSU Northridge (before is was at CSU) and my dad being a coach for Glendora High School tennis and basketball and volleyball used to take a lot of pictures of his athletes.

So I was around photography at a really young age and it wasn’t until very recently that I started to connect the dots between those times as a kid and my life now. My parents took pictures at birthday parties and our family travels.

At a young age, I think I was in fifth grade and I would sneak the camera out of the house and take pictures of my friends on the playground and then sneak the film into my mom’s purse.

In high school, I was part of the yearbook and I would take pictures for my pages and of my volleyball team.

And then in college, I switched over to playing with video. I interviewed my friends throughout the four years For a graduation gift, I cut the footage together with no fancy editing equipment and gifted each of them a tape of our times over four years.

After leaving college, I didn’t do much photography until 2008 when I moved to Vancouver, Canada with my husband so he could work on an animated film.

I couldn’t work and I couldn’t go to school because I didn’t have a visa to do those things while my husband was working on a film.

So I picked up my film camera, a Canon Rebel 2000 and started to document through my first blog what it was like to be an ex-pat living in Canada. I wrote about the differences between Canada and the US and funny little everyday things that I would pick up, like the difference in Campbell soup cans or the variety of toothpaste,

or just how people thought about life. I would walk every single day and take photos.

By doing that documentary process, it brought back the joy and the excitement I remember so fondly as a kid.

I wondered, “why did I stop doing this?”

I found a photography community class I could take on natural light. The professor ran a gallery and invited me to be part of the student show. I was very excited and felt honored but before that show could even happen, we had to leave Canada, as my husband’s film imploded. So we came back to the states.

Upon coming back to California, I was having such a good time doing photography, I thought, “Could I make a living out of it?” I have a background in finance. I understand numbers. I enjoy the photography side and have been getting some good feedback. Maybe I can put the two together and make a business.

I found PPA (Professional Photographers of America) and saw that they were offering a two days intensive business of photography class at Imaging USA (which is their big convention every year).

I enrolled and it was at that convention that I met what would become my studio partner for seven years. I came back from the convention and headed to the city building to get my business license, and officially opened the doors to my family and kid’s photography business in 2009.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Being self-employed is not easy.

There are so many outside forces that cause you to analyze and question everything you’re doing. Plus the plethora of many things you need to learn and do while figuring out how to make enough money to make it worth pursuing.

Struggle #1: how to get the word out to tell people you are here

I remember having the business license and a website with a handful of images. I sent an email to friends and family letting them know I’m now offering photography services. I received a few congratulations emails, but other than that crickets. So I knew I had to find a way of getting in front of people. Show up. I gifted sessions to kindergartens, charity auctions, did Halloween portraits at a pumpkin patch with a donation of canned food to bring to the local food bank. I left flyers at shops and I started posting on Facebook. ‘

I found the auctions were awful. Because the people purchasing the session had no idea who you were or how you worked and for the most part didn’t care. They had all kinds of crazy asks and I ran into a few times that people didn’t want to agree to the contracts. Doing presentations or offering a low-cost photography class was a better tool to meet people and build trust.

Struggle #2: mental sanity

Staying the course and being able to quite the inner gremlins is a must for a business owner. It’s so easy to slip down the social media hole and start comparing your work to others, imagining how the life of that person is so easy and presents well. But they’re struggling to keep the wheels from falling off their business just as much as you. A quote I heard from Sean Cannell is “you can’t compare your beginning with someone else’s middle,” is something I remind myself often.

Struggle #3: there is always more to learn and improve upon

I am always learning: how to communicate better, advance my editing, uplevel my lighting skills, improve my pitches, tweak my website, update my portfolios, work on my operations, be more consistent in my outreach. This consistent always learning can lead to burnout really fast. So having a time of the week/month/year slated to work on various aspects of the business helps to temper the need to do everything right now.

I’ve had missteps along the way and have had to pick myself up, dust myself off and forge ahead. Always learning, right?

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
In 2014, I moved my focus from family and kids to shooting commercial and editorial work, focused on food and lifestyle work. But if the concept is kids, food and lifestyle all on one shoot, that’s my happy place.

I highly enjoy learning about others and that allows me to be able to direct them in a more relaxed way. This has led to do more personal stories about people and their work. For instance, I photographed and made a film about the artist community at Alameda Point Studios, which then led to work photographing women behind the wine for a magazine and recently a winery hired me to photograph 11 of its growers to highlight the images on a gallery wall in their tasting room.

I’m known for being fast thinking on my feet, having a large network to tap into and always having a fun light-hearted set.

I have a background in finance and can explain my creative process which I have realized is not a common trait. Because I worked for a large companies (pro sports teams and banks) I have experience communicating with all levels of people who needs varing degrees of information. Therefore, when it comes to talking numbers, I can dive in and understand how to make it a win/win for all parties and when it comes to bringing the creative ideas to life I can talk to how to do that as well. It’s something that helps me stand out.

In 2020, I launched Food Photography Mentorship as a way to help others turn their passion into a paycheck. I have spend the last 12 years learning about the businesses and having others help me. I wanted to help give to those coming up behind me. Through virtual live meetings and monthly topics, we travel down the success path of business and creative topics.

Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
I have found that through meeting people, I have created some lucky situations in both life and business.

I met my husband, Jamison, in college through guys I played soccer with. All of us were in the same corporate economic class. So when we left the first class, we gathered outside and decided to go to the pizza place to divide up the homework. The guys invited Jamison to come along, and he ended up sitting next to me.

When I wanted to pivot into commercial work and I had no idea how to do that, I met a seasoned commercial photographer of 15 years on a hike through another friend. After the hike, she helped me put a portfolio together and encouraged me to go to portfolio reviews. After the portfolio reviews, she mentioned wanting to pivot away from photography and into styling food. So we did several test shoots together, and I had the beginning of a food portfolio.

I went to a workshop in Denver where I met an art director, who a week or so after the workshop called me to see if I shot food. And as luck would have it, I had just put up my food portfolio.

So you can call it luck, good timing, or serendipitous that it all came together at the right time.

Contact Info:

• Email: hello@shellywaldman.com
• Website: http://www.shellywaldman.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shuttershelly/
• Youtube: https://bit.ly/photocamp_
• Other: https://bit.ly/FPMLPMN

Image Credits
Shelly Waldman