The Problem with Photography Education
Hello friends, and welcome back to the Beyond Natural Life Photography Podcast. As always, I'm so excited you're here. And I wanna talk to you today about education in the photography industry and the problems that I see with it.
Going into this conversation, I want you to know a couple things about me. First of all, I am a certified teacher. According to the state of Washington, I am qualified to teach people. I went to teacher school and I taught in the public schools here in Seattle for about five years before going full-time into my photography business. I have such a passion for education and I'm a trained educator. I left education to become a photographer and found my way back to education through the photography industry.
I've been a professional photographer for 25 years and I have been teaching and mentoring other photographers for about the past 10 years. I have a lot of experience being a teacher, being a photographer, and being a teacher in the photography industry.
Over the past couple weeks, I have been sitting down and talking one-on-one with photographers who are applying for Sandra Coan Certification. We opened up this round of applications at the end of August, and I've been having the most wonderful conversations with people on Zoom, talking about their photography skills and hopes and dreams and where they want to go, where they see themselves going in their business. Over the course of those conversations, I have found myself saying the same thing over and over and over again as I'm listening to people's frustrations and where they feel stuck.
Feeling stuck is not your fault.
That is the way the education system specifically in the photography industry is set up, and it's not necessarily set up to help people really succeed. I'm a little nervous about having this conversation because I don't want to upset anybody. The truth is most of the people who are out there teaching other photographers mean well and come from a place with an open heart and wanting to help. A lot of the problems that I now see with the education system inside the photo photography industry, I also participated in, I made the same mistakes as an educator.
I'm not trying to point the finger at anyone. I'm not trying to say that I have all the answers. This is something that I had noticed and I've been frustrated with as a trained educator and that I've seen my students and other people struggle with who are trying to learn and work their way through the system.
The number one problem with the way the photography education system is set up is that it's very siloed.
There are all these fantastic classes out there where you can go and learn one thing. You go and you learn lighting. I teach lighting. I have a class, The Missing Link, that I've been teaching for years that teaches photographers how to create natural looking night with strobes and flash.
If people want to learn my posing system, they can take my posing class, Simply Posed. If they want to learn business and marketing, they can take Six Figure Studio. That’s how I set it up in my business. That’s how it is in the industry at large, classes are siloed. People who are students can go in and access the information that they feel like they need to learn. That makes a ton of sense. If you think, “Hey, I'm struggling with my light, I'm gonna take a class on lighting.” You go in and take a class on lighting. What could possibly be wrong with that Sandra Coan?
The problem that I see with this real siloed approach to education is you can go into something thinking that this is the problem, that if lighting's the problem, I'm gonna learn lighting, and then that's gonna solve all the other problems.
The reality is, you don't know what you don't know.
Maybe you do need to address your lighting, but that's not the only problem that's going on in your photography. Maybe there is an issue with your posing or the way you're directing people. Maybe there's a processing problem that you're not seeing how things are processed. When classes are siloed, you sign up for the class and you learn the thing and you probably nail it. But it doesn't address the problems that you may not be aware of.
This is something I've seen it over and over again. It keeps you stuck in this cycle of investing in lots of different programs, trying to figure out what the problem is, trying to solve the problem. But when you don't actually really know what the problem is, it keeps you stuck and it keeps you from moving forward. And this is something that I have seen in my own classes.
I honestly think, Six Figure Studio, my business and marketing class, is the best course I had ever written up until this year when I created Certification. I'm so proud of Six Figure Studio. When I wrote that program, I left nothing on the table. I know it works, it’s a fantastic program.
The problem was people were coming in and they were learning what I was teaching in Six Figure Studio thinking that they had a marketing problem, thinking that they had a branding problem. The reality is they actually had a problem with their portfolio. There was a problem with what I call “having clarity,” really showcasing, this is what I do.
That program in was broken into three parts - clarity, communication and consistency. So clarity is that photography piece, what do you do? What is your style? What are you known for? Communication, that's the marketing piece - learning how to talk about what it is that you do. Then consistency, setting up systems for automation so that marketing is super simple.
What I saw over and over and over again is that people were getting stuck in clarity.
I would have people that would spend six months stuck in clarity, really frustrated. As an instructor, that concerned me because I know that this program works. We had people go through Six Figure Studio who came in within two months, were suddenly ranking on the first page of Google after never ranking on Google before. We saw people double their income. We saw people triple their income. We saw the most amazing things happening in the program. I knew that that program worked. But as an instructor, I was concerned because there were, were so many people also getting stuck in clarity. And I was like, what is the problem? I spent about a year really looking at that. What I came to was people are stuck in clarity because they have problems in their photography, in their portfolio, in their work that they don't even know that they have.
If you don't know that it's a problem, you don't know to fix it. They would come to Six Figure Studio and I would ask “What do you do?” They would say they’re a studio newborn photographer, but then I would go in and look at their portfolio and their work was all over the place. They had a real problem. They had problems with lighting or they had problems with posing, or they had problems with consistency as far as editing. I could teach them how to brand and market but if there's still that basic problem in the portfolio, they weren't gonna move through it. This is one of the major problems with the way the photography education system is set up.
We just teach one thing.
People are just getting part of the picture instead of getting the whole entire picture. It keeps people stuck. This is why I created the Certification Program. I went in and I looked at the problems that people were having with clarity, and I reversed engineered it. Why are people having so many problems curating their portfolio? Why are people so stuck in the piece that is about your work and what you're showing?We're photographers, that part should be the easy part, but it wasn't, it was always the hardest part for people. And I realized that in order to have clarity in order to be able to say, “This is what I do, this is my vision, this is who I am as a photographer” that we need to break that into chunks. It starts at the very basic level with light.
Light is the foundation of everything you do.
It's not about just knowing how to use a strobes and flash. It's so much more than that. It's the basics. What is your go-to lighting pattern? What is your preferred lighting pattern? Do you know how to see it? Can you capture it consistently? Can you capture it consistently when you're outside working with natural light? Can you capture it consistently when you're inside working with a window? Can you recreate it with a strobe or flash? Does it all look seamless? Do you know that no matter where you are in the world, what time of day it is, you can create the same kind of images for your clients, the same light, the same feel?That is step one.
Once you have that, we have to look your posing. Do you have a set of poses? What pose you're going to start with, where you're going to go next, so that when you walk into a session, you are in charge? That stuff doesn't maybe seem like a big deal, but it is a massive deal. When you have that kind of direction, when you know exactly how to pose somebody, how to direct them what you want out of an image and can help your people get there, that does have a huge impact on your portfolio and the consistency of your work. It's not just about your lighting, it's also about how you direct the people. The way you pose people can be part of your signature style.
It has a massive impact. Then of course there's processing. Learning how to process for consistency and make sure that your work looks like your work that every image in your portfolio looks like, itt was photographed by you, by the same photographer is soo important. That's how I address this problem. In Certification we're not just looking at one thing.
I’m giving everybody the full picture because I think when education is siloed, when it's broken up into little pieces, you're going to get stuck.
You're always gonna be in that hamster wheel trying to move forward. And you can't move forward because you don't know what you don't know. In Certification, we're going to start with the craft. We're going start with your light, then talk about processing, then we'll get into portfolio curation and building your brand and marketing your business.
What I now know 10 years into this as an educator is that you can't have one without the other. You can have fantastic light. Your craft can be awesome - fantastic light, beautiful posing, consistent processing. If you don't know how to build your brand and market your business, you're going to stay stuck. You're not gonna move forward.
And vice versa, you can have all the great marketing know-how in the world, but if there's a problem with your portfolio, if your pictures are off, you're gonna stay stuck and you're not gonna move forward. So in certification, we are doing it all. I'm so excited, it is the first time I've ever put together a program that is so comprehensive that really goes over everything.
I am moving away from the siloed approach to education in my own education company because I have come to the conclusion that it just doesn't work.
It's a great way to learn. Still take classes! But if you really, really want mastery, you need the whole picture. And sometimes the whole picture includes aspects that you don't even know you need, so you don't even know to search for it. And that is just the truth.
The other problem with the photography education system - there is no feedback.
Traditionally, there's no there's no way to make sure you're doing it right or you're on track. Even if you're in a course, we end up learning in isolation.
There's no chance to sit down with the instructor and get honest feedback or get critique. As an instructor, this part has always really bothered me. I know that a crucial part of the learning process is getting feedback - learning the work, practicing doing the work, and then sitting down with somebody and asking “Am I on the right track? Did I do this right? Am I nailing it? Where do I need improvement? What do we need to tweak? What do we need to work on?” The way the education system is set up in the photography industry, there's not much opportunity for students to get that kind of feedback.
This was a problem I identified early on that bothered me as someone who's a certified teacher. We tried all sorts of different ways, like Q&As in the Facebook group, but it never really worked. This is one of the reasons why I've completely restructured my education system and I'm moving away from these siloed classes and into Sandra Coan Certification I know is going to teach photographers literally everything that they need to know, even if they don't know they need it AND set up a structure so I could give honest critique and feedback to the students who are learning from me.
Now in Certification, as you work through the program, when you finish a section, you're prompted to schedule a call with me and we actually sit down on Zoom together. You pull up your images that you've been working on, where you’ve practiced what you've learned in the session, and we go over them together and I give you direct feedback - this looks great, here's some areas for improvement. you're on the right track here, why don't we try this or tweak this. I can ask what are your struggles? What are you finding in the real world? I can glean from my 25 years of experience and really help you with it.
Being able to give critique with my students is a game changer.
It's so fulfilling to me as a teacher. The impact that it's having on our students is phenomenal. I'm seeing people who are just two months in the program and they have turned their work around, from where they started to where they are absolutely phenomenal. I really believe this feedback critique piece is massively important. The fact that it isn't part of the traditional education paradigm within the photography industry is a problem. You need that kind of feedback. You need critique if you're going to move forward. I am a huge believer of that.
As an instructor, I have made these mistakes in my own education company as well. I'm not trying to point any fingers. I spent the last year trying to figure this out and almost a year and a half now really thoughtfully creating the Certification Program to address these problems.
I'm moving away from siloed classes.
We discontinued Six Figure Studio this year, which is really hard. That is one of my all time favorite programs I have ever written. I poured my heart and soul into that, but we discontinued it, not because it wasn't successful, not because people who took it weren't getting results, but because it was part of the problem, it's a siloed thing.
It's very specific. We're just teaching business and marketing. But I've really come to believe that you cannot in good faith teach business and marketing to photographers without also looking at their work. And if there are problems with their work, if there are problem with their portfolio, then that also needs to be addressed. Now I'm taking the business content that I taught in Six Figure Studio, and I am incorporating it into the certification training. Super excited about that! Right now, The Missing Link is still available. I love that class. It's the first class I ever, ever produced and put out to the world. But I am very much considering closing that one down as well as my other one-off classes because I am really wanting to serve you. Those of you who are in my community, those of you who take my courses, I'm really wanting to serve you as best I can.
I just don't know that the siloed, no feedback or critique, figure it out on your own kind of thing- I don’t know if that paradigm works. I think it doesn't. If you’re going to learn from me, I want to give you 110% of myself. I want to make sure you actually get results. I want to not only give you exceptional instruction, which I feel like I do, I'm a really good teacher, but also really give you exceptional service and make sure that you're getting the feedback, you're getting mentoring, you're getting all the guidance that you need to be successful. That's why we're making the shift in my business. We have lots of exciting things in the works.
I'm working on a brand new website specifically for certification. We're going to promote people in the program. That's where we're gonna have our online directory referral network. I'm working on a preset for certification with my friends at the Image salon. We're putting together custom website templates for people in certification. We're working on a welcome packet for people who earn their certification. That's going to include pre-written blog posts, blog copy social media captions, model releases, contact forms, basically everything you need to take off in your business once you're Certified. I’m pouring my heart and soul into that program. I'm really excited about it! I’m so grateful to everybody who applied over the last couple weeks and have sat down to hop on a call with me.
We have closed applications and we probably won't open them again until next year. We don't have the dates right now, but if you are interested in the program, if you'd like to learn more or just make sure you're notified for our next launch, then get your name on the wait list here. Get your name on the wait list. I'm really invested in providing the best education for my people that I possibly can. If there are problems with the photography education paradigm as you see them, I want to hear about it. Send me a DM on Instagram or send me an an email and let's have this conversation. Alright, friends thanks for joining me today and I'll see you again in the future.
