Madga Kuczmik from Magda K Photography faced her freelancing fears

Madga Kuczmik from Magda K Photography shared some compelling tips with a packed audience at a recent Creatives’ Club networking event, which got the room thinking about their own goals and aspirations. 

Sharing her story about making the leap into freelance, Magda talked about what helped her on her journey and introduced the concept of imagining your own 'awesome'.

Imagine your own 'awesome'

• Visualise what you would like your life to be like
• Picture yourself in 5-10 years from now 
• Create a bigger picture of what your future life will look like
• Make a plan - according you your vision, Magda’s included:
  • Saving money
  • Buying equipment
  • Developing a portfolio - She asked 10 photographers if they would let her practice for free - only one did! She did trades with models for photography skills at model agencies and joined hundreds of Facebook groups
  • Finding customers
  • Working hard

Snippets for success

• Passion 
• A ‘can do’ attitude
• Focus on your goal
• Determination
• Take action
• Develop healthy habits
• Believe in yourself

Top tips for making the leap to freelance...

• Build your confidence
• Make a list of 10 things you are really bad at and keep working on them, practicing them and perfecting them until your confidence grows
• Self doubt helps with quality and will make you grow
• Wing it
• Don’t compare yourself to others to measure your success, find your own style
• Be prepared to fail

Tools to help you take control of your photography business

The plan is to work for yourself and work less!

• Organise yourself with an automated system such as Trello. 
• Use a tool such as Lightroom for editing  
• Pixieset is a really useful online gallery 
• Use Google drive for cloud based access to documents such as spreadsheets; it's ideal for making notes and managing business admin
• Facebook groups are great for making connections and asking questions
• Dropbox is perfect for file transfers and cloud-based storage so you can access work anywhere
• Set up an Instagram account to showcase your work and find inspiration