004: Israel Smith – A Meteoric Rise, Weddings to Portraits, Lifestyle and Depression

004: Israel Smith – A Meteoric Rise, Weddings to Portraits, Lifestyle and Depression

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, so a little bit of a different intro today. I normally prepare a bit of an introduction, and I had one all written out and ready to go for Israel, but there, there was a little twist to this one. So I'm going to read you what I had written and explain why there was a little twist. So here it goes. So I'm rapt to have Israel from Israel Smith Photographers on the podcast today, and to many photographers, it's seem that Israel made a meteoric rise through the ranks and quickly became established as a photographer to take note of. Now, I'm pretty sure this rise through the ranks had a lot to do with his photography skills, but he also has this really optimistic outlook on everything, and his involvement in the AIPP and his willingness to mix it with the big boys of town right from the start, really set him apart. Now, I also know he has a super supportive and encouraging wife, and whenever you see Israel, he's always sporting this like huge smile. He always looks happy, this guy. Now, another reason that I chased up Israel for this interview is because he made a transition, or a leap, from wedding photography to portrait photography part way through his career, and to me, it seemed like a huge success. So we're going to find out a little bit about the secrets to his success, and also about the reasons for his transition and how he did all that with a mortgage, a family and a lifestyle that was, you know, would be the envy of any up and coming photographer. So that was my initial introduction. Now, when I actually had a chat to Israel last week, he said, "Look, Andrew." He said, "I feel a bit strange, sort of coming on." And he said, "I am under the pump. Things have not been good, where I'm fighting my way back. I've had dramas with depression, and the business wasn't where I wanted it to be." So he said, "I feel a bit strange, sort of coming on and talking about this." And so I thought, wow, that that's so different to what I expected. You know, when you look at things from the outside with Israel and his family and his business everything, it just looks amazing. So I'm even more excited to chat to him today and set to hear a little bit more about his story that he's that he said he's happy to share. So Israel, welcome to the podcast, mate. How you going?

Israel Smith: Yeah, really well, thanks, Andrew. It's actually a huge pleasure and very flattering to be invited to be part of it.

Andrew Hellmich: Awesome, mate. Awesome. And so what did you think about my initial intro, like that I had sort of set out for you, was that, is that the way you see your business as well? Or did you?

Israel Smith: Yeah, look, I think I'm gonna have to commission you as my speechwriter. Look, I do see my business that way. I know that we've been, that we rose through the ranks quite quickly to become established and to become well-known. And you're right. I didn't have any problem with sort of stepping up to the plate as far as what the bigger players in the industry were doing and having a go. But yeah, you're right as well, in that, I tend to, I try to be a very optimistic, very positive person through life. I love to have a laugh. I'm a very easy guy to get along with, and so I try and bring that to everything that I do. But yeah, I guess with the thing that's not as well known is that the last couple of years, especially for me, have been quite challenging, and that, you know, mainly behind closed doors and a little bit out in the open, my wife and I have been having a bit of a hard time with, I guess the business got a bit too big for what we wanted. It sort of started to clash with our lifestyle and things. So yeah, I'm happy to, kind of, as you mentioned, go through a little bit of that journey with you as well. For your listeners.

Andrew Hellmich: Unreal. That's awesome, mate. So before we, before we sort of jump the gun, do you want to tell us a little bit about you know, your background, where your business is situated, where you guys live, and how you got started in photography?

Israel Smith: Yeah, absolutely. We run our business from a big residence in Coogee in Sydney's eastern suburbs. I feel very, very fortunate because it's literally a five minute walk from my front door to the sand. So I have this wonderful little spot that we and we got married on Coogee Beach. So I'm quite close to a lot of sentimental things for me and my wife and my family. We run from home, so it's the front half we work from, and the back half we live in, and I get to see lots of my kids and lots of my wife as a result. Some people think I'm mental because I work with my wife, and I live with her, and we're in the same place all the time, but it tends to work for us and, yeah, we focus primarily on family portrait photography. I still do a little bit of wedding photography for select clients, but generally, I'm a family portrait photographer, first and foremost.

Andrew Hellmich: Cool. And you guys have been in business for nine years now, haven't you?

Israel Smith: Yeah, that's right. Last week, actually, we started our nine week, sorry, our nine day birthday celebration. So on our blog, we've been releasing a big giveaway to our clients and to our network every day for the past, I think we've done six already, today's the seventh day. So, it's pretty exciting. And yeah, I started out, we'll say nine years ago, 2004, after leaving a really successful, again, quite quickly established IT career. I used to be an IT consultant, which was everything from hardcore infrastructure, networking, programming, anywhere up to, I guess, customer facing roles and project management, that kind of thing. So I decided after a little while that wasn't the right choice for me, and at around the same time, I picked up my first camera and started doing a few, I guess, community college courses, and just found that I had a real knack for it. I had a passion for it, and I started to get the odd part time gig after work, and took it from there, pretty much.

Andrew Hellmich: So when you're doing the IT stuff Israel was that, were you working for yourself there, or you're working for someone else?

Israel Smith: I was a consultant for a small company. So there was about 10 guys in this company at the time, and I recruited to the guy. I met him when I was at uni, and did a bit of part time work for him through uni. And then we would, we would bill out to different clients under his company. So it was, and again, we were basically just hired guns in the IT industry. And at that point, you know, late 90s, early 2000s, the IT industry was absolutely booming, and my boss or the company owner, had a lot of great connections in the finance and banking industry, so we had a lot of really solid clients and solid projects to work on, but we literally just consulted to those companies for a day rate or for a weekly rate on project sort of basis.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, so did you get paid whether you had work or not, or there was just always..?

Israel Smith: Yeah, I did. Yeah, no, I got paid whether I worked or not. We also had an incentive to be working ourselves, in that my boss had, at the time, a profit share arrangement where we would earn our set salary per year, but then once our billable hours and our billable revenue for his company exceeded, I think, our salary plus 25% we would then take a percentage of anything further. So he would split the profits with us at the end of it, which was fabulous. So, I mean, for me, I walked straight out of a university degree into $100,000 a year job after that bonus and profit share came into it. So it was quite ridiculous.

Andrew Hellmich: That's pretty amazing, Simon. So what I want to know now, so what I want to know is how you made that transition from that wage to, you know, to a photography business. Because, so, yeah, do you want to talk us through that, that transition? Yeah, sure.

Israel Smith: First of all, I had to come to terms with eating baked beans a lot.

Andrew Hellmich: So there was a salary drop.

Israel Smith: Oh, huge, huge. And, look, it was a, really, it was even more extreme than just my 100k salary. Basically, I, well, my wife and I decided we were going out at the time and living together and I was gradually becoming less and less interested in work and more and more grumpy to live with. And she'll tell you this story far more vividly than I will but, but it reached a point where Belinda and I had a chat, a real heart to heart, and she said, "I think you're going to have to change jobs because you're clearly not happy doing this work", and at the time, I'd taken a huge kind of very all-consuming interest in photography, so every spare minute I was either taking pictures or reading magazines or going to classes or, you know, all that sort of stuff, working on projects. So from there, it got to a point where we'd made the decision I was going to leave the IT business and or leave the IT career and start a photography business. I'd always studied business at school and at university, and I'd wanted to do something in that way, starting my own business as well. So the opportunities kind of lined up really nicely, that I could start a photography business, be around people a bit more, pursue my passion, and at the same time pursue my other passion for being a business owner and an entrepreneur. So from that point, my wife and I worked out a plan, and I think it took about two years from when we made that decision to when the doors actually opened, and that was largely arranged around when was the right time financially to make the jump? So we saved up a lot of capital and then decided to go on a big three month holiday to Europe and spend it all. And then we went, we thought, before we'd become self-employed and a bit sort of short on income, we thought we'd splash out and have a fantastic overseas trip. And then we got engaged. While we're over there, came back and paid that off, and then saved up some more capital, and then started the business. And I think when I say capital, it was probably about 25 to 30 grand, and that was partly to invest in some equipment, and partly just to pay for food, and, you know, the baked beans for the first few months. So that was..

Andrew Hellmich: So that's those that you actually quit the IT job, like you just, you didn't go part time. You just said, bang, done.

Israel Smith: Yeah, I just took a jump basically. I had, I had three months over in Europe, and that finished in about June 2003 and then I got a contract that was originally going to be six months, and it ended up stretching out to nine. So by March the following year, the contract had finished up, and I'd already spoken with my boss about my plans. In fact, he almost, almost sacked me about two years previously to give me a nudge to get me out of the business, because he knew I wasn't happy anymore. I wanted to be a photographer. So it's like, I appreciate the gentle hint, but it's not quite the right time. So, so we ended up, yeah, just, I just made a clean break. I figured that I'm, I didn't feel personally, I was going to be able to do what I needed to do to start the business if I always had this nagging distraction of a part time job to work in. So, and my wife at the time, or my then girlfriend, was very happy to support us in the early stages, and she was in an insurance job that paid a 150k a year. So between us, we earned a quarter of a million bucks a year, and then by the end of 2004, so nine months after we started, we found that we had enough work and enough vision for where it could go that we both stepped out of the business. I both stepped out of full time work. So I was already gone, and Belinda joined me full time in in the photography studio.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, so tell me then, so that the first part of the business was at all weddings, or was it, so, you know, were there some portraits in there?

Israel Smith: To start with, it was a bit of a mix. It was mostly weddings, and then there was a little tiny bit of family portraits in there, and a bunch of other stuff as well, like anything from, you know, "I need this product photographed. Can you please take a few photos for my website?" Or "I need to have an event photographed. Can you, you know, borrow somebody's digital camera and take some pictures at that?" Because at that point, it was all film based. So I was shooting 10 to 15 rolls of film at a wedding and shooting, usually two, sometimes three, rolls of 36 exposures for a family portrait session. So very different way of working, but it was literally a jack of all trades, whatever I could get that was paying gigs.

Andrew Hellmich: Yeah, yeah, sure. So basically, just took whatever work had come in and then built it up, built it up from there. So did you, did you have a conscious decision to target weddings?

Israel Smith: Yah. I reached, I think after, probably after that first nine months or so. So by the end of that first nine months, end of 2004 I think, Belinda and I sat down and had a good chat about it, and thought, rather than just being this jack of all trades, master of none, we sort of need to specialize a bit and target something. And I guess the stuff that really appealed to me when I was studying classes of photography while I was still in it was a lot of street photography and a lot of documentary stuff, and that kind of be the fly on the wall and capture beautiful moments and juxtapositions and things as they happen and I felt that I could take that approach quite readily into wedding photography. And it hadn't, it hadn't become as mainstream as it is now, with everyone doing the journalistic, documentary style stuff, so it was kind of a bit of a niche that I could work in it, I guess, drew on where my love of photography came from, and it just sort of gave me some sort of focus, I think. So, yeah, we did definitely consciously choose to focus on weddings. In fact, I think it was, it was a little tiny bit broader. It was focusing on people. So rather than shooting inanimate objects, I much prefer hanging out with people. That was one of the reasons the IT career did my head in, because I had a couple of contracts where I was in computer rooms all day, every day, with no one to talk to, and just machines buzzing at me, and I was going quietly insane. So, so it's funny now, the time, it wasn't so much fun, but you know, I look back at the thing, yeah, good groove. So glad to be out of that. So, but, yeah, we decided we'd focus on people. And then the two obvious ones were weddings and portraits. And that was, you know, there's, there was some, some good money to be made in wedding and portrait photography. And, you know, at the time, and there still is. So it's quite a good opportunity as a market, if you can differentiate yourself in it.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, so we want to talk a little bit about that in a second. So, but in my introduction, my initial introduction, and the part that still stands true for sure is, I mean, you definitely took a meteoric rise through the ranks. I mean, you became well known very quickly. Like I said, you certainly mixed it with the big guys, and that you weren't phased at all with that, whereas a lot of newbies would sort of come into the conferences with the AIPP and really take a backseat for a couple of years. So do you think that played a big part in your big rise? Or what do you see was the success? You know that that initial success?

Israel Smith: Look, I think historically, my wife and I have always been overachievers, so we've always set out to do big stuff and to get where we want to go with the maximum speed and the minimum fuss. So I guess from that point of view, we did a lot of speaking with people such as yourself and, you know, other well established studios, and just learning from them. And I'm really fortunate that I've made a lot of really wonderful friends at high ends in the industry that are able to give me some advice and things, you know, studios that had been established for 10 or 20 years prior to me, I also, I did get very heavily involved with the AIPP very early on. I think within the first 12 months, I was on the New South Wales Council, and I was sort of the technical guy, because of my IT background, I was able to help get all the, you know, the overhead projectors and the audio bits and pieces all sort of connected together, and make sure that events all went off without a hitch technically. And that gave me a lot of really wonderful exposure, again, to experts who were speaking to the photography community about what they'd done to improve their own businesses, or their own shooting styles, or have you. So, from there, I just took it all in and digested it. I also did, in fact, Belinda and I have done an awful lot of business coaching. I think I've realized now when I look back at what I knew about business in 2003 when I decided to jump, I think it's absolutely laughable.

Andrew Hellmich: And, sorry, did you do the coaching? Or you had coaching?

Israel Smith: I had business coaches, so we participated in it. I wasn't actually a coach, but no, we had a string of really good, really helpful business coaches who were able to give us guidance and give us input on how better to run the business and how better to market and position ourselves. And, you know, what to do, I guess, to make..

Israel Smith: Is that a paid service, Israel?

Israel Smith: Yeah, it is, yeah, absolutely. So, ranging from, you know, a couple of 100 bucks an hour to a couple of $1,000 commitment a month in different stages of the business, and depending on who we were working with and for what goals, but, but it kind of came down to a point that we wanted to learn as much as we could, and we wanted to, I guess, short circuit the journey from newbie to experience established studio, and we were prepared to invest a bit of extra money at the outset to teach us things that we didn't know to help us make that faster transition. So it definitely made a difference. I mean, as you've said, We did go through the ranks quite quickly and become established and well-known. And look, I'll have to attribute part of that to my parents from giving me this name as well, because it is very unusual and tends to stick in people's mind quite well, but, but I think, but beyond that, you know, we have, we have worked pretty hard, and we've learned a lot, and we've made a lot of mistakes and tried a lot of stuff, and, you know, haven't been too afraid to put ourselves out there and really give it a good, hard a good red hot crack, as they say.

Andrew Hellmich: That's awesome. I didn't know about the business coaching at all, so just tell me a little bit more, a little bit sort of about that. So when you say the big difference between, say, the newbie or the transition from the newbie to the experience pro, what do you think is the difference there? Is it business or is it photographic skills?

Israel Smith: I think it's a bit of both. I think you've got to have your chops photographically. You've got to know how to use a camera and how to create interesting, beautiful images. But I would argue, eight days a week, that a more important skill is the ability to market yourself and to run a profitable business. You know, there's, there's plenty of starving artists, but I guess one of the reasons we got quite well-known is that our business became profitable and successful quite quickly. And, you know, we've supported ourselves without any other income streams since the start of 2005, with no other input, you know, and I think learning how businesses work, it is really, really simple. It's just kind of get the bums on seats and make sure that there's more coming in than there is going out financially. It's not rocket science, you know, but, but the thing is, when you're a photographer, there's a lot of emotion attached to what you do, and it helps to have a neutral point of view, and I want to also say that my wife and I took quite a while to figure out how best to work together as husband and wife, you have a very different relationship within the business, and we've gotten quite good at understanding that within our business, we're business partners, and we're allowed to have very strong, very opposing viewpoints or ideologies, but what we end up coming together really is a collaborative result that is better than what either of us could have produced on our own. So, like, I guess there's that whole thing of synergy, of the two of us being together in business, but what we had to learn quite early on was that just because you have a massive argument in business mode doesn't mean that the relationship is broken and that it's all over between you and your wife, or you and your husband, and learning that was something that we had to get from one of our business coaches as well, because we were just constantly battling, because we each had different viewpoints, and we didn't know that we each had different communication styles, and we didn't know that we each had to work together to find a better solution.

Andrew Hellmich: So your coach has actually helped you sort of work through all those issues.

Israel Smith: Yeah

Andrew Hellmich: Not just pricing and marketing.

Israel Smith: No, not just that. No, it was very holistic. So, you know, it was one of our business coaches that pointed out that I'm, as I suppose there's a lot of photographers. I'm a very big picture, fluffy idea kind of guy, and I'm very happy to, you know, pluck out an idea and say, "Yep, let's just go for that", without really considering all of the steps to get there, whereas my wife works from a detail perspective first. So before she'll commit to a goal, she'll want to have mapped out, "Is it achievable? Is it realistic? Can we make all of these steps happen in the timeframe we're thinking about?" And then once she's satisfied that it is achievable and it can be done, then she's happy to commit and say, "Yeah, okay, we can now set that as a goal." So, as you can imagine, when you're having business sort of meetings about where you want to grow the business and how you're planning things, having such polar opposite viewpoints and communication styles meant that we were constantly at loggerheads, and it'd take us three days to develop what should have been a two hour exercise.

Israel Smith: But you would have been halfway done.

Israel Smith: Well, yeah, it would have been halfway done. But the problem was that my wife is also a very independent, strong-willed woman who can hold her own when it comes to arguing her points.

Andrew Hellmich: I'll make sure that she gets a copy of this as well.

Israel Smith: Yeah, absolutely, with my compliments. I love you, honey, but and she knows this just as well as I do, but it just took us a while to learn that. So the business coach helped us, not just with, you know, "This is how you need to price your work so you make money, and this is how many jobs you need to do to cover your overheads, and this is your break-even point", all of that, which is absolutely essential. But they also helped us with, all right, "Well, personally, you need to nourish your soul, or you need to make sure that you're getting enough kind of satisfaction from outside of work, so that you're great in work, and you also need to manage the relationships within the business, and you need to look after yourselves as a couple, not just as business partners and all of that." So, it was really good, because in a husband and wife team, as I'm sure, you can appreciate, it's not always easy working with the person that you've chosen to be life partners with and have a family with, and so it's good to kind of have that, well, for me and for Belinda, it was really great to have that bit of external, impartial advice to say, "Listen, guys, you've got a lot of great stuff going on, but you know, this particular way you're handling this problem is not going to solve it, and you need to look at things a slightly different perspective and maybe take the other person's point of view a little bit more easily."

Andrew Hellmich: That sounds really interesting. I was, wasn't aware at all that well, first of all, that you had a business coach, and that they were, there was so many and, yeah, it sounds like it really was a shortcut to getting to where you are.

Israel Smith: Yeah, I think that. And I think that the fact that we got really heavily involved in the AIPP, so I was able to draw upon, and I still can draw upon, a wonderful network of friends, good friends in the photography industry, who have been around in the business far longer than I have to just simply have a chat with, or have a coffee with, or, you know, pick up the phone and say, "Hey, listen, I've just been having this particular situation. How would you have dealt with this? Or have you come across this?" And, you know, it's a wonderful industry, and that so many people are very willing to help for no sort of payback other than they just wanted to help out. And I guess for the same reason, I find that I'm very happy to have chats with new photographers now, because of the leg up I was given from so many mentors in the earlier days.

Andrew Hellmich: I feel, I feel 100% the same, and I've also experienced the same, putting the word out for this new podcast and asking photographers to come on and share some stuff. And they've all like, "Yeah, yeah." "How much do you want?" "What do you mean?" And it's been phenomenal. You know, it's been really good.

Israel Smith: I think it's one of those industries where, because we tend to operate, if not, as solo operators, all the time, certainly it is. A lot of it is internal to your own head. You know, the way you shoot, the way you think about your own work and it is really valuable and a really wonderful environment to have this supportive network of peers, which, I mean, let's be honest, there's that many photographers around, but there's so many work opportunities around that none of us can shoot everything ourselves. So there's inevitably going to be other photographers in the marketplace. And, I mean, in the wedding industry, there's still a massive percentage of weddings that aren't photographed by professionals. So you know, the market is limitless, so I don't think of my peers as competitors. It's more just colleagues in the same industry. And how can we help each other? Because we all benefit in the industry as a whole benefits.

Andrew Hellmich: Yeah, I think, I think as many referrals come from other photographers as they do brides for us. So it's great.

Israel Smith: Absolutely

Andrew Hellmich: Mate, so things are going awesome. You and Belinda have, are working together full time. There's no external income coming in. Business is good. Lots and lots of weddings. What causes, or what's, what's the catalyst to jump to portraits?

Israel Smith: There was a few things. The most obvious factor to begin with was I could shoot for far less time and have the potential of making almost as much money. And the production was, it was kind of a time of materials and potential income, so they were just a lot more profitable, straight off the bat. So I mean to break it down into actual numbers, I would spend anywhere from six to 10 hours photographing a wedding, somewhere between 20 and 40 hours in post-production album, designing, retouching, assembly, all of that sort of stuff, plus the meetings with the clients for each of the different stages. So you're already looking at kind of a 40 to 50 hour investment, sometimes in your own time as a photographer and as a business owner. And then I would have say, an income of three to $5,000 from that then. So, you know, say it was the higher end of $5,000 for 50 hours, 100 bucks an hour.

Andrew Hellmich: It doesn't look so attractive now, does it?

Israel Smith: It's, it's, yeah, it takes a takes a while to, you know, and that's not just your time. That also has to cover studio expenses and all the rest of it, and, you know, rent and..

Andrew Hellmich: Everything, insurance, tax, a lot.

Israel Smith: Yeah, all of that. So when you break it down, you sort of go, "Okay, I've got to shoot a lot of weddings and put in a lot of hours to make profit", whereas when I started doing a few portrait sales that were, you know, 1000, 2000, $3,000, actually my very first, and this is back in I think it was late 2005 or possibly early 200, I think late 2005 I did a portrait sale off my very first official portrait marketing campaign, which was $1,000 and that paid for the entire business coaching course that had helped me set up that marketing campaign. But even not including that, it sort of taught me that for a one hour photo shoot and for probably somewhere between three and six hours of production, of retouching, of framing and that kind of stuff, I could earn $4,000 so, you know, seven into 4000 goes a lot better than, you know, 50 into 5000, so..

Andrew Hellmich: Like you said, it's not rocket science, is it?

Israel Smith: No, not at all. So that, to me, was an instant. "Oh, my God. Family portraits can be a really profitable way of running a business." I guess, what I've learned subsequently is that, in my opinion, at least, it's easier to market as a wedding photographer than it is as a portrait photographer. I find I've got to be far more proactive and far more kind of out there as a portrait photographer to stay busy. But when you do get the jobs, they can be absurdly profitable by comparison to the time in weddings. So, so that was, that was the first major factor. And then the second one was, I put so much of my heart and soul and my emotions and my creativity into a wedding that I'm pretty much ruined the next day. So I'm not one of those guys that will shoot two or three weddings a weekend in peak season. I have a rule that I have always a day off in between weddings, so at best, I'll do a Friday and a Sunday. Back then, when I was busy.

Andrew Hellmich: It's so good to hear say that, because I am exactly the same. I remember when I started, I would do the two and three weddings in a weekend, and absolutely smashed myself. But it came to the stage where like, like you I was wrecked the next day, and it wasn't being fair to the Saturday wedding or the Sunday wedding, because you knew that you're thinking about the next one at the first one.

Israel Smith: Yeah, yeah. You sort of think "Geez, I'm already shafted, and it's halfway through Friday, and I've got two more to go this weekend. How to manage?" So, and yeah, you're right. That's not fair to like, you know, if you're at 110% for your first wedding, you sort of drop to about 75 for the next one, or probably about 40 or 50 for the third one. So anyway, so for me, I decided, in fact, it was my lovely wife stepping in and saying, "I really don't think you should try shooting back to back weddings anymore, because it just wipes you out even after one." And I just wanted to do a little more work during the week, and I wanted to make sure that the business was insulated a bit against the seasonality of weddings. So to have portraiture during winter, in the off season for weddings in Sydney, it was able, it sort of meant that we could keep our cash flow steady, and we could make the business work. So that was, that was a, probably the second biggest reason. So the first one, profitability, second one, just a bit of diversity in the work. And then thirdly, it meant that I could start to throttle the number of weddings. And as we started to have, as we had our first child and then our second, we wound the number of weddings right back, because I wanted to spend more time with them on weekends when everyone else was off, like my family or my mates and that sort of thing. So it sort of it was driven by lifestyle that we wanted to refocus a little bit on family portraits rather than on weddings.

Andrew Hellmich: That's still one of the hardest things, I think, as a wedding photographer, is missing out on that family time. And, you know, whether it's kids sports or family get togethers or, you know, whatever it may be, it's that's tough.

Israel Smith: Yeah, and I guess even back to when I used to work part time at Grace Brothers at Arena, when I was going to school on the Central Coast, I always used to have this philosophy that my life achievements or my life goals always came first beyond work, so, or sorry, always came first instead of work. So where people would say, "Oh, I've got to work, so I have to sort of sacrifice this or that", I would say, "Do you know what?" And I almost said this to my supervisor one day. I said, "Look, I want to take four weeks off. I have Christmas holidays because I'm going to go for a surfing holiday with some mates of mine." And, you know, some of my mates at Grace Brothers are like, "Oh, you can't do that. That's peak season." I'm like, "Well, I've got two choices. They can either give me to leave, or they can say, you know, accept my resignation." So, and I think I've brought a lot of the same philosophy into our business as photographers, where my life comes first and the business exists to serve what our personal goals are and what we want out of life. So I do want to be there for sports events on the weekend, and I do want to spend time with my family in everyone else's downtime, which is Saturday and Sunday. You know, I do work Tuesday until Saturday week, most weekends, but, but I find that Saturdays for me, because I'm not always tied up for the whole day, doing a port, doing weddings, and it's a bit more interspersed with portraits. I can still participate in stuff on Saturdays in and around the work commitments. So for me, it largely has become the lifestyle choice, not just the business profitability choice.

Andrew Hellmich: So did things change though, Israel, when you took on staff, and, you know, what, if one of your staff members came to you with the same sort of philosophy, you know, "Can I have four weeks off over the wedding season? Because, you know, I want to go on a surfing trip." Does that..?

Israel Smith: Look it happened. One of my, one of my photographers, wanted to go to South Africa for a month because his family was over there, and we had to, you know, we had to make arrangements to work around that and look, as long as, when I had other photographers shooting weddings for me, if they had a wedding booked already, then it was pretty much, "Look, you've already met with the client, you've already committed to be here. So this is what you've got to fulfill on." But if it was in and around their existing jobs, I had no problem with it, because we took the same philosophy that we had into our relationship with our team as well that, you know, if Belinda and I live by the credo that family comes first and lifestyle comes first, then everybody else that worked for us deserved to live by the same philosophy.

Andrew Hellmich: And that's great.

Israel Smith: And we would be, we would probably be one of the most understanding and probably generous to a fault employers around insofar as well, you know, at that time, when we had a lot of staff, we would make sure that everyone had what they wanted personally and it made for a great team who were really dedicated. So, you know, I think there's more to life than being a mongrel who cracks the whip all the time. You know, I don't like working that way, and I'm sure my team wouldn't have liked me if I liked that, if I, if I did work that way, I wouldn't have had a team.

Andrew Hellmich: Yeah, exactly. So what? So what happened? So you've had, you've had a number of photographers and staff working for you and with you, and that sort of that's gone up and then back down again?

Israel Smith: Yeah, that's right, when I, when Belinda and I started the business, and it took us a while. I guess once we, I guess we'll get to this as well, but once we slowed the business right down after I was diagnosed with depression, we sort of took a lot of stock of well, how did we get into this position in the first place? And we started the business with huge aspirations of multiple studios in multiple cities, and this massive machine of a business that we could eventually to step away from and have it make us bucket loads of money while we sat on the beach sipping pina coladas.

Andrew Hellmich: The dream.

Israel Smith: That was the dream, baby! You know, that was what we wanted to go for. And so we started along that path, and we thought, "Okay, we've got to systemize it, and we've got to make it really focused, and get staff and outsource and this and that." And, you know, we went down that entire path. I guess it's like the, there's the famous business book by Michael Gerber called the E Myth. And we sort of followed that philosophy of, you know, create a turnkey business that just operates on systems and works without you. And so hiring other photographers or contracting other photographers to shoot for us was the next evolution, because, you know, I can't shoot every single job on my own, and that's the income stream. That's where you make the money. You have to shoot the work to get the cash. So, so we did that, and we hired one person to be our sort of back of house retouching and production person, and we had someone else that we'd hired to sort of do some client admin and contacts and that kind of thing. And, you know, so from all of those sort of bases, we'd built this wonderful, systemized, streamlined monster of a business. And at various points we had, I had at least one or possibly two freelance wedding photographers, and then as we transitioned more to family portraits, I had, at one point, other photographers shooting family portraits for me, and they were busy enough for themselves, which was a couple of shoots each per week, because I think three out of four had children that they had to work around as well. So yeah, so we kind of got to that point where we built this wonderful beast of a business that had a bunch of other photographers, and it had a couple of staff, kind of helping keep the wheels turning inside the business and on the production side of it, and the customer facing side and all of that, and it just got too big. It just got to the point where I was burning out, as I said, I got diagnosed with depression. We sort of had this enormous year in 2010 and everything. It's funny, it all comes back to our personal goals. We wanted to have a second child, and my wife was so integral to our business that while ever she was here, she wouldn't be able to have a second child. She wouldn't be able to spare the time. Our daughter was three, three and a half, and she was in daycare a couple of days a week, and we sort of went on this whole 'get fit, get fit get pregnant campaign' and, you know, change the food, and gave up coffee, which was just ghastly. But anyway, got off the booze and all this sort of stuff to get ourselves as wonderfully healthy as we could so that we could have our son. And worked, we had a beautiful little boy in 2010 in October, and at that time, I'd come off the back of running a full 42k marathon in July on the Gold Coast and published a book for the local council, which was filled with my photography for the big seniors and environmental sustainability project. I published another book filled with family portraiture as a fundraising exercise for Sydney Children's Hospital. I was the volunteer, pro bono official photographer for Sydney Children's. I had my four other photographers that I'd trained earlier that year. I had a staff member that I'd hired and trained to replace my wife. And I had this massive business that was costing me a fortune just to keep going every week, and we just reached this point where I collapsed under the strain.

Andrew Hellmich: So you just felt like you were doing everything on your own?

Israel Smith: I knew I wasn't doing everything on my own, but it felt like I just couldn't give enough of my own time. I felt like I couldn't cope with the number of responsibilities that I was wearing because I was meeting with all the clients to view and sell their portraiture to them. I was trying to train and manage and give feedback to my photographers if they'd had a bit of a substandard shoot, or if there were things I wanted them to improve on. I was looking after all of our workflow and our client orders in the office, and I was trying to keep an eye on all of our marketing and make sure that we kept everybody busy. So I felt like I was just in this massive hamster wheel running like crazy and never making any ground.

Andrew Hellmich: So Israel says, just before you go on, I mean to me, like listening in, it sounds to me like you were just almost frightened to hand-off some of the responsibility to some of your staff, even though you'd already trained them, and they knew, they knew the way that the systems worked in the business. So was that, was that something that you felt that you had to do, or you were just, you just didn't want to let the reins go?

Israel Smith: Do you know, the biggest thing for me about training people and handing over the responsibility? I was very happy to hand over the responsibility for the shooting and for the production and that kind of stuff. But nobody, nobody got to the point where they could, or, in fact, I tried training up a couple of people to do the selling work for me, to meet with clients and do that sort of stuff. And it had never really worked to my satisfaction where I could sort of just rely on them to just do all of that stuff and I think I don't know it seems like, at the time it happened really fast, we just had that much stuff kind of going on that I think I had to stick with what I knew I could manage, and to try and hand over that last piece of the client sales appointments so that I could focus on just the marketing and just running the business. I just don't think I had the headspace for it, Andrew, I think it was at that point where I had all these other conflicting priorities, and I don't know, I don't think I was reluctant to hand over the reins as much as I just hadn't found the right time and the right way of doing that, and just sort of reached that burnout point before I could look at that as a process.

Israel Smith: Okay, so did you, did you actually feel the burnout coming, or the depression? Or, you know, did Belinda say one day, look that there's something wrong? Or, how does that work?

Israel Smith: Well, so after our son was born, I was just kind of head down, bum up, in the office a lot of the time. And, you know, so we're at home, so it's the front room, and I had the door closed and I'd be, I gradually just became grumpier and grumpier, and I was just not much fun, and I was, you know, holding on by fingernails until we got to the end of the year, and I think my wife had noticed that I was starting to change. And at the same time, obviously new baby in the house, sleep is a bit, kind of all over the joint, and the family routines a bit disrupted. So there was a whole lot of sort of spinning plates that we had to try keep going. It didn't feel sudden for me. It felt very, very gradual. And there was just, you know, a little bit extra. Bit extra stress, and then a little bit more, and then a little bit more, and then a little bit more. And then we got to our Christmas holiday at the end of that year, we took a couple of weeks and went up the coast, and I just couldn't unwind. I just couldn't relax, because I had it in my head that I needed to stay physically very, very active and really challenge myself with my fitness to manage and stay on top of all of the other responsibilities. So coming off the back of a marathon, I started training for triathlons. And so I was, you know, every couple of days, I was trying to go out for a long bike ride and for a swim and for a run, all this sort of stuff. And kept getting these niggling injuries, and it was just all sort of getting me really agitated. And so I didn't really enjoy that family holiday very much, because I was just so wound up in my own head about trying to do all this thing to keep it together for the family and, you know, and it, and then it was really when we got back to Sydney after that holiday, I had a date booked in for a triathlon, and about three days before it I tore my calf quite badly on a training run, and I just couldn't do it. And then the wheel started to fall off. After that, I couldn't fulfill on that goal. And then a few other things started to sort of wobble. And then my attitude towards the whole business really shifted. And, you know, everything just started to crash basically. I sort of reached the stage where I had no interest in the business. I had no interest in coming into work. I was scared to pick up the phone when it rang. I didn't want to listen to the voice messages. I was afraid of everything. And I just, sort of, you know, I subsequently found out that it was, it's one of the hallmarks of depression and overload and stress is that you constantly in final flight mode, and that was pretty much where I was at.

Andrew Hellmich: Sorry, so really, it really was a fear. You're not just throwing that word out there, like you actually..

Israel Smith: Oh no, I was actually like, I would have a pit in my stomach when the phone rang.

Andrew Hellmich: Jeez, right.

Israel Smith: But I would feel paralyzed almost on some days. And I remember, I remember really vividly, actually, sitting down. We would have a weekly phone catch up. One of our team works remotely from their house in the Sutherland Shire, and we had a couple of team in the office and Dorothy on the phone, and, you know, we're sitting here, and we would each start every, every week, we'd have a phone catch up and like a team meeting. And we'd start with, you know, what's been happening in our life, how's everyone feeling, and how we all coping, and all that and this one week, I kind of remember sitting there with everyone, and I just broke down in tears in front of everyone. I said, "I really love this business some days and some days I frigging hate it, you know, and I really just don't want to be here. And today's one of those days", and I sort of walked out and sat in the lounge room, played little eyes out so, and it's just, yeah, just sort of reach that overwhelm point where I just simply couldn't cope. I just wasn't able to put one foot in front of the other anymore.

Andrew Hellmich: So who gets you to the doctor, mate? Is that you? You realize yourself there's something wrong now?

Israel Smith: Do you know, actually, yeah, I had a conversation with my stepdad, and he and I have a great relationship about this kind of stuff, where I was able to, I phoned him up that day, and because my wife said, "Listen, you seem to be unable to talk to me about it, call your stepdad, have a chat with him." And it was really, it was literally in the moment on that phone call, I said, "I am simply not coping." And it was in that moment that I sort of admitted to myself that something wasn't right. I said, "I'm just not coping. I just can't keep up with what this business needs from me", and because we'd had a slower start to the year than what we'd hoped, we were hemorrhaging cash because we had such high overheads, so our savings had just about vanished. And you know, it would just, it was just a lot of stress. And it sort of reached that point where I said, "Okay, I've got to own up to this." And in that phone call, I did. And in his wisdom, my stepdad, I love him to pieces. He has this fabulous simplicity in how he views the world. He said, "You've got two choices, figure out what the problem is and fix it. Or if you can't figure out what the problem is, get someone's help to figure out what the problem is and then fix it". Pretty simple. And I just went, "Yeah, okay, that's actually some of the best advice I've ever had." And I said, "Clearly, I can't figure it out myself, because I've been trying. I've known that there was something just under the radar that wasn't working in the way things are running in our business and in life, and I just can't figure it out. I can't put my finger on it." And then the next day, I had a wedding, and my wife had been, while I was out shooting, my wife was researching on the Beyond Blue website, and had been looking through some of the questionnaires about how to really identify depression symptoms and that kind of stuff and she said, "Listen, is, you know, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth or I'm not trying to tell you that this is what I think you've got going on. But listen, I would really appreciate it if you'd simply have a read of this with an open mind and see what you think." She was very diplomatic and very, very gentle, and, you know, trading on eggshells as she needed to at the time, and so we, we had this, I read through the stuff she was looking at on the website. I was like, "Wow, it's like someone's actually been inside my head and scraped out everything and just laid it out on the paper." It was literally that confronting that they had just nailed how I was feeling about life and about the world and that was when I realized I've got to do something. So that was Saturday night. Monday morning, I had a booking to see my GP. I said, "Look, I've been through a bunch of stuff online. I have a very, very strong suspicion that I'm suffering from depression right now." And he said, "Well, if you've already done the homework. I'm not inclined to disagree with you. Okay, so you do. Let's work out what happens next." He said, "You know, you can either, excuse me, get straight onto some antidepressants or something and try and fix it that way, or you can meet with a psychologist and talk to them about it, and we have one in the Medical Center." I said, "Look, I'm not huge on dosing up on drugs", just at the minute, a lot to try and address. You know, I, as you said earlier, I tend to be a pretty smiley, pretty happy kind of guy most of the time. So there's just other factors at play here, and I just need someone's help to work them out. And through some freak kind of cancelation of appointments, my psychologist was able to meet with me that afternoon, and I would normally have had to wait a couple of weeks to meet with her, because she's that busy. So just the stars aligned to kind of put me into this path of fixing this sort of situation, getting treated and I did this questionnaire survey thing with the shrink the first meeting, and, you know, it's just a whole bunch of on a scale of one to five rate how you feel about this and how you feel about that. And I forget the questions, but I remember the results really vividly. She said, "Well, looking at this, interacting with your family, you're a bit stressed, but you're okay, kind of within the normal range. How you feel about yourself, yeah, that's okay. It's kind of normal. Work related stress off the charts. I've never seen such a high reading before, ever"

Andrew Hellmich: Right

Israel Smith: And I just went, "Well, good, because I thought that that was the problem. But being right in the thick of it, you know, can't see the forest for the trees sometimes. It was really, really powerful to have someone as an external third party say, "This is what's going on for you." I was like, "Yeah, okay, that actually now that makes sense. Now I can start to think about it a bit more objectively." So, you know, I had another couple of sort of chats with her, and we spoke about things like getting the right amount of sleep and not burning the candle at both ends too much, and slowing down, and all the physical stresses I was doing with all the triathlon training. And so I stopped hitting the gym three times a week, and I stopped running, and I stopped cycling, and I just sort of let my body recover. And she sort of said, "You just need to let all the parts of your brain that make the drugs to keep you balanced emotionally. You just need to let them all recover, because they're all burnt out. Man, they've been working that hard to try and keep you balanced through all the stresses of last year that you just have nothing left in the tank."

Andrew Hellmich: That's awesome. So really, it was just rest. And then I guess you had to modify the business then, too, then after this chat.

Israel Smith: And that was the biggest thing, it was like, "Okay, I know what I need to do personally to get better, but even if that's all I do, there's still the massive business stresses at play." And this was one of the hardest, hardest situations. And like, no word of a lie. This was the biggest test I've ever had in my relationship with my wife, because she didn't really comprehend until a really specific event a couple of weeks later. She didn't really comprehend how much I was hurting and what I was sort of going through, and then, you know, so she was really reluctant to, in her words, "Throw away everything that we'd built", and we had worked really hard to build the business to this wonderful level of momentum and systems and structure and all of that. And, you know, reached that point where we had to change, or else I was going to blow up really, really badly, and who knew where it would end. And the specific event that I mentioned was I'd been, as I said, pretty grumpy, pretty down, not much fun to hang out with in the office and pretty emotional and pretty sort of all over the place of my moods. One day, my wife came home from going to the shops or something, and there was a police car pulled up on the footpath, and instantly she thought, "Holy crap, what's Israel's done?"

Andrew Hellmich: Yeah, right. What was she thinking, suicide?

Israel Smith: She was thinking, I killed myself or something. And it all gotten too much. And, you know, we were and I think maybe a week before that, we had a chat with one of my team who had been suffering depression for 20 years. And at the time, she came clean with us, and she said, "Look, I've been on antidepressant since I was, you know, a teenager, and I've had numerous situations where I've tried to take my own life and this sort of thing." And she said, "This not a joke. This is not a mystery. There is a real illness at play here, and you need to treat it like one, you know." And then when my wife came home and saw the cop car, it was, it was parked in the street for something completely unrelated.

Israel Smith: She sounds exactly like Linda.

Israel Smith: But instantly her stomach dropped, and she thought, "Oh, my God. What if Israel has done something here. What if he's just it's all gotten too much." And, I mean, and I was in such a volatile situation, that she actually thought that might have been possible. And it was at that point Belinda said, "We've just got to treat this like cancer. We've got to treat it like whatever it is, you know." If I was diagnosed with cancer, you would drop everything and change your life in 10 seconds to make sure that you got the treatment and the work that you needed to make it go away. She said, "So, I've got to treat it like this. I've got to treat Israel's depression and his mental state and his mental health as though it's a physical disease, not a mental one." And, and so that was the turning point for Belinda and for us to then start looking at, "Okay, what do we need out of the business to survive?" Not, what do we want? Not what's the game plan to have, you know, the big house and the cars and the fancy holidays to Disneyland, or all the rubbish that, you know, we sort of get fed, but, it was, you know, what is the bare minimum we need to do to make ends meet, and how can we re-engineer our business to get to that point?

Andrew Hellmich: So there was a huge scale back.

Israel Smith: Huge, huge. So we, and look, it's one of those situations where, I guess the universe kind of helped us out. The three out of the four photographers I had working for me, came to me within a week of that meeting, and said, "You know, I've heard you're not having such a great time. I need to step back myself." And I was like, "Well, good, because I was going to have that phone call with you tomorrow, you know." So they, each one of them was having a new baby. One of them had just fallen pregnant. One of them had to stop her extracurricular stuff, and start spending more time with her kids, who are both at school. And you know, so for all of those three women that shot for me, they each literally was, within seven days, they all came to me and said, "I can no longer work for you. And I'm really sorry." I was actually, "Do you know what? This is the best phone call we could have possibly had, because I haven't had to initiate it."

Andrew Hellmich: Wow, that's incredible timing. So all these girls at their own level are going through something similar, almost?

Israel Smith: Well, just different stuff in their life, and they just couldn't keep up with what I was asking of them, within the workload of the business, and so, just yeah, it all kind of married up really, really well that they were able to step back and amicably, we just said, "You know what? It's been awesome", and not just, "Do you need to step back for your own personal reasons, but I need you to step back anyway. So this is actually beautifully timed, and there's no hard feelings whatsoever. I still have spectacular friendships with all of them, and, you know, talk with all of them regularly. So it worked out brilliantly. And then that was the front end of the photography side. I still had one guy that I kept with me because I knew that I would need at least one backup just to help me through this next little transition. And then I had a couple of staff in the office, and one of them who had had depression herself, she said, "Listen, I've been thinking about stepping back from working here as well, because I've got my own", she was studying law, and she wanted to go do some part time law work instead of working in our studio. And so that worked out beautifully for her. So she stepped away. So then I was left with me, Belinda, a full time production assistant, and Belinda's sister, Dorothy, who's a part time kind of customer service and client admin kind of person, and that was and we had James as well, who was shooting for me part time, and that worked really, really well. We just were able to, within probably two weeks, scale it back to that. And then just think about our marketing, and think about our overheads and our, you know, cost of doing business and keeping the doors open, and what do we need to earn each week? And how many shoots would that equate to, at what sort of average sale? And, you know, can we make enough money doing this? And what if we work a little more conservatively? Can we still make enough money, you know? So, yeah, so it was a real, a really structured and really focused scale back, but it also happened really rapidly. So within, I think, I was diagnosed with the GP in February, and by May, we'd put everything into place, and the business was smaller.

Andrew Hellmich: So, so is that where you are now, Israel?

Israel Smith: It's even smaller now, actually.

Andrew Hellmich: Well, tell me where it is now, and then give me a snapshot of where you see it, where you'd like to see it, say, you know, in 12 months’ time, like, what's the vision for the business?

Israel Smith: So where it is now, there's me, Belinda and Dorothy. I do all of the photography. I do all of the client meetings, and I work with Belinda on the marketing. I coordinate the production. I have an outsourced re-toucher who does my retouching from home. I just upload to a Dropbox, and she does that work for me. When I have it, it's far better, in my opinion, than having a full time employee that I have to pay to keep sitting here at a desk even when we're quiet.

Andrew Hellmich: Let me jump in there. Is that? Is that outsourced? Or she local to you, or she overseas?

Israel Smith: She's local. She's in Sydney, different part of Sydney, but yeah, she's in Sydney and yeah, I just either speak to her on the phone occasionally, or just deal with her via email and send her my, my cropped sized JPEGs that she then does the retouching on and then I print them, and they look fabulous. So, and that's everything from like, color correction to, you know, enhancing and dodging and burning like kind of stuff, and little bits of spotting out blemishes and softening lines and whatever else requests. So it's all of that. And just really fortunately, my retouch has got this amazing set of skills that can do really high end fashion and commercial retouching if it's needed. Or my stuff tends to be some of her more simple work, because I have a pretty simple and I guess, natural aesthetic, and so that is very easy for her to do, but she's still very happy to do it because I send her a fair bit of work.

Israel Smith: Awesome

Andrew Hellmich: Yeah, so that's, so she's local, so again, email and Dropbox does the work for that. Belinda is in the business a couple of days a week, so I work kind of Tuesday to Saturday mostly. Occasionally, I'll have a Saturday off. Occasionally, I'll work a Monday. So it sort of varies a bit, but it's about a five to five and a half day week for me. Always have Sundays off. That's my family time religiously. I don't come into the office, I don't answer emails, I don't do any work on a Sunday. It's just a day that I set aside, and I say that's when I get to spend quality one on one time with my wife and my two kids. So, that's a real firm rule that we made a few years back, which has been very, very kind of crucial in maintaining our family unit. And then we've got Dorothy, Belinda's sister, who works school hours from about 9:15, to 2:45, Tuesday to Thursday. So Dorothy's job while she's in is to answer all of our incoming phone calls. So we've got our phone set up to divert automatically to her phone during that time, she can remote dial into our database and our client system, so she knows what our workflow is up to and where our clients are at, and she makes sure that all of our new inquiries get themselves booked in for photo shoots, and all of our photo shoots that haven't had their appointment booked to come and view the images that they all get booked and, you know, manages our inbox and manages our incoming calls. So she's a fabulous, fabulous part of the team. And, you know, nothing's a hassle and it's family as well. So I feel like we can kind of help her out and help her family out, too.

Israel Smith: Unreal. So what about 12 months’ time? Or are you at the at the level you want to be at now? Is this it?

Israel Smith: It's not quite, not quit. The journey over the last couple of years from when we scaled back, has been an interesting and slightly up and down. One we haven't found the balance that we need to find with just enough work and just enough marketing to keep ourselves busy. So we will find that we sort of max out on the workload and we neglect our marketing, and then it sort of goes in peaks and troughs a little bit. And I've been working through a little bit of that last couple of months specifically. But where we want it to be in 12 months’ time is, I guess, steady, with up to maybe five or six family portrait shoots a week, maybe up to 10 weddings a year, and be able to manage that workload comfortably in about four to four and a half days a week.

Andrew Hellmich: Cool, that sounds nice.

Israel Smith: Yeah, that's the intention. And look, my wife and I have massive, massive plans for the next three years, both with this photography business and with a couple of other projects we're working on that it's giving us a very clear vision as to what happens next. Our objective, if I can very, very briefly, touch on it for you listeners, take about 12 to 18 months and travel around Australia with our kids in a bus, and not just see the sights, but also do a little bit of work while we're going around, so I can see that I'll be photographing families that I've met through weddings and through Sydney clients who've then kind of moved to different parts of the country. I'll be kind of giving them some updated pictures, and maybe shooting the old wedding here and there while we travel. I'll also be shooting an awful lot for myself personally, to do a bit of a documentary project of the trip, and who knows, a few landscapes will probably creep in there somewhere. And then we also, my wife, is studying at the moment in health and nutrition, and so we're planning to take that time to find people who have overcome chronic health conditions, using diet and food and nutrition and lifestyle as their medicine, and do a documentary film or documentary TV series about that kind of stuff.

Andrew Hellmich: That's awesome.

Israel Smith: So the trip is going to be all about family and all about wellness and all about how we can, I guess, make a better life for ourselves just through making different choices with what we eat and how we live, and, yeah, so between the two of us, we're really, well, I mean, even our daughter is getting so excited, because I've told her that she can be my camera assistant, and she can help interview people and run experiments and stuff, and she's just rapt, so.

Andrew Hellmich: So, so what will you do with Israel Smith Photography or Photographers?

Israel Smith: We'll probably, I guess, we'll transition to a point where it works from mostly an online presence, and you know, that's what we're working on at the moment, is to build, to build our online business model in that attracting work through Google and through web searches and that kind of thing, but also build enough of a network and a community of people that love what we do, or what I do and what I stand for, which is all about family, that our profile can start to go around the country before us, and we can then say, "All right, well, we'll be in this town from this date to this date, and we'd love to meet about five families and photograph them."

Andrew Hellmich: That's awesome. Is it going to be a blog or something where we can follow you? Or would there be a special website for that?

Israel Smith: Look, the best place to follow it for now is israelsmith.com which is my website for this business, because we've got, we know what we're going to call it, and we've got a website registered, but there's nothing there at the moment, so we're not quite ready to release that yet. So, but it'll probably only be a matter of three to six months, and we'll be ready to release that on mass and start building that community of people. But for now, everything that we do, we're starting to talk about on israelsmith.com in that blog there and that'll be the sort of launch pad for the next adventure

Andrew Hellmich: Unreal. I'll put, I will put links to that in the show notes, mate. And you also, you make sure you let me know when, when that's up and running and you're kicking off, so that way, you can let everyone know, and they can follow you around the place. That'd be awesome.

Israel Smith: That'd be fabulous. Appreciate it.

Andrew Hellmich: Mate, are you ready for 10 quick questions and 10 quick answers?

Israel Smith: Sure, hit us.

Andrew Hellmich: 10 quick questions, 10 quick answers, 3-2-1, go! All right. Here we go. Canon, or Nikon?

Israel Smith: Nikon

Andrew Hellmich: Is that? Sorry? Was that Nikon?

Israel Smith: Yeah, Nikon.

Andrew Hellmich: What was your first ever camera?

Israel Smith: A Kodak point and click when I was about seven, and then I lost that, and I had nothing until 2001 when I bought a Nikon F80 with a 28 to 105 kit lens.

Andrew Hellmich: Nice one. What's your favorite lens today and why?

Israel Smith: Oh, 35 mil 1.4, which I don't have.

Andrew Hellmich: 35 1.4

Israel Smith: Look, the favorite lens that I have in my kit bag is, geez, that's a tough one. Probably my 51 4. I'll probably still always go back to that. The 35 I just like that extra bit of angle, because again, getting back to my street photography roots, you can just see a little more of a scene. And I'll tell you what, when you shoot that thing at 1.4 it is unbelievably sharp and unbelievably beautiful with the way it renders depth of field blur. It's just phenomenal. I borrowed it from the guys at Nikon for a wedding I shot, and it was the most stupid thing I ever did, because I also borrowed an 85 1.4 which is, between those two lenses, about four gram worth of glass. And I came back from the wedding thinking, "I want both of these lenses tomorrow, please." And... financially for us at the moment.

Andrew Hellmich: Mate, that's so funny to hear you say 35 1.4 mil. I go and ship my portraits mainly with an 80- 200 2.8 and bring out the 85 1.4 I couldn't imagine shooting the whole thing, or shooting a 35 a lot.

Israel Smith: Yeah, I don't know. It's just, I think thinking more about my adventures upcoming with documentary and that kind of stuff, and wanting to show more environmental portraiture, rather than really close up in your face stuff. I've got a 70 to 200 that I use for most of that stuff with kids and families, for, you know, solo portraits, and I love it. But..

Israel Smith: Yeah, that's why I love this little this question. It's awesome to hear what different people are doing with, you know, different equipment.

Israel Smith: As far as something that really kind of cranks my handle, that gets me excited about what I can shoot in the future, it'd be, probably, it'd be either a 35 or an 85, but I think probably still the slightly wider version.

Andrew Hellmich: Cool. Well, let's get going here. Biggest breakthrough in your business?

Israel Smith: Realizing that it's about life and about family first.

Andrew Hellmich: Awesome. I'm with you all the way there. If you had to start over today and you had the same knowledge that you have right now, what would you do differently?

Israel Smith: Oh, I work far harder at building an online profile more quickly and getting our work from online sources or building relationships online, I should say.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, cool. You'll enjoy the podcast I released later today. It's right up, right up that alley.

Israel Smith: Yeah?

Andrew Hellmich: Yeah. What software do you use for your batching and editing?

Israel Smith: I'm old school. I shoot JPEG. I use Bridge to edit and view my pictures, and I use Photoshop. I've written, again my IT nerd comes out. I wrote a very specific, very custom script to plug into Photoshop that can run four different batches for me at once. So when I'm processing a wedding, I just kick that off. And then, even when I process some portrait shoots, I kick that off. But typically I try and get it absolutely bang on in camera, in JPEG, and then just show clients first run JPEGs because they look amazing anyway.

Andrew Hellmich: I love that you shoot JPEG, because that's exactly what I do. Not many of us left.

Israel Smith: Not many. I'm getting into some more projects, I'm starting to experiment with what RAW can do. But so far, I still find it's just so much easier to get the camera hardware to process it. And I know what I get, and I know how to work with it. So anyway.

Andrew Hellmich: I'm with you all the way. All right, mate, do you have a pre-shoot routine for your wedding or your portrait shoots? Is there something a little sequence that you go through

Israel Smith: For weddings, it usually consists of having a massive breakfast at the beach, you know, bacon, eggs, toast, tomatoes, mushrooms, sausages, the whole shebang, and a massive coffee and a massive orange juice. That's kind of a regular little routine for weddings. For family portraits, less so. I try and spend about five minutes before the shoot. I try and get to the place early and then spend about five minutes before the shoot just trying to clear my head of all the stuff that's been happening with my family and with the business and with, you know, the studio and previous client appointments and all of that, just so I can think about, what am I trying to say about this family, and what am I trying to capture and create for them in terms of their family history and their memories and I find that that's really, really useful even, even if it comes down to just trying to come up with some creative concepts that I can put into play on that shoot, because I've done enough family shoots now that I can kind of just turn up cold and still get awesome results. But I find that they always go better if I've taken that little bit of time just to clear my own head and almost, almost just meditate for a couple of minutes, just get everything centered again and just be able to be really in the moment and create some beautiful stuff for them.

Andrew Hellmich: Nice. So you did that actually on location just before the shoot?

Israel Smith: Yeah, because I often look at the location and think, "Well, this is great. And I can go here, and I can go there, and I can use some of that little background, and I've got these sorts of environments to work with." And so I try and take cues from the environment that I'm in at that time, at that moment, and the weather conditions that I've got to work with on the spot. You can plan all you want when you're sitting in the studio, but it's only when you get to the location and see that there's 4000 people sitting right where you wanted to shoot, come up with something. And I do shoot a lot of beaches in a park. So if it's a beautiful summer's day or a nice sort of autumn or spring day outside, it doesn't take much, and suddenly you've got massive crowds where you typically shoot, so you need to be quite prepared to improvise. And that little, that little bit of clarity beforehand always ends up with a better shoot.

Andrew Hellmich: Yeah, no, I like it. I like it. Two more questions, mate. Where do you see wedding or portrait photography in in a few years’ time?

Israel Smith: Geez

Andrew Hellmich: The hard ones, eh?

Israel Smith: Crystal ball. Look, I see wedding photography going the same way that it has been, where there's a far bigger divide between generic, sort of churn out wedding kind of places and that. By that, I guess I mean people that don't have anything particularly creative to offer, but simply do an okay job for okay money. There's just this massive proliferation of that sort of contender. And I guess this applies for portraiture as well. There's a massive proliferation of those sorts of people who can, you know, save up and buy a decent digital SLR and sort of shoot okay stuff, and sort of get okay results and sort of charge okay average kind of dollars for it. And then at the other end are the people who have created a niche and a following and an artistry and a voice as photographers and some sort of vision, and look to how that they work. I see those people differentiating themselves even more clearly, and I will be one of them where I'm sort of creating a whole vision and a whole look around my family work to differentiate us even further in the marketplace, so that, so that we'll be able to attract clients based on what we have to say and our creativity and our artistry, not just the fact that we're a monkey that can push a button on a camera.

Andrew Hellmich: I love it. I love it. I think that, like you said, they're the photographers that are going to be successful, aren't they? Because they're going to stand out no matter what happens with the industry.

Israel Smith: Absolutely. It's, you know, it's the same with it's the same with music. You look at music, there's, there's musicians and artists who have been very mainstream, very bland, and they sort of come and go and they're a dime a dozen. And then there's the people that stick to their vision and stick to their guns, and they're the ones that craft really, really big followings and have a very clear differentiation in the industry. So and, I mean, God, everything that the photography industry is beginning to go through now with digital and with, you know, the infringement of copyright, and images just getting shared and spawned all over the web and stolen, all this sort of stuff that's, that happened in the music industry five to 10 years ago, and what we're sort of looking at now is the musicians who have built a wonderful, wonderful community of fans and followers, who people, people who love what they do and love what they're about, and have built really solid, almost relationships with these people and can relate to them and connect with them, they'll still buy their concert tickets, and they'll still buy their merchandise, and they'll still buy the music, even if, you know, even if it's been given away for free, they'll still put some money in because they believe so strongly in what's going on. And I see the photography industry moving the same way that you know, on the one side, you're going to have this massive amount of stock photography libraries and this big commodity sort of flavor. But then on the other side, you're going to have people that create wonderful communities around what they have to say with their imagery and that they are just producing such amazing, compelling work that their networks and their relationships with the people that love their work will help sustain them and will help make them profitable and successful.

Andrew Hellmich: Touché, mate. That's awesome. That's a great comparison, too, with the music industry. I mean, I often don't think about it like that, but it's, yeah, it's spot on that they've gone through, right through that stuff that we're going through now.

Israel Smith: The whole intellectual property, like so many albums, get given away for free now online, because that's not where the money is. The money is not with selling CDs or selling music files. It's actually with selling community, selling the T shirts and the posters and the concert experiences and the artworks, and all of the sort of add-on around that and like, there was a, well, I mean, getting into a bit too much detail, but there's a great case of this artist called Amanda Palmer, who raised $1.2 million on a Kickstarter campaign. She's a musician. She's played with a successful band called The Dresden Dolls, and then went out on her own and formed a new band and started this Kickstarter campaign to say we've produced this album. We're really proud of it, but we want to take it to this whole other level. And we've got this group of people who love what we're about, and that group of people, three and a half to 4000 people raised 1.2 million bucks for her to fulfill on her artistic vision.

Andrew Hellmich: Nice. That is awesome, mate. Last question before we find out where we can find you. Can you share, share one of your most embarrassing photography moments or stuff ups?

Israel Smith: Geez, I think, oh, geez, I don't know, there's so many. Kids photographer or a family photographer, I don't have very much shame. It takes an awful lot to embarrass me, because I am so committed to getting the shots for that family that I will do all sorts of ridiculous stuff. I photographed Janie Seal and Ed Phillips, the Channel Nine TV presenter and husband a few years back, and I was jumping around in their backyard doing my best impression of a gorilla to get their son to laugh at me, to the point where the next time I met with them, the son was referring to me as the monkey man. So that was pretty embarrassing with TV personalities. But, um, geez. I mean, the other ones are like, you know, when cameras blow up and stuff and you're on a shoot, or you drop your camera in front of everyone, yeah, that's always pretty embarrassing. But I've got too many shameful moments.

Andrew Hellmich: Mate, that is awesome, that is heaps. And I've got to say, thanks for coming on today. You've shared some awesome stuff and given us a real insight. And so you know what, how a photography business can, I guess, transform and change, and also changed you guys as well, and the way you've adapted through all that. So, mate, thanks so much for sharing. And I know that for the premium membership, members of the site, they're going to, they can jump back into that area and get an extra little tip on how exactly you're doing some of your recent promos that actually get you bums on seats. So looking forward to hearing about that. But just before we sign off from here, mate, how can people find you, apart from the israelsmith.com site?

Israel Smith: Yeah, so that's the main one. I'm on Israel P Smith at Twitter. So at Israel P Smith, and it's I-S-R-A-E-L-P-S-M-I-T-H, same thing on Instagram, same thing on Facebook. And I'm also on Google Plus, I'm kind of everywhere. But you know, if you just jump onto the main ones like Twitter or Facebook, that's a pretty easy way to find me.

Andrew Hellmich: Awesome. If anyone's got any questions, if they're going through something like, you know, like you went through, you happy to if they hook up with you on Facebook or shoot you an email or something?

Israel Smith: Absolutely. I've actually had, geez, since I gave a quick talk at a AIPP event in August last year. And in the lead up to that, there were some people that contacted me directly that couldn't actually make it to the event, that still wanted to hear what I had to say, and I ended up mentoring them through similar changes in their business, in their life. And, you know, while I can't say categorically, I'll be able to mentor or teach everybody that comes to me, I'll certainly be able to sit down and have a chat with them for half an hour or an hour and talk through some of the things I've learned. I think that the journey I've been on about, you know, looking after my own mental health and making sure that the business doesn't take away from my family, that it actually exists to serve my family. That's, that's my goal in life, Andrew, is to help people really understand that that is the way business is meant to work. And I'm very, very happy to share that message far and wide.

Andrew Hellmich: Awesome. And I'll help you with that one, because that's the whole reason I got into it in the first place.

Israel Smith: Right.

Andrew Hellmich: Awesome, mate. Thanks again, and I'll chat to you soon.

Israel Smith: Absolutely a pleasure. Thanks, Andrew.

 
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