No, this title is not clickbait. I'm not bragging. I'm not flexing.
I just want to show you that it's possible to make $100,000 a year as a food photographer. I've been doing it consistently now for the last three years, making over $100,000 a year. And my goal with this video is to just lay out exactly what I did to get there.
the steps i took in order to get there and then ultimately how to hit that six figure mark my name is nick anderson i'm a professional food photographer and lifestyle filmmaker i live in milwaukee wisconsin with my wife and our little dog his name is banks he's really cool he's almost four i kind of feel like a game show host with this microphone thing here i just got my like claw set up here with the little microphone on the top i thought it'd be a kind of a cool microphone give me something to do with my hand instead of not really knowing what to do with my hands at all all right enough of the riffraff let's get into the juice let's break down a hundred thousand dollars a year into a monthly more attainable goal. I find that it's easier to work on a monthly basis, a monthly dollar amount. So you can kind of strive and shoot for that number every single month as you're doing work. $100,000 per year broken down monthly is roughly $8,333 every single month.
So step number one in hitting the $100,000 per year mark in food photography is you must take great photos. This is the number one principle, the golden rule of all of food photography. Clients are not going to pay for shitty photos.
I'm sorry. If they're mediocre, they're going to go to somebody else. You have to take great photos.
You have to really elevate your style and your brand and really shine through that quality. Let me show you the first photo I ever posted to my Instagram. I'm honestly kind of embarrassed, but you can see how far I've come in the last five years of shooting food.
Well, Nick, how do I take great photos? That was the question I had to myself at the very beginning. I knew very little about a DSLR. I had a single interchange lens.
It was like an 18 to 135 on a Canon 60D, something my parents bought me in high school. How do these food photographers on Instagram that I'm following and that I'm inspired by have such great images and mine are so lackluster? I wanted to get to that point where my images really popped and stood out and were beautiful and had great composition.
I knew everything that I wanted was gonna take a decent deal of time. So what I did is I spent my late nights on YouTube, on Google, trying to figure out the best lighting setup for food photography. My full-time job didn't allow me to shoot during the day at all.
I was very limited. I could shoot in the morning before work and then I could shoot in the evening when I got home from work. So as you know, even in the winter months, especially during the winter months, the natural light at those hours is absolutely trash. So I needed another way. I needed a...
I needed to figure out another way to be able to take great images of food because this is something I wanted to do every single day. So I reached out to some people that I knew that used artificial light and I watched YouTube videos constantly and I asked the dumb questions and I said, hey, what's your lighting setup look like? How are you able to get those images?
Is your light coming in from the sides? Is it coming in from the back? Are you using the flash on your camera? I asked all those questions at the very beginning.
And what I found out is most of these food photographers and food bloggers are more than happy to get back to you. and help you out. And that's like what I strive to do with like when somebody asks me a very simple question that I just, I don't laugh at it because I was once there.
I was in that spot before. So I asked all of those questions and what I found out was the more I reached out and the more questions I asked, the more inspired I was to shoot and the better I got as a result. Now, the second part to step number one is just you have to practice, practice, practice, practice. And I know I say this basically in every single YouTube video that I do, but it's very important. 2018 was the year I made the most money.
It was also the year I took the most photos I took around 55 000 photos just in that year alone now granted i'm not using all of those I probably use anywhere from three to five percent of all those photos Those are all like deliverable either for my instagram or for clients I found out that the more I shot the better I got at food photography. I always learned something I always learned a new lighting trick or a new editing trick But the more time you spend behind the camera and then behind the computer You the better you're going to get. Step number two to hitting the $100,000 a year mark is build your portfolio. You need an area online where you can put all of your food images.
They're going to be trash in the beginning. You just have to have faith that you are going to progress and your food photos are going to get way better as time goes on. Just trust the process. But for right now, you need a portfolio in order to store all of your images.
A, this will help you see your progress over time so you can make adjustments, so you can see how your style changes, so you can see how you grow as a food photographer. And B, this is a place where you can send companies and clients to your food page. It's easy to say, I'm at Fork and Pancakes. Check me out. And it takes them a second to search for your name, find it, and then they can start looking at your images.
It doesn't matter if you think your work sucks now. My work sucked at the very beginning five years ago. I hated it.
I didn't want to look at it. I was just wondering when I would get to that level, but you have to embrace the suck. It's part of the process.
As long as you enjoy shooting. and setting up and working with different lighting techniques you're going to get better i promise you'll be more confident behind the camera whatever your portfolio platform choice may be, whether that's your website, Instagram, if you want to do your stuff on TikTok, that's cool, but you need to put it out there for the world to see. Step number three in making $100,000 per year is you have to reach out to brands. Before you reach out, I think it's important to determine if your work kind of matches the brand's work and vision. It'll be a lot easier in the long run to be able to gain these clients'trust.
and to be able to gain their vision. If you have similar styles, I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying if you're a dark and moody food photographer and you want to shoot something that's light and bright, the style is not going to vibe. So I would say kind of go after brands that A, you like and that you want to work with and that you believe in and B, that you also have like a similar style to their feed and a similar aesthetic. It's just going to make things so much easier.
So what you're going to do is you're going to go on Instagram. You're going to ask them, you have a certain person that shoots. images of food for you.
You know, do you have a person already? If not, what does that look like for me to be able to do something like that for you? You know, here's my portfolio. I'm reaching out to you via my Instagram food page. And I'm wondering, you know, if you have a need or a want for someone like me to be able to take images for your social media feeds.
Here's a trick that worked super well for me in the very beginning. When I didn't have really any clients, I offered to do some work for free for them. This is super important. Instead of coming right out of the gates and saying like, this is my day rate or this is my hourly rate.
I think it's important to ask them for product that you can work with, that you can get to know, that you can style and shoot plenty of times before you're delivering any content to them. Most times they're going to say yes, not a problem at all because the company's only out product. And then if you deliver no images, they're only out product. But here's what you're going to do. You're going to get those products and you're going to work with them.
You're going to style them. You're going to shoot them. You're going to send them back to the client and they're going to be blown away.
They love your images. They love the work that you did for them for free. And then they're eventually going to want to hire you. Maybe not all the time, you know, but this often works a lot because you're taking the initiative. You're taking the approach to getting the product in your hands, working with it, taking some images on your own dime, and then sending them back to them.
That basically earns the company's trust right away. They know you're going to deliver work on time. That's quality. and they're going to want to work with you somehow. Do the work you want to get hired for.
Here's another little trick that I used in the very beginning. If I wanted to work for, let's say, Red Bull, I would go out to the store, buy a bunch of Red Bull product, bring it back to my apartment or studio, wherever the heck I'm shooting at the time. and I would shoot their product. And then I would reach out to them on Instagram and say, hey, like these are some images I took.
I was just having fun in my studio on the weekend and feel free to use them on your page if you want to. That's another way to gain a brand's trust. Just showing them that you're more than willing to do the work at the beginning for free of charge, basically. I'm just telling you, both of these tricks worked really well for me in the beginning, especially when I didn't have clients or I didn't have a client base.
that was paying me a consistent amount each month. So the brand wants to work with you. This is awesome. This is great news. This is the first step to becoming a full-time food photographer.
And this is the first step to making your $100,000 per year. Do this to multiple brands. You can easily work at a monthly pace on different brands. across the board delivering 20 photos 30 photos 50 photos a month so in order to hit the 100k a year mark you probably have to have four or five clients paying right around two thousand dollars a month or a little bit more which is not out of the question at all i had five clients one time all paying 22 to 2500 a month no problem for 20 to 30 images on their social media feeds every single month tip number four is shoot for restaurants this is one thing i absolutely love doing i love working with people i love working with brands and restaurants in person it's a more personable atmosphere.
You're working with people to be able to match their vision. You have real-time editing and critiquing that goes on while you're taking images for restaurants. Your job is super easy because you have someone, a chef that cooks for you, a food stylist that does all of the styling, and then you as a food photographer that has the best part in the world where you're able to just shoot this beautiful dish that you didn't have to prepare at all. It's great.
But this is an outstanding way to make $100,000 a year. And this is something I've been doing from the very beginning. When COVID happened, all of my restaurant... work went away. You know, everything I was doing was basically online for brands on Instagram, but I'm so thankful to be able to be back doing this after COVID now, because it's one of the things I really love.
And I think you can make a decent amount of money doing it. So working with restaurants is nice because most restaurants are part of a group. They usually have a bigger budget to work on projects like this, and they have a bigger budget for marketing. So they're willing to throw more money at a project, especially if your work's awesome. My day rate currently in 2021, and this might go up in 2022, but my day rate.
for a full day of shooting, which is anywhere from six to eight hours is anywhere from $1,500 to $2,200 per day. Now, if you do this five different days out of the month for different restaurants, you're well over that $100,000 a year mark. I feel like if you give restaurants just like a single flat rate that includes all of your photos, all of the editing, they're going to be much more understanding and much more.
more happy about that, that they're able to budget for that number. They don't want to be surprised with an hourly rate after the fact. Let's say you end up editing for 10 hours instead of the five that you projected. Now that restaurant's going to be a little bit surprised by that number.
So if you give them a flat number up front that you're comfortable with working under, I say that's the way to go. You're not surprising the restaurant at all. They're able to budget for that number and then book you accordingly. Step number five in making the 100k a year mark.
is passive income. And something as food photographers, we don't necessarily think about passive income that much because we're constantly shooting, we're constantly styling, we're constantly editing. So there isn't really anything passive about that.
So what can you do to get into that passive income sphere of things? Think about all of those photos that you've taken over the years, food photos that you're not really using anymore, stuff that you've posted on your Instagram from years ago. Those images can all be repurposed as stock photos. And then every time somebody goes onto the stock photo website, they download your image. and you get a kickback or certain percentage of that sale every single time somebody downloads.
Passive income is one of those things that I'm really trying to get better at. I'm trying to learn more about it. I'm trying to develop my portfolio to be more passive income heavy. I feel like it's a great avenue to generating very high amounts of wealth.
But as you know, passive income is one of those things that works while you sleep. And it's super important to have some of those things in your portfolio in order to make that 100K a year mark. I don't have one yet, but a lot of photographers have courses. And I think courses is another great way to gain that passive income.
I have bought a few courses from photographers that I really enjoy and really love. I just feel like it's a great way to support them. And then you're also learning something in return. So that's it. That's my five steps to gaining financial success and being able to hit that $100,000 a year mark.
They are very simple steps. And you might say, man, I've done that before and it's not working. I just, I don't know what's going on. I can't hit that mark. I'm telling you right now, it took a ton of late nights editing and a ton of mornings.
before work shooting. It took a lot of very uncomfortable hours to get to this point, but you have to be committed and determined to get to this point in your career. I'm telling you, it is 100% worth it.
If you decide to take that journey, please reach out to me. I love hearing about your success stories. I love seeing your food images on my Instagram at Fork and Pancakes and always your comments below.
I try to answer every single comment on every single one of my YouTube videos. I'm very honored and blessed to be able to do this and to be able to teach you the skillset that I have and that I've used in order to... to be successful shooting food i hope you took a couple things away from this video and i hope your food photos improve they definitely will as long as you put in that time and effort that's it for me today good luck chasing that 100 000 a year you can definitely do it i believe in you peace