2025 12 30

Bear, in studio. Keep it 100. See You Soon, Chicago, Illinois. May, 2025. © Clayton Hauck

Becoming a Portrait Studio Photographer in 2025 2026

Backstory: for 2024’s year-end post about becoming a portrait studio, see: 2024 12 30

For updates from this year, see: Part 1: 2025 03 24; Part 2: 2025 05 13

Quick aside: I recently got a “wellness check” call from a friend after reading my Threads posts. I’d been posting some negative contemplation after a tough week filled with rejection. It’s how I vent! While I realize being negative on the internet is a great way to ruin your reputation, I’ve always felt far more comfortable openly discussing professional losses more so than the wins. Likely, I’m just looking for some sympathy, whereas hyping my wins makes me cringe. How Midwestern of me. All this said, I think it’s time I take the advice and ditch the negativity (I’ve already ditched the politics and it’s helping a ton) on social media. Luckily for you, this here blog will remain the occasional platform for my negative (realistic) rants.

So, yeah… the portrait studio has been increasingly humbling in every way possible. While it’s easy for me to blame things out of my control (the economy, politics, astrology), surely there are things I can be doing better to get more bookings. I’m not going to get into specific numbers in this update. Instead, let’s think through some big picture ideas. To give you a bit more detail, however, let’s just say that my three most recent runs of Keep it 100 have been challenging (two were terrible and one was okay).

Present me jumping in here — I wrote the above back in September after two awful showings for portrait sessions. Basically, I didn’t have enough people book session to even justify doing then, and it had me questioning the whole operation. Afterwards, I did one more run of dates last month and it went a bit better, through still nothing to write home about. The quick and easy explainer as to why I’ve been having a tough time with it is that it’s not a priority of mine. Yes, while doing it, it is, but all of the time in between offering Keep it 100 sessions is spent focused on other things, while hoping that the next time I offer sessions, they will sell out!

Basically, there’s a lot of correlation to my commercial photography career and why it, too, has been struggling. I’m excited and focused while doing the work, but have very little interest in also doing the annoyingly-necessary things required to get the work. One way I’ve been attempting to “trick” myself into promotion is by posting a bunch of the images on my new everyoneisfamous.com website, in hopes of getting a lot of views (and then bookings) from that. As expected, it has worked fairly well! However, again, I’m not putting in the time required to actually update it regularly and am currently sitting on a backlog of two dozen people who I need to make and post pages for (it’s time consuming! I enjoy doing it, just don’t have the time!). Once I’m done with my year-end posts here, I will get busy over there.

Looking Backward and Looking Forward

It’s interesting to read last year’s post (see: 2024 12 30) back to see where my head was at then vs now. Basically, I’m in agreement on much of it but have a better idea of how to get there if I do, indeed, want to go that way. It’s no secret that ai has thrown a massive wrench into all things creative, so I think a large part of my hesitancy has been from a lack of conviction that portrait photography is a valuable way to spend my time and energy. I will say, from a photographer’s perspective, I’d wager it’s one of the better places to be if you do wish to ride out the storm as a working photographer. Sure, many people will ditch portrait sessions altogether and generate whatever images they need (you don’t wanna work with these people anyway!), but many others will shun the automation and turn to the real thing. I think that being an elevated portrait option at a reasonable price point (there’s the catch) will allow you to stay in business for decades to come. The far bigger challenge will be standing out in the pack, among hundreds of other very talented photographers near you, as everyone wants (/needs) to work for themselves these days.

The trouble I’m having with commitment has more to do with logistics than with desire. In sum: I opened the photo studio ~4 years ago now, thinking it would be used mostly for commercial photo projects and occasionally events. Much of the commercial work never materialized, so I turned to portraits partly out of curiosity and partly out of necessity. The space was never designed to be a portrait studio and, looking forward, I’m not confident I could make it the type of portrait studio I would want it to be. It’s too large and expensive, which requires me to maintain partners and other use-cases (events) in order to cover the rent. If I were to really make a go at being a portrait-first photographer, I would need a space with the right character that I could make my own.

Excuses aside, there are still ways for me to utilize what I already have going, while giving a bit more thought to my longer-term plans within photography. That’s the current plan: focus on what is already working. In 2026, I will give everyoneisfamous.com the time it needs to hopefully develop a bigger audience, offer Keep it 100 sessions as much as I can in the current space (likely once per quarter), and do a few free on-location popups to further get the word out and help promo my other businesses. It’s a grind, really, but the good news is that it’s a grind I enjoy doing.

Thinking longer term, I’m still very much inspired by a few London-based portrait photographers (Ivan Weiss, Phil Sharp) and could very much see myself pivoting more towards that type of work (elevated, high-end portrait sessions) as I get older. I always say that I set up the studio in hopes of bringing more jobs to me as I get older, but where I went wrong was with what sort of jobs those would be.

-Clayton

This is one entry in a multi-part series of self-exploration and contemplation-out-loud in advance of the new calendar year. Some of this may happen; none of this may happen.
For the complete list of Year-End Contemplation posts from 2025, please see: 2025 12 25.
For the complete list of Year-End Contemplation posts from 2024, please see: 2024 12 25.