Speaking about the Journey so far, BabyBumPhotography’s Founder Ms. Simmi Gupta, said,
Being an established photographer looks like a dream come true. Initial struggle with BabyBumPhotography was challenging, particularly after leaving a well-settled job and spending long hours trying to understand the camera, equipment like studio lights, flashes, filters, lenses, etc. The excitement of getting initial clients and nervousness of offering them a satisfying experience and service, most important giving them a memorable moment captured to be relished for life. Dedication and hard work to understand the sprawling unorganized market to create a niche for my work and service always kept me on my toes.
Every client was treated with the utmost importance. At times, it took me more than eight to ten hours to finish baby shoots and had to very patiently handle expecting mothers. All the hard work paid off getting appreciations and overwhelming feedbacks on social media from my clients. Every day is a new excitement with photography with new clients, new concepts, creativity & experiential editing. I am looking forward to a long and satisfying journey ahead.
Did you face any challenges?
Differentiation in the offering. There is a lot of competition in photography, as a lot of amateurs and commercial retail studio set-up boomerang this space. Creating a niche and specialized service model and value-added service offering in this space come as a big challenge in this segment but once your quality of product and service registers within the customer and the user base, this profession becomes self-sustaining. But you need to innovate at every stage. Also, India as a country is still struggling to know the difference between good and great pictures. Indian clients are still not willing to pay much to photographers. The Wedding photographers are doing great on commercials but the rest of the streams like maternity, baby, family, lifestyle, portraits, newborn shoots are still evolving. Indian clients are taken away by international samples and expect the same work at a low price. They are unaware of the location constraints we have in India and even if we have options they don’t want to pay for the outdoor travel costs.
Why BabyBumPhotography?
The venture name is called BabyBumphotography.
BabyBumphotography was floated 2 years back and as the name signifies it only deals with maternity, newborn, baby, kids and family photoshoots.
The name babybum signifies baby’s bum in a cute way and baby bump to relate to for expecting mothers.
I was sure about trying my hands in photography and once I studied the Indian market, I realized there was a lot of space to cater to the upcoming photography trends in India like maternity shoot, Newborn shoot, Pre-Birthday shoots. It took me no time in understanding the scope of work and service delivery.
Is your Work Life Balanced?
With my own business, I enjoy a great work-life balance. I am generally shooting over the weekend and I try to complete at least 4 shoots per week and the rest of the time goes in creative editing.
Are you looking to raise any funding or investment?
Yes, by 2020 for a franchise business model spread-out under “BabyBumpPhotogarphy” studios.
Any misconceptions about the industry?
This industry is still evolving in India. The fundamentals of offering and expectations need to be firmed up. There are very basic crash courses with photo walks but no great schools to create great photographers in India. We all work on a self-learning mode. Also, there are a lot of me-too photographers in the industry who are willing to do photography at very nominal amounts. This disturbs the entire chain and becomes unfair to photographers who are actually doing great work.
Any Success Story?
My success stories are my clients. I have had a client who in the past 2 years has got 5 shoots done by me. Starting from maternity to just born, newborn, six month baby birthday and now 1st baby birthday shoot. So much, that they want a photoshoot every six months now.
A recent client was so thrilled after seeing her maternity shoot that she came down to meet after her baby was born and complimented me by saying that “This was the best shoot of my life even better than my pre-wedding and wedding”. Next, I went to her house for a baby shoot and I saw she had replaced her wedding pictures with my maternity shoot pictures. This meant a lot.
Anything else you want to shout out to our readers?
Yes. I think clients in India still don’t understand the pain and hard work that goes into this service. For most, it’s just a very simple one-time investment in a DSLR camera. But photography is just not about having a camera. There is a lot of investments like lenses, props, space cost, light cost, editing and software cost.
Every picture handed over should have an appeal combined with creativity and editing, hard work, ideas and technology to create great pictures.
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Feel free to connect with Ms. Simmi at [email protected]. Make sure to not spam her inbox. 🙂
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