041: Kai Coombes – The Worlds Only Remote Shooting Underwater Photography Studio

September 20, 2021

“You have to be better at business, than you are at photography.”

KAI COOMBES

Hey everyone! It’s Sally here, from Studio Ninja. Today’s episode is all about Kai Coombes.

Check out some of the biggest points from Kai’s interview below:

How do you pose people in the water?

With great difficulty, but this is part of the reason why I love it because everything… Something different happens every single time. There is no real control over exactly what’s going on, which means that, in a photoshoot, I might get through easily a thousand photos in an hour just because you have to keep you in to make sure that there’s some decent ones running throughout when there’s hair not going across their face. So it’s a combination of trying to teach the models to go through. We do a lot of stuff with dance poses. So as long as you’ve got kind of wide arms and pointy toes, normally you’re good.

And we worked through a load of different poses that we’ve kind of got stacked with us. We got to have an iPad normally, and we’ll go through and just sort of show them the image and go kind of like that. They try it, and then they come up again, and then we give them advice until it gets to the point where we want it. The most difficult thing that we found is actually communicating with the clients and the models underwater because they can’t see out. It’s a really weird optical illusion where the front of the glass, where I’m shooting from, from the inside, is just black because I’m shooting from essentially a large blackout marquee that stops any kind of reflections on the glass.

What are your marketing secrets? 

So for me, it’s quite obviously a niche thing that we offer, and to be fair, we don’t do a lot of B2C. We don’t work with a lot of consumers. We work with most of the other businesses. And so, my kind of main effort was to go out and build relationships with people in the industry. So I don’t know if you know much about the film industry, but it’s incredibly incestuous. Everyone knows everyone. And my kind of main goal was to go out there and make as many people as possible aware that we exist, and we are a thing. In the hope that when someone goes, “I really fancy doing… I’ve got a concept, and I want to do something underwater.” Someone will go, “Oh, I know a place.” And it’s gone absolutely wild. We invited a load of people down for different shoots.

We worked with a lot of influencers in the industry, and we kind of do all of our marketing through word of mouth and building relationships. We’ve got people that have kind of sent us five to six referrals each as kind of filmmakers. And we always say to them, “Do you want finder’s fees? Or do you want a percentage cut?” And they’re like, “No. No. Just bear us in mind next time we need the studio for anything underwater. Just remember that we’ve sent you some work and give us a discount,” and that’s fine by me. So yeah, it’s really just building relationships with people and making sure that when they do come and work with us, that they have an amazing time and they get exactly the shot that they need. And then they keep coming back. So off the back of building a few referrals, we’ve just built our network and built our network until we know a lot people in the film industry.

We’ve worked with every form from the same lighting crew that did James Bond Skyfall, and they know everyone. Yeah, that was wild one actually. We invited one person down who owns a YouTube channel because we thought he makes really good videos, it would be good promo for us, and he was going to shoot with a large format underwater… Sorry, not underwater. A large-format, Victorian Bellows camera. In fact this… again, I’m welcomed by your listeners to be proven wrong by this, but I think it was the world’s first time the underwater images have been taken in color using Victorian camera.|

And he came down to shoot this video. I didn’t realize at the time that he was a massive kind of figurehead in the film industry down in London, and off the back of that, we’ve got so much work. So from my poster to anyone in kind of the niche photography area, if you’re dealing with businesses, it’s all about building relationships and not necessarily driving sales, but just making sure that people know that you exist. So when they need you, you’re there.

If you could start your career all over again, is there anything you’d change?

The short answer is, no. So I made the kind of mistakes when I was younger in terms of not necessarily focusing on the photography like it was a business. I just tried to turn it from something that was a hobby into a job, and it’s actually a very difficult transition. It’s not something that’s easy, and you have to put a huge amount of work and effort into it. So having that opportunity to go out and then work in lots of different areas and kind of build up my business background and then come back into photography has put me probably in the best possible sted to make it into a successful business.

Thank you!

Thanks again to you all for joining us and a huge thanks to Kai for joining us on the show!

If you have any suggestions, comments or questions about this episode, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post, and if you liked the episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of the post!

That’s it for me this week, I hope you all enjoyed this episode.

See you soon,

Sally