073: Jorge Bernades – Changing What You Do For A Living To Be Happier & How To Organise Your Business

Well, I’ve been photographing, professional since 2014. I do mostly weddings and I am in Portugal. So I’m a Portuguese wedding photographer. I started off doing something very different. Basically when I started my professional life, I was in the Air Force.

Basically when I was little, my dad would take me to air shows here in Portugal. So that’s where my love of airplanes came up. Also, it came along with my love for photography, because we would go to air shows and photograph the planes with my dad’s film camera. So basically that’s where both things started. But when I was a kid, the airplanes always pulled me over more intensely than the camera.

So I decided that I was going to be an Air Force pilot, and that’s what I was focused on during high school. I did a little bit of photography as well. I did a summer course during high school, but eventually when I finished, I went into the Air Force. So it was a long trip in the Air Force. Basically I started my course in 2001, finished around 2006, and then I did eight years of service in the Air Force.

That was cool. But then after a while, after being in the Air Force for a while, I started feeling like the job was making me happy. I loved flying. I loved flying all sorts of airplanes from the small training aircraft to fighter jets. It was a lot of fun, but after a while, it started getting to me and the fact that I was single at the time, I was away from my family, I was away from my friends except the work friends. It kind of started getting to me and I wasn’t feeling happy. So it started getting up with a weird mood in the morning, and that’s when it’s time to make a change.

I had kept in touch with photography throughout the years. I picked it back up as a serious hobby in 2009. And I taught myself a lot of stuff, taught myself by learning, by reading books, watching YouTube, endless hours of YouTube tutorials, which was nice. But eventually when I started thinking of changing my life, I started viewing photography as a possible profession, as a thing that I could do to make a living. So while I was still in the Air Force, I did a professional course in Lisbon. I had classes at night, so I would have my regular job during the day, go out have classes at night. And during those classes was when I felt that I was starting to feel happy about something that was like work again.

So that’s when I really decided, yeah, this is what I want to do next. So basically I created my plan and in 2014, I put my plan into practice and I left the Air Force, got a part-time job teaching English. So that’s another thing. And 2014 was also the year that I shot my first wedding. So basically that was the long story, the long roundabout way of how I got into photography.

Well, for me, the decision of wanting to change something came first, right? Because I looked at how I felt about what I was doing and it didn’t feel right anymore. So first I came to the conclusion that I had to change something. And then basically because I have a tendency to be a little bit organized, and my military experience also pushed me a little bit that way, I started coming up with a plan. And for me, the plan was okay, if I want to quit this job, I need to know what my bills are, what I need to do to eventually pay the bills after I’m not getting this paycheck. And basically I started coming up with a plan. And for me, the plan was my part-time teaching job, because that gave me the opportunity, while my end game was getting to photography. I knew that I had no clients in 2014.

Like you said, my first wedding was the wedding of a friend of mine, that talked to me and I photographed their wedding, which was great. But other than that, I really had no clients. So I had to do a lot of things to actually start the photography business. But my plan started to, I started to think of the plan of, okay, let’s deal with the important stuff first, and I need to keep paying my bills and that’s where the part-time came in. And sometimes that will be a solution for people. And then I started making my plan of how can I start increasing the number of clients I have? What can I do?

And that can be a lot of different things. I remember that I asked friends of mine to dress up as brides. I had a couple that had already gotten married and I turned to the bride and said, would you like to put on your dress again so I can photograph? And she said, yes. And that was great. So I got some more pictures.

I would probably never put down my Zenit film camera that I used in that summer course in high school. But if we’re being more realistic and talking about the beginning of my photography business, I think the one thing that I would’ve done differently would be I would do more portfolio building sessions at the beginning. I think that would’ve helped me grow faster because I have been growing every year. But I think that could have been accelerated if I had more work to show in the beginning. So basically that’s what I recommend when somebody’s starting out. People normally don’t like the idea of working for free. But basically when I think of these portfolio building sessions, I don’t think of it as working for free. I think of it as you are working for yourself, you are paying yourself in stuff that you can show to eventually bring more clients to you.

So I think it’s perfectly legitimate. Like I said, the story I asked my friends to dress up again so I could take some pictures. I think that I would do more of that. And sometimes we’re very scared to go ask people to do things. But I remember that one of the sessions I did, for example, I talked to a bridal shop and the lady gave me, loaned me three dresses, three bride dresses. I talked to a friend of mine to put them on. I talked to a hair salon for makeup and hair. And basically everybody got pictures. Everybody was happy to put some of their time in, to get something out of it. And when you’re working like that, when you set clear expectations for what people might get, you might be surprised at how far