Freelancers don't always have it easy. A wedding photographer explains why

For startups and small businesses, too much business can never be a problem. For the freelancers, it is. This was slowly dawning on Joseph Radhik, a management professionalwho had turned away from the corporate grind to make and break it as a wedding photographer.

Two years and four weddings into the profession, Radhik realized that wedding photography was a lot more than just photography. For one, Radhik was spending an inordinate amountof time NOT shooting any pictures.

Instead, he was busy editing, compiling and delivering pictures. In his most productive periods, Radhik was spending 70 percent of his time on shooting and about 30 percent on making the delivery.

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As a result, he was doing only about one wedding a month and as he says, there was little time left to invest in himself. Radhik knew he needed help and a complete rewiring of the way he was working. Luckily, help was available by the way of a person who also sharedhalf his DNA.

First clicks
An alumnus of Indian Institute of Management at Indore, Radhik began his work life as a management trainee at Colgate Palmolive in 2007. Like most entrepreneurs in the creative space will tell you, Radhik too was discontented with his time in the 9-to-5 grind. “Afterspending two and a half years at Colgate, I realized I didn’t want to do it anymore. I felt that my creative abilities were not being utilized,” says Radhik, 30, who moved on to Elephant Design, a design and brand consultancy.

At Elephant Design, Radhik worked on business development, an area that the design firm hardly paid any heed to. “I was trying to put in place processes and operations geared towards getting new clients and pitching for ideas. These were issues that design-focused companies never looked at.”

While still at the firm, Radhik went for a close friend’s wedding. Here, for the friend and for his own love of photography, he shot the entire wedding. “I loved the experience and wanted more of it. Gradually, I moved towards taking up assignments. I remember that myfirst professional assignment was in February 2010 was,” says Radhik. One thing led to another and pretty soon, Radhik had a slew of assignments lined up in front of him…as it turned out, too many assignments.

Radhik’s brother, Joshua Karthik, 31, meanwhile was putting in the hard hours at Asian Paints, a company he was with since 2005. An alumnus of XLRI Jamshedpur, Karthik was risingat a fairly rapid clip in his career. But no matter how busy he was, Karthik always kept a tab on Radhik’s creative efforts.

Karthik had identified, perhaps even better than Radhik, the need for putting in place concrete structures and processes in the way his brother was going about his sole proprietorship business. “I knew that there was no way Radhik would be able to manage backend operations while he was busy shooting. Delivery, client calls, administrationand coordination…all these had to be looked into,” says Karthik. A photographyaficionado himself, Karthik gave up his fairly high position and teamed up with Radhik to convert that proprietorship business into the firm, Stories in Motion in 2012.

More Radhiks
They started small, with a seed capital of Rs 3 lakh that was spent mainly on equipment. Everything else was funded through the income from Stories in Motion’s first wedding client. Karthik took charge of everything other than shooting. His brief was simple. First, to ensure that Radhik as a photographer was free to focus on his creativity. The second was to leverage Radhik’s brand name in the wedding industry circles to expand Stories in Motion into a larger, full-service firm.

As a first step, the duo hired freelance photographers, who could work as an extension of Radhik and increase their reach and ability. However, Radhik says, they soon realized that it was difficult to ensure the same quality and consistency with freelancers-it was important to have a fully trained creative team of in-house photographers.

“When we started the hiring process, the only thing that I looked at was talent and a desire to get better,” says Karthik, Director-Services at Stories in Motion.

Today, Radhik has a team of 22 photographers, which has shot about 200 weddings. Now, when Radhik cannot make it to a wedding, there is a team that is well trained to ensure thatthere is no compromise in quality and delivery of pictures, which are shot the ‘Radhik’ way. “Once David Ogilvy built his company, he was not present for every project that the company did. Yet, to date, there is consistency and standard in the way the company runs. That’s the guideline we follow despite being a really small company,” says Karthik. Thecompany charges anywhere between Rs 1.5 lakh to Rs 3 lakh for a single day event depending on the scale and location of the wedding, says Radhik, who says that they do photography as well as videography for their clients.

Interestingness
Meher Sarid, a wedding industry expert, indicates that things will only get better for the brothers’ firm in India’s $25 million wedding market.

“Photographers like Radhik today use sophisticated equipment and technology to shoot images different to those shot by yesteryear photographers and studios,” says Sarid.

Chetan Vohra, Founder, Line Communications, a wedding management company, says that wedding
photography has clearly got fragmented into segments-celebrities are shot by Sheena Sippy and industrial tycoons by Badal and Raja. “The brothers have made their way into the working professional clientele,” he says, adding that approximately 20-25 percent ofan average wedding’s budget is spent on photography.

The two brothers tell us that they have different objectives and goals when it comes to their work. For Radhik, it is all about creativity. “If in any given album, we can capture 25 percent pictures that are worth giving a look for over three seconds or are worth being framed as per my standards, I think we have done a good job,” he says.

Karthik says that the quantitative goals he has set for the company are not in revenue terms; they are related to speed and quality of delivery, depth of talent, profitability, diversity and range of work, and an internal criterion he calls ‘interestingness.’

“We see ourselves working on 40 percent more weddings in five years, but the spread and the range of work will change. The talent pool that we have built [and are building out further] needs to be challenged constantly. I see us doing a broader scope of work inthe photo and film space in five years,” says Karthik.

This article first appeared in Entrepreneur India magazine