Hello friends and neighbors, thanks for joining me on another step of the Luminous Journey. This one goes back a bit, starting something like 5 years ago. I wanna share with you the things I’ve been doing to try to become someone in the art scene. If you’re like me, you didn’t go to an art school, you don’t have a family name or connections in the right circles, in that case, how in the world can you get noticed? With seemingly endless numbers of artists out there, how can I claw my way out of the shadows and into the light where I can blossom? That’s what I wanna explore today, by giving you some of the advice I’ve taken and followed, we can come up with some solutions together. Let’s get into it.

First thing’s first, what’s your niche? If you don’t have an answer to that question, you’re going to struggle. In my case, I was pretty fortunate to be struck by inspiration and discover light painting. Finding that passion was a journey though. It took years of experimenting with different styles and forms to get to that point.

Death Valley National Park, California ©theluminouseye

And that’s what you’ll have to do, dig in to as many different styles as you can find, give them each a good honest go, and decide what exactly makes you different. This may change over time, but understand that the more specific you can get, the better you’ll be able to stand out. Specialization is a key to both refining your skill set, and being noticed. Once you have your style refined, what you need is a body of work.

You cannot become a photographer without taking a ridiculous amount of pictures. I mean ridiculous, like get yourself some extra SD cards, and start building that shutter-finger muscle. It takes hours and hours just to familiarize yourself with the settings and functions of your camera. Once you do that, you can begin on the years it takes to develop your craft. There’s a great article in the description about the 10,000 hour rule. The author believes that just to master lighting would take around 10,000 hours, and to really become a great photographer is in the range of a decade of daily practice. By that count, I still have a long way to go, but I try to do as much as I can, and so should you. It’s a long game, even if your iphone photos look great right now.

Alright, so you’re a pretty darn good photographer now, so let’s talk business. We need to find an outlet. My first attempt was craft fairs. We would print up some photos, get a booth, and hit up passers-by to buy them. This was a total failure. The prints were too small, not well framed, and just didn’t have a feel of value. I got a ton of compliments, but no sales. It just wasn’t the right market. I entered a few group exhibitions, which was a bit better.

At least the buyers there were looking for art. Without a track record though, it’s still a challenge to command good prices and generate a buzz. Another thing that hurt me was the quality of my equipment at that stage. We’ll get into more details about what I use in a future video, but I’m sure you all can understand that to do pro-level work, you need pro-level tools.

It actually wasn’t until this point that I developed a distinct name and logo. Before this I was just going by Sena Cakiroglu photography. There’s a lot of debate about this point, with many saying that the best name you can have is the one you were born with. It’s distinct, it helps people to identify with you on a personal level, and just keeps everything simple. All of these points are true, and you can’t go wrong with naming your photography business after yourself. However, when your last name is Cakiroglu, it doesn’t work super well for the American market, so I had to go a different way. After several weeks of brainstorming, writing down options, and iterating, I came up with The Luminous Eye.

It emphasizes the light-painting, and has an element of mystery that I wanted to bring out. I’d love to hear your comments on this point, do you think it’s more effective to use your own name, or create one?

Now that I had a name, it was time to make that a proper business. After doing some research, I decided to go with an LLC. The main reason for that is that at the time I wasn’t a citizen yet, and S-corps may not have non-citizens as shareholders. Beyond that, there are many more formalities involved with S-Corps, that I just didn’t want to deal with. The LLC protects my personal assets, and also gives me some tax breaks. There is a cost of course, there’s a minimum tax you have to pay even if you don’t make any money, but at least you can write off all your equipment expenses. I went through all this with an attorney for my first LLC in California, and you should definitely do the same. I’m not qualified to give out financial advice, so you need to find someone who is. That worked well for me, until I moved out of California, and had to dissolve my LLC, as I no longer had an office or agent in the state. For my second attempt, I used an online service to form the LLC, with the big benefit being that they can act as my agent and receive official correspondence, which will be necessary once I hit the road.

Ok, now I was legit, but still had no source of income. Up to this point, my in-person exhibitions were just not panning out. So my next move was to go virtual. I purchased a domain name, and then set about designing my website. I did this all myself rather than hiring a designer, so I could get what I wanted. The downside to that, is that it took me almost 2 months to really get everything right. The font, colors, layout, I really got into the details so that the site looks as professional as possible. Hopefully I hit my mark, let me know what you think.

The website was done, so now I had a great place to direct anyone who wants to know more about my work. But I wanted to take the virtual experience a step further. I stalked Reddit for several weeks to get an invitation to an NFT platform.

It turns out I was a bit late to the party, but I wanted to take advantage of the big wave of NFT sales that was going on. I’ve got that set up now. Now I feel like my digital presence is up to what I would expect, and all my infrastructure is ready. So we get to what I feel is one of the most difficult parts of this process; marketing.

No matter how excellent your work is, and how well you’ve prepared yourself and your business, you will never be successful if nobody knows who you are. And to be frank, I feel a little bit lost here. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the most effective channels for a new photographer. I’m just not sure if I should focus more on local groups and events, or go wide. There’s certainly an element of cost involved here, larger campaigns require larger investments. If you’ve got great ideas for marketing art on a budget, share them below. I’ll highlight some of the best suggestions in a future post & video. So here we are. I’ve been laying the groundwork for this journey for something like 5 years, and there are many miles to go. If you take only one thing away from this video, it should be this:

Chase your dream, and keep chasing it. If you’re on the right track, the chase will not feel like work. You may get lucky and find the secret sauce quickly, but more than likely you will need perseverance. I haven’t gotten there yet, but I am not discouraged. It’s only a matter of time, and as long as I keep putting in the energy, I’ll make it. You will too, just as long as you never give up.

In the next post, I want to show you some of the people who have inspired me to maintain my efforts, and keep the journey on course. Wouldn’t it be great if that could also inspire one of you? Find those like, subscribe, and notification buttons on my Youtube channel so we can find out next week. Much love, see you soon.

Watch this on Youtube by clicking HERE.

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