How I Built My Small Business

Jak Wonderly - Becoming a NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC Photographer

• Jak Wonderly • Season 1 • Episode 39

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Today we have Jak Wonderly in the studio chatting with us about his journey to becoming a National Geographic photographer.

Jak is an award-winning commercial and editorial photographer based in Northern California. His remarkable work has been featured in esteemed publications such as Smithsonian Life and the New York Times, with over a thousand images in the National Geographic Image Collection and contributions to more than 25 National Geographic books.

Wonderly's photography captures the beauty and complexity of the natural world. He achieved first place in the prestigious Big Picture Natural World Photography Competition and has had his work exhibited in several museums. A passionate advocate for conservation, Wonderly has lectured on conservation photography at Stanford University and the California Academy of Sciences. 

Through his lens, Jak not only documents the world but also inspires action to protect it, making him a significant figure in both the artistic and environmental communities. 

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Anne McGinty:

Welcome to H ow I Built my Small Business. I'm Anne McGinty, your host, and today we have Jak Wonderly in the studio chatting with us about his journey to becoming a National Geographic photographer. Jak is an award-winning commercial and editorial photographer based in Northern California. His remarkable work has been featured in esteemed publications such as Smithsonian Life and the New York Times, with over a thousand images in the National Geographic Image Collection and contributions to more than 25 National Geographic books. Image collection and contributions to more than 25 National Geographic books. Wonderly's photography captures the beauty and complexity of the natural world. He achieved first place in the prestigious Big Picture Natural World Photography Competition and has had his work exhibited in several museums. A passionate advocate for conservation, Wonderly has lectured on conservation photography at Stanford University and the California Academy of Sciences. Through his lens, Jak not only documents the world but also inspires action to protect it, making him a significant figure in both the artistic and environmental communities. You can find a link through to his business in the episode's description. Before we jump into the interview, please hit the follow button on your favorite streaming platform to help me reach more listeners' ears, I really appreciate it. Let's get started Thank you to our listeners for being here today. Jak, it's so good to have you here. Thanks for coming on the show.

Jak Wonderly:

Oh, it's my pleasure. As I said in my email, I thought this is one of those rare opportunities where I step back and have time to look at my business from the outside in. I Wonderf do enough, so I appreciate your podcast and what you're doing with it.

Anne McGinty:

Well, I'm really excited to have you here. So people generally know what a photographer does, but do they? How would you describe what it is that you do, and can you give us an idea of what goes into a photo shoot?

Jak Wonderly:

Because I have so many different types of clients. You know there's not one answer, but I can give an example or two. I mean, obviously we take pictures, but everybody with their phones now takes pictures. So what's the difference between that? I mean I have a lot of clients who are posting content or using stuff that they shot on their phone. Versus when I come out, I look at photography as being in the pretty rectangle business. I mean, I'm a service provider and I'm making really pretty rectangles and it's that simple. But it's not that simple when you talk about the practicality of making a very high level, amount and quality of photographs in a short period of time. My clients are basically paying by the hour, so I need to give them as much value per hour as possible. One of the things because of where I live in wine country, you know wine harvest and agriculture and stuff is part of my client base. So a good example would be harvest for the wineries.

Jak Wonderly:

A lot of times grape harvest happens at night. Most of the time they do it when it's cold. So you go out at night and first of all, photographer needs light. I mean it literally means mapping light. So now you're working in the dark. You're working with a group mapping light. So now you're working in the dark. You're working with a group. They harvest grapes by hand. Most of them don't speak English, so there's not a lot of communication between me and them. They know that I'm out there. They're respectful, I'm respectful, I try to stay out of their way. But basically there's a group of people running mad through the vineyards cutting grapes as fast as possible in the dark. There's headlamps, there's tractors and I have to go out and try to make this look beautiful, interesting, glamorous. You know, there's a reason why they want me to capture night harvest because it tells about the quality of what they're producing. As a winemaker, they make the effort to keep those grapes cool. They want to pick at three o'clock in the morning. So my alarm goes off and I'm out there at three o'clock in the morning. So my alarm goes off and I'm out there at three o'clock in the morning. And now I've got 20 to 40 pounds of gear on my back and I'm sometimes running through the field trying to keep up with the pace of what's happening.

Jak Wonderly:

I have to anticipate the action. I have to not get run over by the tractor. I have to stay out of people's way. I have to think about lighting. I have to stay out of people's way. I have to think about lighting. I have to keep shooting the same shots over and over again.

Jak Wonderly:

And because it's nighttime, you're working at the very edge of a camera's capabilities. You can't turn the ISO up too high. I know, you know photography. Yeah, it'll get grainy, it'll get grainy. You have to keep your shutter speed up unless you want to blur the action.

Jak Wonderly:

Your aperture has to be wide open, and then I light almost everything. So besides ISO aperture and shutter speed, I've got how much light power do I have and how far is the light from the subject? So basically I've got five different variables. So in the back of my brain, as I'm running around, I'm doing a little bit of math all the time. If I reduce my f-stop to 1.4, I can get an extra boost of this thing. But I got to move my light then because it's going to be too close. So there's just a lot of juggling. But I'm so happy. To me it's like game day. It's game on If I come home and I'm sweaty and dirty and everything that was awesome. There's a little bit of adrenaline in it for me. I wouldn't say I'm like an adrenaline junkie, but just those challenges of like it's happening now. I have to get this right right now.

Anne McGinty:

And with digital photography? Are you looking at what you're shooting in real time or are you just shooting?

Jak Wonderly:

I try not to. I mean, I definitely check it, because now we have mirrorless cameras where you can see in the viewfinder the exposure that you're going to get, not just the scene but it actually shows you the exposure so you know that you're not underexposed or overexposed as you shoot. We call it chimping. Like you look at the back of the camera, it's called chimping. I try not to do that because the minute I do that I'm out of my flow. Yeah, you're distracted, I'm distracted. I'm like judging myself versus staying in the moment. So I do, but as little as possible.

Anne McGinty:

And when you think about your original decision to go into this field, what stands out to you Like? What do you appreciate most about what you do?

Jak Wonderly:

I think it would have been financially much easier to stay in the corporate world. I mean, if I look at the trajectory that I was on, you know things would be more comfortable in some ways. But I just feel like in my soul I would have slowly died, just personally. Some people thrive in that environment and I did not. The experiences that I've had, I make memories on an almost weekly basis in my job. That was not a thing when I had a cubicle job.

Jak Wonderly:

You know, I get paid to go whitewater rafting. I get paid to go to Yellowstone and take pictures of wildlife. I get paid to go to Singapore and take pictures of pangolin. Today we're going to take the window off of Cessna and you're going to hang out the side of the airplane For a client that you wouldn't think is in that vein of like. That's not an adventure client, it's a very mundane government contract, but still those things happen. I got to feel a bear's heartbeat on a photo shoot, like that's just not the kind of thing that I could have gotten in most of my other opportunities.

Anne McGinty:

Can you tell us about that?

Jak Wonderly:

I had a job with National Geographic to do a small assignment to cover a rescued bear's release. They had rehabbed a bear in Tahoe and they were going to release it and so I went into the cage with the vet and the volunteer person as they darted the bear and videotaped that. And then as it goes to sleep they bring it out and they're like do you want to feel the bear's heartbeat? So the bear is just basically on the floor and they're just doing work on it and I could put my hand on its chest and feel the fur and the heartbeat and everything through it and it's those kinds of experiences that to me, are more valuable than anything. I had a job for a while, for about four or five years. One of my income streams was I would go and assist or co-lead wildlife tours. It's a great way to fill in some financial need and travel at the same time. Versus, you know, it would cost me whatever $10,000 to go to Africa and go on safari, rather than cost me anything, I can make $10,000 going and teaching. And over the years I built up a pretty good portfolio of wildlife and experiences. When I first started taking pictures as a hobby, I was really into animal photography. When I first started taking pictures as a hobby, I was really into animal photography and I wanted to do something with the photos, anything. This was before I was a professional and if I went to the zoo and I got pictures of a tiger or a snow leopard, I would offer those photos to the nonprofit that I thought might be able to use them. The Snow Leopard Conservancy is in my area. I mean, I literally just emailed them. I went to their office. I was just offering to help, so they knew who I was.

Jak Wonderly:

Flash forward almost 10 years. I had ran into Rodney Jackson, who's probably the leading snow leopard expert. He was at a fundraiser and I said hello and asked him about how hard is it to get a snow leopard photo? And he said well, it's getting easier. It's still really hard, but it's getting easier. But by that point I had photographed all the other big cats like leopard, jaguar, lion, cheetah all of them tiger. So the only one left was the snow leopard. So I kind of had it in my head. I'm like, well, I might as well finish it, and that's by far the hardest one. I mean, it's a myth, it's a ghost, like they just don't want to be seen Anyway. So I ran into Rodney and we had that brief conversation.

Jak Wonderly:

Then, like a year later, I just got a text from a photographer friend of mine who said Rodney wants you to go to the Himalayas and photograph snow leopards and they have somebody willing to pay for it. And I was like how does that have? Like I just couldn't believe my luck in a way. But it wasn't luck, you know. I mean it was it was networking and I had the portfolio. We had a very generous sponsor who was willing to cover the cost of the expedition and I said yes, without even thinking about it. But then, as I researched it I had a few months to get ready I realized what I had signed up for, like I could die. That's basically what my reaction was. Like we're going to go to 12,000 feet, 14,000, 15,000 feet in the Himalayas in the dead of winter and we're going to sleep in a tent and it's going to be 20 below and you might see a cat.

Anne McGinty:

Did you see one?

Jak Wonderly:

I did. It took eight days. I was there for 10 and on the eighth day we saw one. It was great because usually they're very fleeting. You know they're hundreds of yards away and they'll just pass over the ridge or something and they're gone. Like 30 seconds is all you're going to get. But I had one that was feeding on a yak that he had killed and I had one that was feeding on a yak that had killed and I had 13 hours staring at it through a, through a lens and it's staring back at me.

Jak Wonderly:

I mean because it's very aware of your presence wow and so you just hold your ground and don't approach and it realizes that you're holding your ground and it holds it ground and it just sits there with its kill and stares back at you. And it was a proper expedition in the sense that when we go out into the mountains, like we put our gear on ponies and hike off into the hills like it's the 1800s or something, like there is nothing out there.

Anne McGinty:

That sounds amazing.

Jak Wonderly:

It was probably the trip of a lifetime. I think about those experiences versus sitting in a meeting talking about something I don't care about, and I just I couldn't imagine doing it the other way.

Anne McGinty:

So rewinding a bit, because it must have been quite a few steps before you got to this point what originally led you to jump into photography in the first place?

Jak Wonderly:

I kind of fell in love with art. At the very end of high school I decided I wanted to be a designer, like an industrial designer, somebody who does product design. I went to school for that at a private art school in the Midwest in Detroit. I took photography there as an elective and I really enjoyed it, but I didn't get bit by the bug that bad, but it was something I always did. I mean, I look back and you know, when I was 18 or 20, I was taking pictures a lot and I was making a little gallery wall at home and it was definitely an interest of mine. I got a job as a furniture and interior designer for a while.

Jak Wonderly:

At some point I got a little disenfranchised with that because I felt like there were three people helping somebody buy a $10,000 rug. I was like there has to be more meaning. I mean, I like nice things I definitely do but I just didn't want that to be my day-to-day. I looked around. I got a job for a software company that made software for designers like a visualization tool. That was a startup that went from three people to 30 and then back down to three. I switched to another company that was in the similar type field, but in the marketing side that company went from five people to 120 and then back down to about 10. So it was a wild ride. Every day you'd go into work and not know who would show up that day or who got fired.

Jak Wonderly:

At the end of that stretch I was in San Francisco working remotely taking care of clients in the Bay Area for a company that was based in Detroit, and it was slowly becoming a sales job, which is not my forte. One day the phone rang and it was basically all your work is moving to Los Angeles. There's not going to be an account in the Bay Area anymore. If you want to stay with this job, you got to go where the work is, and that's Los Angeles. This was about 2007.

Jak Wonderly:

I had no interest in relocating to Los Angeles. I started looking for another job. I applied at all the right places. I got interviews. I got second interviews. I ran out of time at the job that I had. They were like okay, you know, like are you going to move or not? And I said no. And they said then we don't have a job for you and I knew that. So I found myself unemployed. But I was like no problem.

Jak Wonderly:

I got this and then the 08 crash happened and the interviews dried up and it got real quiet really fast and meanwhile I had taken up photography as a hobby. Like in the last couple of years before that, it was something I did several times a week. I had bought a nice camera. I was really into it and you know, I was living in San Francisco. It's extremely expensive. I you know, I was living in San Francisco. It's extremely expensive.

Jak Wonderly:

I started downsizing. I moved out of the city. I got a smaller place, I was living on my savings and I just went. You know what? I don't want to go back. I just didn't want to go back.

Jak Wonderly:

I had no idea how to make it work. I had no idea what a photography life looked like. I reached out to a couple of photographers. I didn't get much information but I just went for it. I literally made a business card and put up a website and just said I'm in business. But I didn't even know what that was.

Jak Wonderly:

At this point my portfolio was mostly animals. I love photographing animals, but they don't write checks. So you know, there's a little bit of how do I make this work my first real win, and it was humble, but it worked for me. I took pictures of a friend's dog when we went for a walk. She framed one of those photos and she put it on her desk at work. Her work was at a veterinary office. He was celebrating his 25th year in business. He wanted to build a new website and give a gift to his 25 most loyal clients, which turned out to be a photo shoot with me. So I had 25 photo shoots all of a sudden, 25 potential clients I could build upon. I was giving out cards, I was making connections and stuff, so that's how it started. There were a lot of bumps along the way, though.

Anne McGinty:

How long did it take for you to really build up a client base and transition into this being a full-time job that could support your life?

Jak Wonderly:

Long after I had built up that client base, I read somewhere that it takes five years to go full-time and 10 years to make a name for yourself, and in retrospect I think that's true. I'm sure there are people who've done it faster, but for me that was about the case. The first few years I would fill in with jobs that paid 20 bucks an hour or whatever it was, and I tried to keep it relevant. So I worked as a photo editor part-time, freelance at a publishing company. I worked as a videographer part-time things like that that were relevant but steady. I mean, I had a kid at that point, so I had to make some money and in hindsight all of those jobs were helpful. At the time it felt like a grind, but it was worth it.

Anne McGinty:

And then not only did you make it, but you then made it quite big, a big name for yourself. How did you build your relationship with National Geographic and how did you get into their agency, the NatGeo Image Collection?

Jak Wonderly:

In 08, 09, like the first couple of years, and I was not sure how to make this work. I just knew that National Geographic was the gold standard of photography, so I wanted to send them work somehow, get recognized somehow, even just not get hired, but just get some acknowledgement that I was good. And I put a reminder on my calendar every 30 days. I was going to send them something, however I could. I didn't have any contacts there, so usually that meant entering it into a contest. You know they always had like a travel photography contest, a wildlife photography contest. They had a your shot thing where people would send in their amateur photos and their editors would pick their favorites, and over the course of about a year and a half I went from sending the photos in and nothing would happen to more often than not, they would put my photo on the website, like six out of 10 times, seven out of 10 times. So I started to feel like I'm getting good at this thing. And then, along the way, of course, you've signed up for all their newsletters and all this stuff's going into my old Hotmail account where all my spam comes, and I don't open them.

Jak Wonderly:

One day I'm in my Gmail account and I get an email from National Geographic saying we've been trying to reach you, we want to publish this photo in our magazine, et cetera, et cetera, and I was shocked. I was absolutely shocked. And it turns out they had emailed me in my Hotmail account like three weeks ago and I mean I missed it. Oh my gosh, like National Geographic calls and you don't pick up the phone is basically what happened. But fortunately they persisted and it was a photo that I had taken of an alligator and it was just a really interesting composition. It was that simple and they published it as a two-page spread in their magazine. You open the October issue I think it was September, october and like the first big photo in there was my photo.

Jak Wonderly:

And it paid well and I was like oh my gosh. And then immediately everybody goes he's a National Geographic photographer and people don't have a lot of context about what that means. But it definitely looks good on the resume that you've been in their magazine. So they had a stock agency that represented a lot of the best photographers in the world and if you could get in there it was like you were in the club, the elite club, and the rule was they don't just take random submissions, you have to be somebody who contributes to their publications. Like they only represent their own photographers. National Geographic doesn't have staff photographers anymore. So when people say they're a Nat Geo photographer, you have to take that with a grain of salt, because they're a freelancer and there are definitely some people who I think have earned that title. Like they have shot a lot of assignments for Nat Geo. They're regular contributors, the top of the top, and I don't feel like I'm in that elite level but I have regularly contributed to their publications. Anyway, having one photo in technically qualified me and the guy who ran the agency said, well, your work's great. But like one photo wasn't quite enough to kind of make him go. You're in Flash forward. It was six months or a year.

Jak Wonderly:

A friend of mine that I used to work with sent me a link to a job listing for Nat Geo. It was a freelance job to photograph stuff for their books. The editors were in the kids' department and it was a lot about animals. He's like you should apply and I was like, yeah, what are the odds? But I did. I sent in my stuff and they interviewed me and they hired me and it was almost a full-time gig, like it was a freelance job, but it was enough to pay my bills every month just doing that one thing. And it was a dream gig for me because they basically just said here's all the books we're working on in the next two years. What do you want to shoot? It was almost all animals, but it was like turtles, snakes, horses, and it was up to me to figure out how I was going to get that done and I had to submit so many photos a month.

Jak Wonderly:

They were just basically building up their own library to make these books work and they also gave me little assignments. You know, we want you to go photograph the ecosystem of Mono Lake, we want you to go photograph this bear rescue, and it was a fantastic experience and once I had that, then the agency let me in and then they would invite you to Washington DC when they have their photographers conference. And all of a sudden you're sitting in this room and you look around and like these are the best photographers in the world Not all of them, but a lot of them are in this little room. These are the best photographers in the world Not all of them, but a lot of them are in this little room and I'm like what am I doing here?

Anne McGinty:

Oh, come on, but your photos are amazing.

Jak Wonderly:

Thank you. I mean, I work really hard at it, but I still, I'm still looking at those people with like they're rock stars.

Anne McGinty:

You can definitely classify yourself as a Nat Geo photographer at this point.

Jak Wonderly:

The fun thing for me is to walk into the bookstore and like go to the section where they have their books and I can just open one and a lot of times find my work and I may not even know that it was in there, Like I didn't realize that they just published this book and there's one of my photos. It's not a relationship I've tried to build that much because I don't really feel like I'm an editorial photographer by nature. You know I don't really read magazines and work on stories. I have, but it doesn't feel like it's my genre.

Anne McGinty:

So talking about that a little bit like what is the difference between commercial and editorial photography? And it sounds like you lean more towards commercial.

Jak Wonderly:

I lean more towards commercial in terms of how many clients I have and the balance of my income. I really like doing editorial. To give you an example, so a couple years ago I shot a story for Smithsonian. It was a feature story. It was on condors. They were hurt by a wildfire in California and they were bouncing back and the organization was bouncing back from losing their research facility and stuff in Big Sur and it was a two page spread and then a bunch of individual photos like it was a proper feature story in Smithsonian and I shot that and I loved it. It was great. It pulled in all my different skills like I could do portraits, I can do landscapes, I can fly a drone, I can do wildlife. So in some ways it was like a perfect assignment for me. But I think people have this conception that if you do a magazine story it's like oh, two weeks in the field, for no, I shot that in five hours. Like it's not a big production and I'd have to do two of those a week to make a lit. Like it's just not a full-time gig. There are very few magazines that have staff photographers. Like I mentioned, nat Geo does not have staff photographers. People don't do that anymore. Smithsonian's great. They paid me well. They really care about their photographers that they hire, but it's not a job in and of itself.

Jak Wonderly:

I had another client on the commercial side, cavalia, which is, if you're not familiar I think they're based in Vegas now but they used to be a touring stage production. It's like Cirque du Soleil with horses and it's the largest touring stage production in the world. When they set up to do a show, it's like the Rolling Stones or something. It's a massive stage. They build everything. They've got 75 horses and a bunch of talent and it's quite a show.

Jak Wonderly:

And when they were in the Bay Area they were my client and they would have me out to photograph the show. They'd have me out to photograph behind the scenes. They would do a press release, trying to get momentum, going to sell tickets, and they would have like a press day and they'd have me go down and photograph something and they'd invite the local press and like four photographers would show up and I'm there and I'd photograph their exact same thing. But Cavalia is probably paying me five times what the press photographers are making and when the press release goes out, kovalia is sending out my photos with it. So all those publications that don't have staff photographers anymore use mine. It's just a shift where a lot of the publications do not have the budget for their own photography and so many of my clients, like I'm, published in magazines all over the place Men's Journal and Forbes and all these places on a regular basis, but it's the business that's paying for the photos. Is on a regular basis, but it's the business that's paying for the photos, not the magazine.

Anne McGinty:

That is super interesting. So that sounds like it's one of the main ways that you've really built your career. I mean, you've been in this now for 16 years 16,.

Jak Wonderly:

yeah, yeah.

Anne McGinty:

Being a creative freelancer isn't easy, so why do you think that you've been able to survive this industry, let alone thrive?

Jak Wonderly:

I think I've had a couple advantages. One of them is I have a really deep art background and I go back to where I started, which I'm in the pretty rectangle business. I'm very good at making pretty rectangles and my corporate experience was a lot about dealing with clients. I know how to do an estimate. I know how to take care of clients. That was the silver lining in the corporate world where I didn't feel great. I learned a lot as a digital creator we were bidding against traditional photography and I know how ad agencies work. I know how art directors work. I learned a lot in that phase. And then it's just hard work and persistence. I think a lot of people in the first few years five years would quit. You have to get over that hump of going full-time and making a name for yourself.

Anne McGinty:

How would you describe your business model?

Jak Wonderly:

It's had different iterations and I've dabbled in teaching. I dabbled in doing those tours. I've done editorial. I worked for a newspaper full time for a while in the early days, which was an amazing experience because you're doing like five assignments and editing them and turning them in by three o'clock. It's like boot camp. It's like boot camp, but now I want things as simple as possible. I strictly charge for services. Yes, I make a little money on stock. Yes, I make a little money on selling prints, but generally speaking, day in, day out, somebody hires me. I do a shoot, I deliver content, I invoice them. It's that simple. I don't have any employees. I have people that I will bring in when a job needs it, so other freelancers. But generally speaking, I work alone, I work from home or I work on location. I don't have a studio. I don't want one, I don't want a team.

Anne McGinty:

Yeah, keep it simple.

Jak Wonderly:

I want it simple and every time I bring people in I'm like they add a lot of value, but it also adds a lot of complexity. It slows things down. There's a lot of communication that has to happen, there's handoffs that have to happen and I feel like I've focused on optimizing my business for just me, doing creative output as much as possible.

Anne McGinty:

Well, it sounds like the perfect fit for you.

Jak Wonderly:

For my personality it is Some people love managing, some people love hiring people, they love having a team and I've had gigs where I'm surrounded by a team like they're not my employees, but on some of the larger commercial jobs we're shooting an ad campaign, you've got a producer, you've got an art director, you've got several people from the client, I have an assistant, there's other people, there's talent and makeup and everything and I'm standing on top of a ladder and kind of barking orders trying to make all the pieces fit and I look around and there's like a dozen people involved in this shoot and there's something really cool about that.

Jak Wonderly:

It's like being a movie director where everybody's working towards the same vision and you just happen to be the one looking through the camera with the eyeball At the same time. After a while I realized you know that's a lot of communication, a lot of pressure, a lot of moving pieces, a lot of points of failure, and I get paid the same when I go out and shoot a vineyard sunrise by myself. So I'm not that motivated to like add the complexity if I'm very much at peace and making a living doing a sunset by myself.

Anne McGinty:

I think that makes perfect sense. How do you get new clients?

Jak Wonderly:

it by myself. I think that makes perfect sense. How do you get new clients? I experimented originally with ads and flyers and emails and I felt like none of it really paid off for me. Maybe I'm just not that good at it, but what I am good at is making those pretty rectangles and trying to be nice to people. My business is almost entirely word of mouth. Yes, if you type in like Sonoma County photographer, I'm going to pop up. So some people just find me that way. But almost all of it is word of mouth. I don't know. Steve Martin or somebody said just be so good, they can't ignore you. And for me I've found that all of the efforts of marketing and stuff are just better spent on putting out the best work that I can and being easy to work with. And the phone rings. People will be like I got your name from so-and-so. That happens every week.

Anne McGinty:

How do you feel about branding and social media?

Jak Wonderly:

I feel like if you go back to those Nat Geo conferences and stuff where there was a lot of talk about social media this was like 2015 and stuff, when I started going and we had presentations on Instagram and I felt like I was already late to the party and I tried and it's just, it's slow. And you watch any social media platform and they follow a pattern of in the beginning it's great and then they slowly monetize it and they lessen your reach, and so I've got thousands of followers on social media that I came by honestly, but if I post something, a 10th of them see it. Because I've been able to build up that word of mouth. I almost give it no deference whatsoever. I will post to Instagram and Facebook and stuff about once a week and it's really just me reminding my clients that I'm out there and I feel like if I stopped, it wouldn't affect my business and branding.

Jak Wonderly:

I think that people that do it well and people that do social media well, it can help you grow your business, but it's not absolutely necessary. There's word of mouth, there's reviews online. There are other ways for people to find good clients. Good photographers, whatever your creative thing is. I don't need to be branded. My brand is I'm good at what I do. To me, that's enough.

Anne McGinty:

I love that because I don't particularly enjoy the social media part of marketing. It feels a little bit like a chore to me. So I don't love it. And I love hearing you say that because it just gives me a little bit more confidence to know I don't have to.

Jak Wonderly:

You don't have to. I mean, I've been on photo shoots where I'm doing photography for print and the website and I'm shooting next to people who are shooting for social media and it's very interesting, like I learn a lot from them and the way they look at things is completely differently and they're like you got to post five times a day and I'm like I'm not on Instagram five times a day, I'm not on it five times a week. I don't want to. That's just me. Like what works for me and my business is to not that's just me.

Anne McGinty:

Like what works for me, and my business is to not. This being said, though, one of your projects went truly viral the New York Times. I have it here written down I've been rather haunted by a prize winning photograph by Jack Wonderly, and it was a photo of dead animals.

Jak Wonderly:

Can you tell us this story? Yeah, because it does tie into the social media piece and why things work on social media. I got a message I can't remember if it was a phone call or an email, but basically somebody asked me. They said we have 232 dead animals here and we'd like somebody to photograph them. And we heard you might be the person to ask and I was so intrigued. I was like this is just too good of a challenge to pass. I didn't even need to know more.

Jak Wonderly:

When I teach people, I have given the assignment of like go to the Walmart parking lot and make art. You know, if you can make art out of something that's not beautiful, that's a skill that will keep you alive as a photographer, because a lot of what I photograph is not that pretty. It's my job to make it pretty, and 232 dead animals on the surface is not a good idea. So this was a nonprofit. It's a wildlife rescue organization in Marin wild care and they're fantastic. I don't know exactly their numbers, but I volunteered another wildlife rescue and they take in like a thousand to two thousand animals a year and Wildcare noticed that people were bringing them in because their cat had attacked them but the animal had survived but was injured. Right House cats attack a lot of animals. They eat birds and lizards and all, but they'll hunt almost anything. And they just wanted to point out that, like your choices with your house cat have a direct impact on the wildlife in your community. And this is a topic that had been covered in multiple media outlets, but there'd never been a good photo to go with it. So like the New York Times or National Geographic would do a story on it, but it'd be like an illustration of a mean looking cat. You know, there was never a photo and they diligently collected 232 carcasses over the course of one calendar year and said these are the animals that came in. So I had to brainstorm like how am I going to do this? How am I going to make a photograph that's not disgusting, it's going to be interesting? I stayed up at night thinking about it. I would do little sketches Like this was just a perfect creative challenge and in the end I just decided to do essentially a mandala.

Jak Wonderly:

I set up a studio in their place. They had the animals frozen. They thawed them out. They meticulously thawed them out, just enough to groom them and make them look beautiful again. But they couldn't be too thawed or they would start to leak bodily fluids on my white background. So we were working on the clock.

Jak Wonderly:

I arranged them kind of spontaneously in a way that just felt interesting and artistic to me. I photographed them from overhead, I mounted a camera on a pole over the top and just laid them out on the floor in a beautiful pattern the best I could do. And once you put them down you can't move them because they'll start to bleed or something. So it was like a one-time deal and it took the whole day and it was amazing. And to hold them in your hands, it really I've been a cat owner, I love cats and you really realize what they're doing. And to hold 200 and some dead animals one by one in your hand like you can't help but mourn what's happening.

Jak Wonderly:

So I deliberately shot it in a way that I knew would qualify it to be in contests. Like, contests have very specific rules about. You can't Photoshop it. You know there's certain things you cannot do. It has to be a legit one-up photograph. There's certain things you cannot do. It has to be a legit one-up photograph. So I entered it in the Big Picture Natural World Photo Contest sponsored by the California Academy of Sciences. It's one of the largest nature photography contests. They have about 7,000 entries a year and they pick different winners and an overall winner and then category winners and I won the Human-Nature Interaction category, so it's in the top 10 or so of 7,000. The runner up to my astonishment was a Nat Geo cover story photo. So I just felt like I had touched on something that was important and when I posted it and the background about it, it was kind of like hey, cat owners, you're doing it wrong, and I didn't mean it in any judgmental way, it's just an education piece. But the oh my God, the comments.

Anne McGinty:

Were they good or bad?

Jak Wonderly:

Both People are like this is so true. And people are like what? That's just their nature, that's what they do. How can you? I'm not doing it wrong, but it's not natural Because we it wrong, that's just. But it's not natural because we're feeding them cat food and then setting them out to prey. They fall outside of this normal balance that nature finds between prey and predator. So you just have to, you know, accept that that's the case and there's little things you can do to offset their impact. And that's all we were asking people to do was to consider it.

Jak Wonderly:

But that photo was in Smithsonian, the New York Times. It was in Nat Geo. Nat Geo did a whole story about the photo itself, like the photo shoot and you know I don't really work on Facebook, I'll just post something I don't know, 2,000 followers, but I had millions on that one, just millions of likes and dislikes and tens of thousands of comments, and it was shared over and over and over again. And I feel like it really tells the power of photography, because that one photo 10, 20 million people have probably seen that photo If just a handful made any little tweak to how they manage their cat, we've saved tens of thousands of birds.

Anne McGinty:

It sounds like a true work of art.

Jak Wonderly:

I've had a few people who wanted to frame it and hang it on their wall and I was like really it's dead animals.

Anne McGinty:

But it invokes emotion, and that's art right.

Jak Wonderly:

It was such a great challenge and I went headlong into it and I didn't charge them for the shoot. I did make an equivalent amount of money back selling the photo to licensing it out and stuff. But it was a success in terms of telling a conservation story and that meant a lot to me. That meant a lot to me.

Anne McGinty:

It's incredible, so I know you must have so many memories that you've made over the last 16 years. What is a good client to you?

Jak Wonderly:

Somebody who's nice to work with. I mean, at the end of the day, I don't want to work with assholes. I know that sounds obvious, right, and I've only run into a couple, but and I don't think they're even deliberately difficult they're just not organized or they're pulled in too many directions and they become difficult to work with and a couple of times I've been like you know what. I'm okay to let that one go. But generally speaking, my clients are amazing.

Jak Wonderly:

I like working with people who are at the top of their game whatever that game is, people who are growing their business. I feel like I want to grow my business, just like I learned from listening to your podcast. I learned from these business owners who are growing and who are excellent at what they do. And when somebody's good enough to be on the cover of Wine Spectator or something, those are the people I want to be around because they make me better at what I do. I raise my game to match what that skill level and there's so many people in my area who are really high level players in whatever they're doing. I like people in the hospitality, tourism and travel business. They're the kind of people who are like do you need anything? Would you like a glass of wine, like whatever the thing is? You know they, just they want to take care of you and then they're hands off and from a business standpoint, I had to learn this over time to think about the client over the long haul. And the reason why I don't need to do a lot of marketing and stuff is because I'm very good at keeping clients and keeping clients as they move from job to job and hire me at different like individual people, building that relationship, always delivering, always being easy to work with, always being on time, and then when they go to their next job at a new corporation or a new government office or something they're like I'm going to call Jack.

Jak Wonderly:

We need a photographer. So I've been able to add four or five clients to my client list from one person and I also need to think about clients in terms of. I mean I can just pick a number, but let's say I want $50,000 clients. They might get to 50 in a year or two. They might get to 50 in 10 years. But if I have enough people that value photography enough and have that budget, then my business works generally from retail photography, which I define as photographing for individual people, like a wedding or a portrait session with a family or something, because they're not going to grow to be those types of clients. And then I have to market a lot. But because I don't do that, I stick to bigger, fewer fish. I basically build those relationships over time.

Anne McGinty:

I mean, you really have worked your way up to getting there. 16 years ago you wouldn't have been able to make it work out that way.

Jak Wonderly:

No, and I had a breakthrough client when my daughter was young and I was in that phase of like I didn't have enough regular work from photography and I was supplementing with these freelance photo editing jobs. There was a job listing for an assistant at O'Reilly Media they're a magazine publisher, like a photographer's assistant and it just happened to be like walking distance from where I lived. So I was like, well, this seems like a good possible fit. So I sent an email in my portfolio link and they called me in for an interview and the woman sat me down and the first thing she says what are you doing here? And I said I just want to learn, like I want to contribute and I want to learn and this is a good potential. She's like no, no, this is not a good fit.

Jak Wonderly:

But I wanted to talk to you and I'm like what she's? Like I'm going to send your name to a friend of mine who's looking for a photographer. Okay, so a couple of weeks later I have coffee with this woman and she's the marketing director for a big bank. The bank loans money to farmers, basically, and it's one of the largest in the country and they're doing ad campaign big shoots three days in Kansas with a big team kind of shoots. And she was just looking for somebody new. She was like I'm going to come up with something little, we'll test this out.

Jak Wonderly:

Okay, so a month later she's asked me to photograph cows. Okay, like I've spent a lot of time on horse ranches and photographing animals, I can photograph cows, no problem. And when she called me, she was like well, what would that cost? And this was one of my best career moves ever is. I told her well, you do this a lot. I'm sure you have a budget in mind, because I had no idea what they were willing to pay, and so she just threw out a number. She said $1,600 for half a day. For half a day Great To me, that was a lot at that point and that set my rate for them and other clients.

Jak Wonderly:

I mean, it varies, but that's still where I originally got my pricing from. And then I went out and photographed the cows and she just watched me work. Literally we were driving around on an ATV and then I'd get out and photograph the cows and she'd say, yeah, work. Literally. We were driving around on an ATV and then I'd get out and photograph the cows and she'd say, yeah, this is the guy. And then we did all these national level ad campaign shoots and that just moved me up a whole level in terms of the kind of clients I could take care of.

Anne McGinty:

And what have you done about lulls in your work schedule? So, like, what did you do about COVID? How have you diversified your services or specialized in order to make it through?

Jak Wonderly:

Okay, there's a few questions in there. I'm gonna unpack. Do I diversify or specialize? A lot of people say you have to specialize. Like to use a simpler example? Like I'm a wedding photographer. It would be somebody's business model and that's what they do. But weddings are seasonal. At least here the wedding season is spring through fall. People don't get married in the winter. It rains.

Jak Wonderly:

And a friend of mine who had a different business but was self-employed was like diversification reduces your chances of extinction. Thanks, jim, and he told me that a number of times. And I like variety. If I had the same thing every, I'd have been bored five years ago. So I have not tried to only take certain types of jobs or clients in a certain genre, and in some ways that makes the marketing and the branding part harder. But, like I said, I don't really lean on that. I just lean on delivering great work and being easy to work with. On that I just lean on delivering great work and being easy to work with. And so I'll do portraits, I'll do vineyard shots, I'll do landscapes, I'll do travel stuff, like if the phone rings and it sounds like it's going to be a good client, I take it and to me that's worked. Covid was very interesting to me because obviously everything came to a grinding halt, especially that first summer. People were not leaving their house, right, and I am the boss. If I'm not out there shooting, I don't get paid, and some of it was luck but some of it was strategic positioning.

Jak Wonderly:

I learned over the years that having a few government contracts in things that are relevant to me and local help bridge those gaps, and I've had different ones over the years. I've had one with the emergency services department right, they're like first responders. I've had one for the city of Santa Rosa. I've had one for Sonoma water. They provide the drinking water for 600,000 people and they sort of see mundane contracts on the surface. There's a ton of paperwork. You got to have great insurance, you got to be willing to deal with very long contracts and a lot of photographers don't want to deal with a 30-page contract and large amounts of insurance. But if you're willing to do that paperwork they become very regular clients and sometimes you get really cool assignments. I mean the one where I was hanging out of the airplane was for Sonoma Water and I just wouldn't have seen that coming. So the government contracts help. I still have some and they're great clients and when COVID hit, I mean I literally just went.

Jak Wonderly:

The only thing anybody was talking about was COVID. So COVID had to become what I shot. And I had a client who was working for the county and they had to push out so much information to people to keep them informed on what they were doing and what's happening. And we're opening an emergency center and we're going to close the schools and like, if not every day, every week, they had to push out a lot of messages and they needed help and they had government funding to do that. And so when everyone else that was a photographer was sitting and just waiting for things to open back up again, I think in those first two or three months I made like $30,000 just dealing with that one subject and it was also fascinating for me. I mean, I think back and maybe I took some risks, but like I was in the lab when they were doing the first tests in our county to see who had COVID, I was in the room when the emergency department and the health officer was deciding to close the schools. I was there when those phone calls happened. Like it was exciting for me to be part of this thing and to document it. So that's how I got through that.

Jak Wonderly:

I think I've learned over the years too, like my business isn't quite as rhythmical as like, say, wedding photography, where there's definitely a season, but I do have, like the fall in the wine business is very busy and so I work like crazy hours in the fall and then the holidays get quiet. Nobody's doing photo shoots in December. They're just not, and I just had to learn that that was the case and I have to budget accordingly and, like I said, those government contracts help smooth that out and sometimes I get great jobs in December and January. But I just know that when the fall comes and I get a big pile of money, I can't just go spend it. I sit on that money and I bank it because my income is going to dip for those two or three months and it's still somewhat like that. Every year it dips less, but I just know that I make more money some months than others and you have to be disciplined.

Anne McGinty:

How, in general, do you balance your life with work as a creative professional and as a father?

Jak Wonderly:

It's not been easy, but I just try not to think too much about how. Like last month, I took my daughter to Yellowstone and it was kind of a big trip for the two of us because she's big into wildlife and I really wanted her to see an ecosystem like that and to just take her away for a week in the middle of everything and just go. We're going to do this thing, we're going to make some memories, and because I don't have vacation pay, you know the trip costs X and I lose X amount of dollars by not working that week and I just I can't go there. I just accept that travel is important to me, experiences are important to me, and sometimes my job gives me those things and sometimes I have to just take time out and go. No, that week I'm out and the phone rings and I go. I just can't do it and that's okay. I'm not going to cancel the trip because I get a good job offer. Those things are too important to me and there's certain times of the week where I just block out.

Jak Wonderly:

Sundays. My daughter and I do volunteer at Wildlife Rescue. That's her big day. She loves it, I enjoy it. That's my day. We spend the whole day together. We work side by side and I don't book photo shoots on Sunday, I won't. And I get a lot of offers to do Saturdays and Sundays and I just I have to maintain some balance because I will burn out. You have to set boundaries. It's easier as the business becomes solid, right as you have regular clients. In the beginning it's hard to say no to anyone and now I'll just say no, the phone will ring next week and it'll be fine.

Anne McGinty:

So what does that mean, then, for your vision, for your future? What's next for you in your photography career? Where do you want this to go?

Jak Wonderly:

Not long after I got into photography full time, I bought some film cameras. I just love them and I've been very quietly taking film photos on all my trips. Medium format square pictures, very sort of meditative, very simple. A lot of symbolism, like all that art history stuff is coming into play and I don't show them that much. But I built up quite a portfolio of those and I hope this year, like by the fall, I want to launch those in a more public way so I can say I'm also a fine art photographer, because I am one.

Jak Wonderly:

I'm just not marketing it. I don't have a website for it yet and I write things to go with the photos. I'm translating what they mean to me, like in a symbolic standpoint. An example was I was in Botswana and there was this really cool experience where we got to sleep out in the it's a salt flat basically, but we call it a desert in the Kalahari and they put a twin bed out in the middle of nowhere and you can just sleep out there and there's just something about that bed sitting out in the middle of nowhere. Sun comes over the horizon, the light hits the bed, it just screams morning and at the same time there was like a copper pitcher full of water and it's just like this pitcher of water in the desert. It's the photo of thirst.

Jak Wonderly:

And so I'm taking these photos and I'm writing what they mean to me and I want to launch those. And then, you know, I still toy around with like the next evolution of what the commercial side of the business looks like, but for now the focus is the fine art part, and just see where that goes. And I also have a lot of things I've taught. I have a lot to say about photography from a philosophical standpoint and I want to share that more. So I think that'll be another piece, but I've just been so focused on the joy of taking pictures.

Anne McGinty:

All of those sound like incredible next steps Just truly creative.

Jak Wonderly:

I think also as a creative person. I want to think about how do I add value to more people. There is a limit to what I can do with the types of clients that I have. I want to break into a larger audience with things.

Anne McGinty:

I can't wait to follow along and kind of see where you take this.

Jak Wonderly:

Thank you.

Anne McGinty:

So I have a couple of questions for you remaining. First one is just what advice do you have for anyone who is aspiring to be a professional photographer?

Jak Wonderly:

So I get this question from people on a fairly regular basis. So, like I got an email on one of the social platforms, you know, my son's really into photography and he wants to be an underwater photographer. And what would you tell them? And I, it's hard, because I want to tell them the truth that it's freaking hard and the odds that you're going to make a living at that are slim. I mean, it's like saying I want to be a rock star or I want to be an actor. I do feel like it's in that vein. I mean, there was a study done about careers and, like photographers job prospects are right up there with dishwasher, like literally next to dishwasher, on the list. So I don't want to say it can't be done because I'm doing it, but I want people to go into it with their eyes open.

Jak Wonderly:

The best way to make a million dollars in photography is to start with two. I think I borrowed that from somewhere else, but you just need to know what you're getting into. I know some very successful photographers. Obviously I would assist with somebody who's really established. A friend of mine who took photography as their major in college went to New York. She got a job as an assistant for somebody there who had a studio, who was doing a ton of regular work. And now she's come back to Detroit Hi, jenny. And she's doing really great. I mean she's shooting for magazines, for big corporations, because she learned how to manage a business and be a good photographer. She already was a good photographer, but she knew how to do both.

Jak Wonderly:

So I would say try to find somebody who's doing what you want to do and just carry their bags, do whatever you have to do, and then you're going to have to be disciplined, especially in the beginning, and, like you're going to have to watch your finances, you're going to have to accept that this is not going to be a high paying job for a while and there is limitless competition. There's no cost of entry anymore. Anybody with a thousand dollar camera or a good phone can beat your competition. So you're not a lawyer who passed the bar, you're just another person with a photographer. So you better be good. You have to set yourself apart.

Anne McGinty:

So for a final question if you could go back and talk with yourself when you were in your early 20s, what would you say?

Jak Wonderly:

That's a great question Trust the process, be patient. I feel like those jobs that I had that I didn't like at the time the two corporate jobs, the freelance gigs in the early days of photography they felt like they were a little painful, but it's like the karate kid wax on, wax off thing, where you got to polish the car in order to learn how to block the punch, the repetition, the skill sets that you're learning, you'll use them all. You will use all of them and as an example, I had one project as a photo editor where this company was building a foreign language learning product and so they would teach somebody a single word in different languages, and sometimes the word was frog and we needed a photo to illustrate frog and it had to be a photo that was unmistakably frog. It couldn't be toad or amphibian, it had to be frog, and so that's an easy example and they were little square photos. When you get to something more difficult like noon, you know how do you illustrate noon quickly in a photo that goes across all languages? We literally had meetings where we had to sort this out and I learned a lot in that process.

Jak Wonderly:

At the time I was like this is just so painful. But if you're trying to communicate in those pretty rectangles or communication tools, you need to be able to boil concepts down to something that's very simple. And when I look at my fine art stuff, when I talk about thirst or mourning or these simple concepts, and I'm trying to make them in what happens to be a small square because I'm using square format film, it's all directly relevant. You have to trust the process. I went through eye surgery three times when I was young and I was squinting and my eye was bloodshot and I had a patch over my eye for a while and now I squint for a living. I don't need that eye to do my job. It's a bad eye. Anyway, I just feel like it's all meant to be Like. You will find your way and you have to just be patient and persist. You'll make it.

Anne McGinty:

I absolutely love your story and I love all of your stories from your career and, jack, it has been so wonderful to have you here. Thank you so much for coming in and sharing all of this with us.

Jak Wonderly:

At the end of the day, that's what we got. We have our stories, and I'm trying to rack up as many stories as I can through this job.

Anne McGinty:

Yes, that's awesome. Today's key takeaways. If you dream of being a professional photographer, offer relevant images to local nonprofits or organizations. This helps build relationships, your portfolio and recognition. Email them, offer help and make yourself known.

Anne McGinty:

Networking is crucial. Building a network is essential in the photography industry. It can take five years to go full-time and 10 years to make a name for yourself In the beginning. Supplement your earnings with other relevant jobs while expanding your network and portfolio. Success requires determination, hard work and persistence. Jack sent images to National Geographic every month for a year and a half and entered various competitions until his images were finally chosen.

Anne McGinty:

Editorial work is exciting and fulfilling, but not always financially stable. Having a good-sized collection of commercial clients can provide more stability. Focus on producing the best work and being easy to work with. Maintain your client relationships to work with. Maintain your client relationships. Once you have a client, do everything you can to retain them by delivering high quality work and always being on time. Customer retention reduces marketing costs and generates regular revenue. In price negotiations, let the other side mention a number first. If they are familiar with the market rate, this can provide valuable insights. As a self-employed commercial photographer, diversification can reduce your risk. Adding government contracts can also help bridge work gaps. If you're hoping to break into the professional photographer industry, start by assisting established photographers in your desired field. Find someone who is doing what you aspire to do and learn from them. Finally, trust the process. Learn as much as you can from all experiences, even challenging ones. Be patient and persistent and you'll make it. That's all for today. I release episodes once a week, so come back and check it out. Have a great day.

People on this episode

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Anne McGinty

Host
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Jak Wonderly

Guest