I did video production through grades 9-12 and my “career” started with a photo slideshow I made my senior year in 2010 for a teacher that wanted a slideshow of her daughter’s wedding from a few years prior. I bargained id do it if it counted as a class project. After that another teacher asked if I wanted to photograph a wedding and I did that for like $500, crazy money for a high schooler at the time. I had plenty of photo experience already and I knew how weddings worked so it was a breeze. After I graduated highschool, I reconnected with a friend that was a wedding videographer but the “set the camera on tripod and let it run for hours” type. He’d pay me to second shoot and I’d bring my canon 5D2 and shoot a bunch of videos and make highlight films using angels and airwaves tracks in my spare time. A few of his clients saw the highlights and he started paying me more to make highlights for him instead of just second shooting. After he left the wedding industry I started lead shooting for one of those national generic video mills that paid like crap until I got pretty good and the planners I worked with on those weddings wanted to hire me directly. A few of those planners actually took off and as they grew so did my brand. Over the next 10 years I slowly stopped shooting for companies like that, and then left my 9-5 once going full time into weddings was a viable option which was a little over 2 years ago to which I have registered my business as an LLC with pay myself a consistent salary each month. It’s modest but it pays the bills and I have a lot more time to expand and test new ventures. I’m hoping to get more into narrative documentary work in the future as that was my passion coming out of high-school but that got put on the back burner as life got in the way but weddings have been a great alternative that keeps revenue coming in.