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Meet Nick Sparks

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Nick Sparks.

So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
At 20, I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. I was attending general education courses at MSU. I had never tried photography before, but I needed an elective and opted for a darkroom photo course. I didn’t realize that I would really enjoy the process of doing it. Photography turned into an obsession and started photographing just about everything on B&W film. Every next picture I took was the best picture ever in my mind.

I kept at it and drove all over doing landscapes and eventually started doing portraits. After I did all my general education there, I transferred over to UCDenver and got accepted to their digital design program. I still wanted to do photography, but I wasn’t sure that it was a viable option. I kept at it anyway and during my last year at school I made a substantial amount of money via my new small business (this one.) Now, it’s been five years of full-time photography. It’s been quite an adventure!

Has it been a smooth road?
Balancing art and business has been a tricky path.

Running a successful photography business is just as much about marketing as it is taking pictures. As a freelancer, you cannot take pictures and just hope somebody hires you. You have to be actively doing outreach and finding ways to make your photos exciting to potential clients. It’s a competitive trade.

Sometimes, I find myself too wrapped up in the business aspect and maybe not as fulfilled artistically. I have recently have been applying a new tactic to find more artistic fulfillment and it has been working out nicely:

Constantly be working on three freelance projects:
1. One that pays
2. One that might pay
3. One that is strictly done out of passion.

Having three freelance projects in mind and doing a little bit of all three keeps me creatively fulfilled and excited!

What else should our readers know?.
Wedding photography is exciting because it’s a job that you really have to think on your feet for. On a wedding day, there are hundreds of tiny little decisions that go into making the wedding photos stand out. No photographer will photograph it quite the same. Knowing light, understanding how a photo will look on different lenses, and taking a few calculated creative risks all go into the fast thinking process, which keeps it exciting!

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
The technology that we use to capture photos is ever-changing, but the final output of a still photograph has largely stayed the same. I can see the demand for a video going up in the next 5-10 years. There could very well be a trend for delivering wedding video in addition to stills. With the tech always evolving I can see us eventually capturing the whole day in video and pulling stills from the video and delivering video content in addition to stills.

I also see a demand for elopement photography going up with millennials. We are a lot more connected than we were five years ago even and in ten years it will probably be more prolific. There seems to be a trend to escape some of this connectedness and venture out into nature to have smaller weddings. With the ever-growing ability to share moments with family and friends, I only see the elopement market growing.

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