June 25, 2020
Today’s guest is one of our best friends in the photography industry… none other than Dawn Charles.
Dawn is an Oregon-based wedding photographer and business educator. She is a California girl at heart, wife to the cutest police officer in town (her words, not ours!), and mom to her two favorite little girls.
At home in Bend, Oregon, you can usually find her playing with her kids or defending herself in Nerf gun fights against her husband, or traveling the world photographing weddings.
As Dawn grew her wedding photography business, she eventually navigated into offering education to other photographers with workshops, educational guides, and presets. The last of which she’s KNOWN for. You’ve probably heard of her presets, DC Presets, so we focused a huge portion of our chat today on how she defined her style, what you have to know before creating and selling presets, specific Lightroom tools she uses that people might not know, and lots more!
Dawn has always been interested in art and known that she wanted a career that allowed her to be creative, she just wasn’t sure what exactly it was. After taking a photography class in high school and falling in love with it, Dawn decided to pursue that as her major in college. Her parents gifted her first DSLR camera as her graduation present and that summer she got asked to shoot a wedding.
She went on to study photography in college and was leaning towards shooting for National Geographic or working in the film industry just so she didn’t have to pose people. After several portraiture assignments, Dawn began to fall in love with shooting people.
At the time, her roommate was a fashion design major. Dawn would photograph her roommate’s designs and use her as her subject for all of her projects. Her roommate began sharing Dawn’s photos, and several friends began reaching out to ask Dawn if she would shoot their engagement photos and weddings.
Dawn felt lost and had no formal training on the business side of things. She had no idea what to charge, how to pose people, or how to make a website. Dawn starting Googling and watching Youtube videos. At that time there were very few online resources for photographers. Long story short, Dawn stumbled across an internship with one of her favorite wedding photographers. She went all in with learning the business side of photography. After interning and second shooting all summer, the following year Dawn’s scheduled booked up with weddings.
For Dawn, it happened slowly and organically. It was never the plan, but Dawn comes from a family of teachers so she always shared that passion and thought that if she ever got burnt out on weddings she could become a high school photography teacher. Online teaching wasn’t at the top of her list since it wasn’t as popular back then.
It all began when she taught mentor sessions after college. Since she had formal training in school and learned so much from her internship she had the urge to pay it forward. Throughout her internship, Dawn learned so much from her mentor and it made her want to be that kind of mentor for other people. Dawn always had the desire to educate and help others at the beginning stages of their business.
It really took off when Dawn started selling presets. She studied editing in college and was fascinated by it. Throughout school, Dawn spent time learning Lightroom and practicing editing. This eventually led to her creating her own presets. She listened to the needs of the audience that now trusted her as an educator. After listening to what their needs were, she did her best to meet them through online education. Through this she learned that it was something she was passionate about.
Dawn still struggles with fear and is constantly questioning if she is the expert for it, if there is really a market for it. What keeps Dawn going is knowing that she has a specific audience who trusts her and knows that she has something unique to offer. For everyone who wants to be an educator or teach something, you have a unique story and style. Just because you may not be the best of the best or the expert in your field, doesn’t mean that you don’t have something that people want to hear.
You have a story to tell and you are unique.
The evolution of your style is something that keeps you growing as an artist. Dawn eventually got to the point that she was no longer using other people’s presets as a base and popping around from style to style. When she arrived at this point, she felt like she found her style.
Dawn tried everything and found that her work was inconsistent. She wasn’t happy with any of the presets she had purchased. Because presets weren’t really available, Dawn studied photos and edits that she loved and used her formal training in Lightroom to achieve a similar look. It boiled down to knowing the ins and outs of the software in order to get the edits in the exact place Dawn wanted them. It took years of messing around and studying to get something that worked and was consistent.
Less is more. Err on the side of being subtle because in the long run it will be more flattering and cautious. For example, Dawn puts her contrast and saturation below 0. Being subtle will last longer and stand the test of time.
Really play around with the HSL (hue, saturation, luminance) sliders. This can really transform your images and correct things like greens and skin tones. HSL sliders can really make some magic. They are also a huge factor in defining your style. You can get incredibly unique and specific in all those tones. You can take a preset as a base and tweak the HSL sliders to make it your own.
In your hue slider you can change your reds to be more orange or more magenta. You are essentially changing the hue of each color. In saturation, you can take up or down the vibrancy of each hue. In luminance you can bring up the brightness of each color.
With so many photographers out there, having different styles allows people to differentiate themselves. Dawn advises people to stay away from anything that doesn’t feel true to you. If you are using a preset that is popular and trendy but you don’t feel like it fits your aesthetic style, it’s probably not right for you.
Stay away from anything that looks overly edited. There have been trends for really dark and moody edits, edits where greens were more grey, or overly warm images. All of these are okay if this is authentically your signature style but stay away from these if you are just following them because they are a trend.
Think about your client’s perspective and the big picture. In the long run, you want to create something where your images depict how the moment actually looked. You don’t want to change their skin tone, or the color of the bridesmaid dress. You don’t want them to look overly edited where people are seeing the edit rather than the moment. You always want to think about how the images will look in an album 10, 20, 50 years from now when shown to their grandkids. Are they are going to see an overly edited photo or are they going to see the moment?
Dawn released presets in 2016 and at that point didn’t know a ton about creating presets for the masses. Dawn made the mistake of not doing enough research on different camera gear and different photographers shooting styles. She ended up discontinuing those presets because people were having problems when using different gear.
Dawn launched a second round of presets and made sure to reevaluate what would work long term and on a huge variety of shooting styles and camera gear. This was really intentional after having a client come back and say that they love the edits but they weren’t showing the true colors of the suits, flowers, and bridesmaid dresses on her wedding day. Dawn realized that her client had a point! Her clothes that she chose for her wedding should absolutely look like how they did in real life.
Dawn made sure to create something that truly and accurately represent what things look like in real life while still having an artistic spin.
It is an incredible way to create passive revenue. However, it is not right for everyone. There is a misconception that if you make a few tweaks to a preset then all of a sudden you can sell it as your own. Dawn has seen people do this and get in trouble legally.
It is great for people out there who have studied and mastered their editing and have been editing with something that is 100% their own preset made from scratch.
There are so many other areas where people can earn passive income other than selling their presets.
Creating a preset from scratch is a ton of work.
Recognize the adjustments that you are consistently making when you are using someone else’s presets. You can also pull inspiration from others. You may notice that they desaturate their blues or that they crush their highlights. Use those unique things that you are doing to make it your own and expand on those. Pull inspiration from other places as well. Try to mesh all of your inspiration together and then really test it out on hundreds of photos. Notice what you are seeing as a constant problem when testing. Minorly make tweaks to those areas until you find something that is a happy medium. Try to get it where the only adjustments you may have to make are in the basics panel and that the preset works as a great base. You want something that will look pretty good when applied to each photo and may just need a few minor adjustments to exposure, contrast, and white balance.
Dawn is constantly working ahead on her next pack just by seeing the tweaks that need to be made consistently. Then, she saves these as new presets. It starts slowly and each time she finds something new that she loves she can update the preset from there.
Dawn takes a preset from her previous packs and works on evolving it even more to create new ones.
When testing, she will have a mesh of a ton of photographer’s images and she won’t even take notice of whether it is Nikon or Canon. She will apply a preset to a ton of photos and take note if she is always having to adjust something. For example, if she notices that it is looking too saturated, she will make a slight adjustment to the saturation and update the preset. Then, she will keep applying with the new update and see if there is another edit that needs to be made to the majority of the photos. This is how it slowly gets modified to work on a wide array of images.
Dawn has been in your place. It doesn’t happen overnight. You don’t have to be the same as your favorite photographer. Even if you have a photographer that you are inspired by, your work doesn’t have to match theirs. That is why they are so great. They found something unique and stepped into that. Take their work as inspiration and not something to strive for. Play around and get comfortable with your software. Take education classes and keep playing around until it is something you are consistently happy with and not going back and reediting work. Through little increments you will develop your style over time. It might be months at a time before you find that little thing you need to tweak and update, but over time you will slowly step into something that is unique for you and you will feel more confident as an editing style that is completely your own.
You do not have to appeal to everyone. This has been something that Dawn has taken a long time to learn. As an enneagram 9, she wanted to be the right fit and appeal to every single person. In doing so, she wasn’t’ truly being her full self or taking as many risks as she could have. Learning that she can be authentic and being okay with repelling a certain audience that wasn’t right for her allowed Dawn to step into who she was a person and a business owner and connect with people who really truly connected with her. This was when her business started thriving.
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WASSUP FRIENDS. We’re Evie + Lindsey, co-founders of this wild partayyy called The Heart University. Our goal is to empower entrepreneurs to kick freaking BUTT in their businesses, dive down into the heart of their why and how, and serve you with all possible tools you’ll need to up-level your business game and CRUSH those goals of yours.
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