Tomas Makacek 

I have always been into photography and graphic design. In high school I briefly took photography class but because they were still stuck in the film age when we were in the digital age I got bored of it very fast. I kind of messed around with smartphones for a while taking pictures of sunrises. I had the itch to buy a camera but it was never in the budget. Then in the summer of 2015 I accidentally dropped my phone and smashed the screen when I found out that it would be $300 to replace the screen. I had just had a kid and thought that I am getting tired of these blurry, grainy cellphone photos of her... I replaced my phone with a $50 flip phone and bought myself a below enter level camera. I started taking pictures of everything. I had my camera on me all the time, even when I went to work.

Everyone started praising the photos of my daughter and events I was covering. That is when I started looking at other peoples work. I quickly realized that there were some photographers trying to make a quick buck off of people and they really didn't know what they were doing with their camera.  I thought if these guys who are in the industry over 5 years are making money from their mediocre shots then why not start a business of my own and start taking on clients? December of 2015 I took on as many free photoshoots as I could to build myself a portfolio to start booking paid shoots. I realized that photographers dont need to be good at actually taking photos if they are good at marketing. My intention was not on becoming mediocre and just working on my marketing, I want to be one of the best there is. Taking wedding photos is no joke. People will look at the photos for decades so if you mess up a wedding you will be talked about negatively for a long time and you could potentially ruin all their memories of the couples day.

People have tried to talk me out of becoming a photographer because the industry is over-saturated. They are right, the industry is full of unskilled and greedy photographers that only care about money and not providing a good service for their clients. I got off to a slow start but I knew that if I kept learning and getting better eventually the clients would come. Fast forward to 2018, the clients have come. We are now booking over 60 weddings a year. I got tired of turning brides down because we are already booked so at the beginning of 2018 I have now trained and hired on 6 more photographers and 2 more videographers to work under our studio. We will keep hiring staff as we go along. My goal is to keep improving and passing the skills down to my staff photographers to be able to provide our couples with the best possible results.