025 Hustle and Grind with Sylvie Gil

The Photo Report

Really honored to have Sylvie Gil on the show who has been shooting weddings for 20 years at a very high end level. She has a background in fashion and commercial photography and gives some really great advice to photographers trying to make it in the biz. Check out her work - https://www.sylviegilphotography.com/ And her workshops - http:sylviegilworkshops.com Below is the transcription of the episode: Sylvie Gil: 01:11 Hi Braedon, how are you doing? Braedon Flynn: 01:13 So good. Well, hey, you have a wealth of knowledge and for those of you that don't know Sylvie, she teaches amazing workshops in France where she's from. But I want to sort of just dig into a little bit of your story and I've got a lot of other stuff I want to ask you. But could you, for people, I know you have a background in fashion, commercial photography and then got into weddings, but can you talk, we don't have to go into like depth of when you first started, but maybe like starting out in commercial photography, then how you ended up in weddings and what that transition was like. Yeah. Sylvie Gil: 01:42 Yeah. So I wanted to be, I basically wanted to be an artist, but I wanted it to be an artist that is um, you know, doing well financially, find a way to just like make the art, you know, just a good financial experience so, and make money. So I went and studied, um, advertising in Paris and uh, I became an account executive. So I learned how to sell a product and had to create campaigns and things like that. And then I came to America and I was really bored with the advertising end of things. So I started working as a commercial photographer and I shot campaigns for, for fashion in studio. And that was going really well until I got pregnant. And when I got pregnant, you know, as if you look at it, most of the fashion photographers are males. It's very difficult to be a female photographer in fashion because your work, these super long hours and you can never be a mom. Sylvie Gil: 02:35 So, and then I had a friend and in the fashion studio that I was working at, I had a friend who was, who was photographing weddings and she showed me this beautiful book of wedding photographs and this was in the early nineties and he was wearing black and white photographs of wedding. There was just super gorgeous. And I, and you know, I'm a sucker for anything romantic. And I was like, wow, I just want to try that out. So I, uh, actually had a friend was getting married in Napa and I shot their wedding and that's how it all started. And I loved it. And this was 20 years ago, Braedon Flynn: 03:07 20 years ago. So it went from, so let's say shooting that first wedding, because I think a lot of people listening are wanting to end up in photography. You're doing that full time, getting that first job versus then getting, you know, more jobs. And how did, how did that end up happening? Like where you'd now started having a wedding business? Sylvie Gil: 03:26 Well, so I did the first wedding. I was fortunate enough that I was able to use the internet. So I created a website immediately, which was in the very beginning of it. This was the early nineties. And I think that was probably one of the first, you know, like people that I knew what a website and uh, the wedding got picked up by a magazine in Canada and uh, they actually created a story with me and a couple of other photographers just based off like one or two weddings I had shot. And then the phone started ringing from there and I just set up the business, you know, hired some help immediately and just created a brand. And which is different today than it was back then. And just, I remember the first year I shot about, 25 weddings. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, that's amazing. And I know the first year and then I went on shooting about 30 weddings for probably like 15 years, 20 years, 15 years. And then I kind of slowed down a little bit after that. But basically, yeah, most of my weekends, spring, summer and fall, we're s --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thephotoreport/message