Trainee Family Portrait Photographer

Trainee Family Portrait Photographer 

MI&Co The Portrait Studio
Shipley, West Yorkshire (BD18 3QH)

Our busy state of the art studio in Shipley has now been established for over six years having built up a fantastic reputation for providing a truly memorable family portrait experience from start to finish. As such we are set to expand this year and are now seeking an exceptional individual to join our expanding creative studio team, as a trainee family portrait photographer. This is an amazing opportunity for someone with the right attitude and potential to be trained and grow with a fulfilling rewarding career, in Yorkshires Premier independent portrait Studio.

Hours of work / Remuneration

Full time hours (including evenings and weekend work)

Initial Basic Starting Salary between £14,750 - £15,500 pa

*to be reviewed upon completion of 12 month training plan.

The Role

Once fully trained the primary role will be to conduct family portrait shoots with groups of people of all ages, from babies to grandparents & even family pets - who often play a starring part in many of our family sessions!

When you are not shooting in the studio you will conduct face to face ‘viewing sales appointments’ (with full training) -where you will showcase the images from the shoots within a cinematic presentation and recommend frames and products to suit each individual customer’s home, style and budgets.

When there are no appointments booked in you will work closely with the rest of the team behind the scenes either helping with editing in Capture / Adobe Photoshop, cross training or assisting with quality checking and unpacking finished work back from our lab /or helping with marketing activities,  or other miscellaneous activities such as cleaning/maintaining the studio areas/equipment.

Essential skills and attributes needed

• You will need to be able to clearly demonstrate your potential ability to enthuse, direct and motivate clients and their families to ensure they have the potential to get the very best Images for every age group.
• Highly creative with a good eye for composition.
• Good understanding and demonstrable skills with Adobe Photoshop.
• Hard working, dedicated and have determination, resilience and self-motivation in abundance.
• Be able to demonstrate an ability to be trained in quality face to face sales.
• Good level of fitness - as there is a lot of running around the studio in order to make kids laugh and get the best shots!
• Qualified to Higher education / degree level, specialising in photography (or equivalent).
• Must live within 30 minutes of Shipley or be able to relocate (& preferably a car owner)

Ideal Skills / past experience

• A good technical understanding of studio flash, lighting techniques and flattering posing.
• Previous demonstrable experience in a family portraits.
• Previous face to face sales and customer service experience within a high value, quality led organisation or retail brand.

Summary of the ideal candidate

We are looking for someone who is right for us and vice versa for the medium to long term, as it’s a considerable investment in time to train in all the skills needed to fulfil this important role. So whilst we would love someone who already has all the relevant experience and ticks all the boxes above, we are open minded and will be looking for potential ability in equal measure with proven past experience. We don’t want to train somebody ‘how to be a photographer’, we want to train somebody how to be a ‘great family portrait photographer’ and fulfil this varied role to it’s potential.

Timescales

We would ideally like to take someone on between April/May 2017, but we are flexible so we will wait until we have found the right person - so if you like the sound of us and could see yourself as part of our growing team then we would love to hear from you.

How to apply

Please submit in the first instance an up to date CV and a covering letter specifically outlining the following:-

• Why this opportunity specifically appeals to you. Why you believe that you are the candidate we are looking for.

We will only respond to fully completed application’s (as described above)