You're ready! You've done your figures, you know how much you need to charge and now you want to set up your website but uh oh... you need more photos for your portfolio.

You don't have nearly enough to fill a portfolio and your website. You know that you need a good range of different subjects and poses but how to get them?

Enter portfolio building.

What is portfolio building? Basically it's a fancy way of saying that you are gathering photos to use in your portfolio and website.

Sounds great, right? But how exactly do you go about getting more photos? Where do you find these mythical clients?

Are you ready to charge people?

That's the question that gets asked a lot when you're thinking of starting a photography business. As artists we tend to question ourselves and our abilities constantly. We are forever in doubt about our abilities and whether we could 'get away with' charging people.

Here are 5 steps you can take to know whether you are ready to charge for your photography.

When I first decided to pursue photography as my career it was little more than an idea and a dream. I didn't know if I could make a success of it, I didn't know the first thing about running a business and I wasn't even sure that people would actually pay me to take photos.

If that sounds anything at all like you then trust me, you aren't alone.

There are a lot of moving parts to opening your own photography business, probably a lot more than people realise and it can feel overwhelming at the very beginning.

Sometimes my inner voice is a b*tch! There. I said it.

My inner voice has a tendency to tell me all of the things I can't do versus all of the things I can do. Does anyone else's do that too?

Why is it so easy to believe the bad stuff about yourself and so, so hard to believe the good?

As artists I sometimes think we may have it the worst. So much of what we do is creating something. We are opening ourselves up to the world and showing them our version of how we see something.

Is it the same thing that everyone else sees? Usually not but that's why we're hired. Because we 'see' something they don't. It's a very vulnerable place to be doing business from and as such we can get stuck in a place of inactivity due to fear.

Here are some of the fears I've held (and sometimes still have to beat back). I hope that by addressing them here you won't feel so alone and that you'll realise that these fears don't have to stop you.

You're thinking about starting a photography business and you're feeling a little overwhelmed and wondering exactly where to start. I get it. I've been there. There's so much new stuff you have to learn and you can't even figure out where to begin. Your brain is on overload and you just want someone, anyone, to tell you where to start.

I hear you, I've got you, my friend. Today I'm going to talk about 5 steps to starting your photography business. This is just a small sample of things you need to factor in but what these steps will do is give you a place to start to see if your little dream is even feasible for you right now.