I’d always loved photography, but when I started high school I joined the photography club and discovered the fascination of darkroom work — developing film and printing my photos.
Withing the first two years, I actually did a bit of “semi-professional” work (in that I charged a small amount for my portrait services). I convinced a local boy scout troop to let me do portraits, and sold a few to their parents. I also did a few school teacher portraits, and (although I no longer seem to have them) several small jobs photographing other cottages and gardens at Battle Lake where our cottage was.
While I was dabbling with web-based income possibilities, I decided to try to go back to one of my main passions — photography. I had been going out and doing landscape photography for my own enjoyment for a few years, but in order to make money I had to change my focus (pardon the pun!)
Combining my passion for photography with my love of kids, I decided to try my hand at kids portraiture. Starting with word-of-mouth, I got a couple of bites, and was immediately successful — my first client spent several hundred dollars on portraits of their kids!
I created a very simply web site, then over the next few years, re-invented to website a few times to improve on it. I found a few screen shots on an Internet archive site, included below. Although I called myself “Hershel Belkin Photography”, I took the URL “belkinder.com”, which I thought was cute, combining “belkin” and “kinder”.
I posted the first few business cards that I created (starting with a really horrible one!), and I found a few sample of my early work, posted here as well.
On the first web page I actually had a GIF that demonstrated the merging of “belkin” and “kinder”:
Found this archive of my very first photography web site. Featured image is missing…
Being that I was already very involved in Bnos Rabbeinu High School, and that I was a professional photographer, it was natural for the school to ask me if I would do the annual senior photos. Of course I accepted, although because of the low income level of most families involved, I set very reasonable prices.
I found this work to be very rewarding, both professionally and personally. On the professional side, it was a way to get lots of practice posing and executing individual portraits. On the personal side, I knew all these girls since I had taught them, and I also knew that their senior portrait is important to them — first, because the share it with tons of friends outside of the school, and second, because they very often use it as a “shidduch” (match) photo when they are looking to get married a couple of years later.
I found that I did, in fact, have the ability to create very good portraits. I also discovered that this was sometimes a way to improve a girl’s self-image and self-esteem, and that was very gratifying.
After several years of doing senior portraits for Bnos Rabbeinu, I was contacted by another local Chicago Girl’s high school, Bais Yaakov. This was a much larger school, and thus a much bigger job (although I discovered that the girls there were not as much into sharing their photos with as many friends.
Although there were hundreds of portraits done over the years, I am including just a sampling of what I would consider some my better ones. Also letters of recommendation from both schools for my use when I re-located to Florida in 2017.
As I noted above, there were times when I was able to help with self-esteem. The following two images were taken just minutes apart. The first is the way this girl showed up for her senior portrait — and the way she saw herself. After taking that shot, I asked her to let down her hair, and to not smile (because when she smiles her eyes squint). The next shot became her senior portrait — and she saw herself in a way that she didn’t imagine (as did her parents). I used these shots in a piece I wrote for a professional photography blog site, which I titled “Why we are photographers.”
Letters of recommendation received from both schools:
As I continued to improve my photography skills, my kids’ portraits definitely got better. My experience doing high school senior portraits led to a request by a former student to shoot her wedding in 2007, in Cincinnati.
I had not considered shooting weddings; it seemed like a daunting task. But I accepted (as I said at the time “just this once”), and found a photographer in the Cincinnati are who I hired as my “second”.
The experience surprised me. Not only did I thoroughly enjoy the photographic aspects, but I was struck by how the photographer (at least in an orthodox Jewish wedding) is the ONLY person who gets to experience EVERY part of the wedding. I also found the connection to the kids getting married, and their families, very rewarding.
After that experience, I pivoted my business to specialize in Jewish weddings, although I still did some child portraiture, and also some other events, like Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.
Progression of business cards over the years
Here are just a few samples of my later years portrait work…
This was a challenge — how to do a portrait of a triplet bar mitzvah?! I decided to pose each boy depicting the three pillars of Judaism: Torah, Tefillah (prayer), and Tzedakah (charity). The I took the one image from each and combined them digitally, resulting in a single portrait:
I also had the opportunity to shoot a couple of concerts. Here are just a couple of images of Matisyahu, and Cheap Trick…..
But my main focus during these years was weddings…
A friend of mine in Chicago owned a small manufacturing and wholesale business that was one of the first Jewish Toy companies. It was a very small business: He ran the Chicago office (2-3 people) responsible for product creation, art, sourcing manufacturing from China, and sales. His twin brother ran the warehouse in Pittsburgh (1-2 people) responsible for receiving and warehousing product, and packing and shipping all orders.
It was actually quite remarkable that they manages to build this business basically just the two of them, with a few other mainly part-time or seasonal employees.
Knowing that I had been out of work for a while, they asked if I’d be interested in helping them in the office during the upcoming busy Chanukah season. Figuring that I had nothing better to do at the time, I agreed.
As a former IT manager, and someone who had been involved with computer systems for many years, I was appalled at what I found — they were using an inventory and sales system that looked to me like it was from 1980! Let me note a few examples:
** Each person’s desktop computer had a COPY of the company database. They were not interconnected or synchronized in any way. Ever morning they would get a copy of the database MAILED to them from Pittsburgh on a CD, and they would each have to update their local database. At best that put them a day or two out-of-date. If one person made a sale, none of the others could see it until the next synchronization!
** Order fulfillment in Pittsburgh (remember these were wholesale orders only) was done by printing out the orders, the using them to pick the products and package them. Once the order was printed, the only way to check status or progress was to find that piece of paper in a huge stack. If a wholesale customer called in for status, or to make a change, we would have to call Pittsburgh, and they would have to rummage through the pile to find the order. Something as simple as getting a delivery date would typically take two days!
In order to run the business, Chicago and Pittsburgh had to be constantly on the phone!I was amazed that they were actually able to keep the business going in such an inefficient manner.
So I quickly embarked on a search for a good inventory and sales fulfillment software package. This wasn’t something that they had even considered — having been convinced (duped) by a sales person at a trade show some years earlier that their system was the best out there for wholesale.
After some investigation I settled on a package called Acctivate (by Alterity). Not only was it very comprehensive, it seamlessly integrated with Quickbooks, which is what they were already using for accounting.
It did take some convincing to get them to agree to purchase both a new server, and this not-cheap software. They were afraid of the change, and neither brother was very technical (to say the least). But I did manage to convince them, and worked quickly to adapt Acctivate to their particular manufacturing and wholesale business needs.
After the slight learning curve, they began to see huge advantages. Tasks that used to take 2-3 days were now 2-3 minutes. Everyone had instant access to all the data in real time, and became much more productive. It was funny — after some months using the new system, they were afraid that their business was failing because they used to have 4 phone lines ringing off the hook and now it was mostly quiet. But the reality was sales and inquiries were being handled so quickly that they were doing more business with much less “busy” work.
So… what began as a simple “come help us do some phone sales during the busy season” progressed into a role as IT manager, as well as sales associate. Normally this would have been very boring to me, but I found ways to make it interesting — like creating valuable reports in Acctivate to help them understand and grow their business, building them a functional wholesales web site and creating the processes to keep it synchronized with their back-end inventory system, and eventually convincing them to abandon their error-prone manual catalog creation in favor of a catalog that I programmed as a report. The catalog creation time went from a couple of months to a few minutes, with all data, images, etc. coming directly from the inventory system, ensuring 100% accuracy. For the first time they had a catalog, website, and back end inventor4y system that were all precisely in sync.
I stayed at that job probably way too long, being that I was getting paid much less than ever before, but I combined it with many of the other activities that are listed in this blog — my photography, teaching in the girls’ high school, and various online business attempts. I take pride in the fact that rather than letting this simple job get me down, I constantly found ways to create interesting and useful projects.
I actually found on the Acctivate web site, an excerpt from a product testimonial that I gave them at some point (although the wording doesn’t sound like what I would have said — someone wrote it after phone interview)
A couple of sample pages from the automatically-generated catalog…
Still looking for other possible streams of income, I decided to try creating a site for Jewish stock photos. Although there were a lot of big stock photo sites, finding good Jewish-content images was difficult — and, as my graphic designer son told me, there are designers working for Jewish organizations that need such images.
My concept was not just to try to shoot tons of Jewish content photos, but to invite other photographers to submit their stock images to the site and to take a small percentage of their sales as well.
So I built the site, shot a bunch of images, and actually got about a dozen photographers to contribute images. I didn’t charge much, and sales were very slow. Don’t remember why, but after about a year or so I lost interest and eventually shut it down.
Searching the web archives, I found some site snapshots (mostly missing the images)… just to give an idea of what it looked like.
Again looking for other sources of income, I had the idea to create a site specifically for models and actors to market their professional headshots. The concept was that each subscribed model would get a dedicated page containing their favorite pro headshots and some basic personal information. Their page would actually contain their name, as in myname.my-headhsots.com, becoming what would have been the first electronic “comp-card”. In fact, the site was designed so it could not be “browsed” — you could only get to specific pages by having the named model page link.
Then they would create things like email signatures that would include a link to their personal my-headhsots page. My idea was to get photographers who specialized in shooting headshots to pay a small fee per clients and offer the my-headshots page as an added value of their service over another headshots photographer.
Well… although I still like the concept to this day, I quickly discovered that most photographers are more into their art than their business, and thus fail to see the advantages of this. (Each headshots page also offered a link back to the model’s photographer, so this would have been good advertising for the photographer as well as for the model!)
Without getting a bunch of photographers to sign up, this was dead in the water pretty quickly. Too bad, because I think it could have been a great service –although I don’t think it would have generated much income for me!
Once again, I found a few snapshots of the site pages…
In 2018 I attended the annual conference of the PPA (Professional Photographers of America). After being inspired by the various speakers, I thought about developing a different “brand” for a new photography venture.
What I chose was a very high end, concierge model of portraits for senior citizens. I had always felt that there was a lack in that area — I had experienced people scrambling to look for a good photo of a loved one after they had passed, for example, and often finding that the last professional shot was from some even many years prior.
I spent almost two years developing this concept, including sourcing a supply of museum-quality hand-carved frames, and obtaining various pieces of equipment best suited to my business model.
I had just completed the web site, and was about to start marketing when COVID-19 struck. And here I was with a business proposal geared exclusively to people 75 years and over! So everything went on hold for what I hoped would be a few months. Unfortunately, as we enter 2022 I have not launched Goldleaf Portraits… but I am hoping to start in the first quarter of 2022. Time will tell if this concept will be successful, but the nice thing about semi-retirement is that I do not need any specific success level — if I sell 10 per year I will be quite happy.
