The Tinholt Photography Story

Thursday, January 28, 2010 Posted in About Us

A question we get asked a lot, especially from people who have been following the wedding industry for some time, is something to the effect of, “Where’d you come from???? I’m suddenly seeing you everywhere, and hearing about you constantly!” I thought I’d take this opportunity to try to answer this question, to tell you about the journey that lead us to being recognized as a premier and high quality studio producing our own style of very unique, artistic and timeless images in only the last few years.

So who are we? Tinholt Photography is a husband and wife team, I’m Mike and the primary photographer with Zarah working as our business manager and also as a very gifted photographer in her own right. Photography started for me, like most photographers, as a hobby. I enjoyed shooting our little family point and shoot 35mm camera in the 90s as a teenager and then was constantly stealing my dad’s new digital point and shoot during university (when 2.3 megapixel was huge!). Nothing special, just point and shoot but I enjoyed it and people tended to say I took great photos. I’m still almost surprised myself at how good some of the photos are that I have stored on my hard drive from those days. I studied Civil Engineering (“We are, we are, we are, we are, we are the engineers, we can, we can…” if you’ve been around engineering students much at all you know where that is going) with the plan to travel the world as soon as I graduated and follow in the footsteps of my globetrotting brothers. A few months before I left one of these globetrotters had just come home and brought with him the photos from his latest trip to Thailand, Nepal and India and I was absolutely stunned by what I saw. My brother had traveled with a friend that he met in Bolivia, Steve Ogle (www.steveogle.ca), who was also a professional photographer. Steve specializes in mountain, adventure, and extreme ski photos, stuff I love. The photos were amazing and I was inspired, I wanted to take photos like that! I was on the verge of my own world travels and I resolved to myself that I would preserve those memories with photos without having to say, “the picture doesn’t do it justice but trust me this place was breathtaking.” That was the beginning of my journey.

My next step was to get my hands on a SLR camera and learn how to use it. I bought a Canon Rebel 2000, an entry level 35mm SLR with a kit lens, read one book on shutter speed, aperture, exposure, composition and all that fun technical stuff, and then started shooting the crap out of everything. I left Winnipeg on a early February morning in 2003, I think the temperature was -28, and 52 hours later landed in Auckland NZ to begin my world adventure. Several months later I was a much skinnier, very tanned suffer dude with a whole pile of photos of mountains, beaches, waterfalls, wildlife, sunsets and bikinis. After coming home to an engineering job I never stopped shooting. The following year I found myself in Costa Rica, and then several northern assignments with my job and before long my walls were covered by stunning scenes of nature without a single person in any of them. And of course I always had friends over, and of course they always had plenty of comments about my photos.

On December 23rd, 2005 I married Zarah, a fiery and ambitious woman who wanted to take on the world. She also had a media background working in TV as a camera person and personally shot a documentary of the Rwandan Genocide for CTV. We were the first of many friends who got married in the following year so we were immediately asked, “you’re an amazing photographer, can you do my wedding?” And of course waterfalls and mountains are a natural fit with weddings… maybe not but I said yes as a favour to a good friend, which turned into seven good friends. I was terrified about my early weddings, I didn’t know how to shoot people, didn’t want to be at all these ‘boring’ weddings, and was thankful I didn’t have to do any more than seven. My opinion began to change as the year went on. I became more comfortable working with people and started to love the emotion, the movement, the story, and before long I fell in love with it.

By 2007 Iwas put in the position of responding to the friends of friends and referrals from people I didn’t know. Suddenly I had to start charging money and realized I had a choice to make: Is this really what I wanted to do? And if so, then how and what the heck am I doing? My decision, with a lot of help from the take on the world wife of mine, was OK lets go for it! But if we are going to do it were are going to aim to be among the best in Winnipeg. We set our sights high but had no idea how to get there. In 2007 we did a number of weddings as lower priced shoot and burns because I didn’t know any better. All the while we were scouring internet forums, blogs and websites and trying to talk to any photographer we could figure out the ‘how and what the heck am I doing?’ question.

As we finally started to get some of these questions answered we began to realized what a disservice we were doing for ourselves, for our clients and for the wedding community. Strangers were hiring us, and trusting us, to preserve the memories of what is one of the most precious days of their lives. I realized that my services were not professional quality and I was giving them a product that was selling them short, even if they didn’t know it and loved my photos, which they all did. Even though I started by shooting cheap shoot and burns myself, I now advise every aspiring photographer to steer clear of that route. It’s critical to learn your trade, spend time working with a professional, going to schools, seminars, courses and then charge your clients the true value of your services. It’s tempting to start out cheap to get experience, a portfolio, and a referral base but trust me it always bites you in the end, and brings the whole industry down in the process. (Not to mention the fact that over 90% of photography businesses fail in the first 5 years……photography is a tough business, and newer photographers don’t often last very long). I hear almost everyday from someone who thought they’d save some money by finding a cheaper photographer and ended up hating their wedding photos. I get asked all the time what I can do to ‘fix’ someone else’s photos. It breaks my heart but the day is gone, in the past, it can never be redone. I also see some very educated and talented photographers putting themselves in this same position thinking they need be cheap to get bookings and get started. Photographers with great work and nice websites charging prices that, when you do the math, are barely profitable and certainly not sustainable business models. They will come to find they are shooting themselves in the foot in the end, hurting not only themselves but also their colleagues in the industry while they are at it. We were very tempted by this route ourselves, but it’s a lot harder to start cheap and then drastically increase prices when you realize it won’t pay the bills, than to build your clientele at the prices you need to actually make a living.

During 2008 Tinholt Photography was officially birthed. It was a slow start since we didn’t get any advertising up until May and immediately became too expensive for our referral base. We worked hard to educate ourselves in how operate a professional photography studio, first through professional online forums and blogs and then by attending seminars to work with some of the top photographers in the world. The turning point came after I attended a seminar with Yervant (www.yervant.com) who is recognized as one of the top 10 wedding photographers in the world. The seminar was in stunning Venice Italy and completely rocked my world. It included an entire day of shooting on our own with models in the fabulous Venice backdrop, the perfect way to put to use everything Yervant had taught during the previous days. This was followed shortly afterwards by a seminar with JB and DeEtte Sallee (www.salleephotography.com) in Dallas. We got along well and we able to hang out with them a lot outside the seminar time and they filled us with tons of great tips and ideas. As we returned to Winnipeg, and also began getting involved in Mexico, we developed our own strength in fashion-inspired bridal photography. Finally we were in the place to make a proper explosion onto the Winnipeg Wedding Scene.

Last year, 2009, was a pretty big year for Tinholt Photography. Zarah, the take on the world girl, managed to get us a spot, then 4 spots (yikes!!), at the Wonderful Wedding Show. From our strong presence at the Wedding Show the word spread along with our other advertising endeavors, Facebook, website etc. We had a great year and are looking forward to a bright future. We are continuing to pursue excellence and improve as photographers, business owners, and people. This brought on another life-changing seminar when we hosted top international photographer David A Williams (http://www.davidanthonywilliams.com) for a seminar at our home right here in Winnipeg. We are expecting our second child in March, will be expanding into Mexico from our condo base in Puerto Vallarta during the winter months starting next October or November, and will always keep dreaming.

So there is a glimpse into who we are and where we came from. If you want more come meet us! We love meeting new people and can always find time for a coffee. Drop us an email, tweet, facebook, phone call… however you talk to people nowadays and we’ll chat