Blogger’s Corner with Emma from Emma Lord Photography

The Blogger’s Corner series is an interview series featuring advice and experience from bloggers whose blogs are older than six months.

If you would like to take part, you can find all of the details here.

This week, we have the lovely Emma from Emma Lord Photography

1 Introduce yourself

Hi. I’m Emma, and I am a Wiltshire based photographer. I operate as a sole trader and my main commissions are for pet portraits, headshots, and local companies.

I set my business up in February 2017, having spent a couple of years studying photography at college.

Photography is a change of direction for me. I started my career in the UK civil service, joining as a statistician after university and progressing to director level.

Eventually, I had to leave the service for health reasons. I was quite seriously ill for a number of months, during which time I existed rather than lived. I came through, and when I was ready, I began thinking ahead.

I decided to return to college with the aim of putting my studies towards beginning a new career. Fast forward three years, and here I am today. Writing about blogging and photography.

2 Tell us a little bit about your blog

My blog is about the work I do as a freelance photographer, career changer, and volunteer. I try to combine information about setting up a business, with photography ideas, and anecdotes about some of my day-to-day experiences.

3 What can your readers learn from your blog?

Readers can learn about photography, about life as a freelance photographer, and things to think about when setting up a business. I hope the readers will also learn a bit about me as a person; particularly the ethics which I try to live and work by.

4 What’s your favourite thing about blogging?

It’s an opportunity to express myself in writing, and to share experience with others.

I also find writing for a blog can be a useful way of giving traction to early project ideas. Taking the idea and writing about it sometimes enables me to form a better picture of the direction in which I would like the project to progress.

5 And your least favourite thing about blogging?

I wait for days to have an idea for a post, and then multiple ideas arrive at once. If the content isn’t time critical, I make a note of the idea and begin to plan ahead for the next few posts. If the ideas are all linked to a certain event or season, for example, then I might just pop a few shorter posts out to cover each idea separately.

6 Tell us one random fact about you

Pets have always been an important part of my family. In all my years, I have never lived a single day which has not been shared with a creature companion of some form.

7 If you could only blog about one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be and why?

Definitely nature, so that I could spend time exploring and photographing outside, as research and content for blog posts.

8 What was the hardest part of starting your blog and why?

Learning the interface between the different platforms I use to host my blog. They all come together quite logically, but it took some time to work out how to set up the look and functionality of the blog to match what I pictured in my mind’s eye.

9 If you could give new bloggers one piece of advice, what would it be?

It sounds like stating the obvious, but be true to yourself. A blog is a platform to share a piece of yourself with others. Don’t be afraid to expose your own values and motivations through your writing.

Try to write regularly but don’t worry too much about sticking to a set routine. Don’t beat yourself up if you usually publish on a Tuesday but miss a week. This is your blog, you’re the managing director, the chief operating officer, and the owner. You run it as you would like to.

Take advice from experienced bloggers, and use it to shape your own approach.

Which is more than just one piece of advice, but I hope is useful.

10 Is there anything you know now that you wish you’d known in the beginning?

There is a huge amount of information – mainly online – giving advice about the best ways to blog; from when to publish, to which key words to use, to what to call your blog.

It’s worth reviewing and digesting the advice, but ultimately, it’s for you to start your own blog. Every new idea starts somewhere and rather than spending too long trying to run the perfect blog based on the advice of others, just go ahead and get writing.

I spent a long time reading about ‘how to’ blog when I could just have gone ahead and started writing instead.

11 Do you have any long term goals for your blog?

I’d like to continue writing about the business side to the operation, then combine some of the posts on business start-up learning into lessons, which I can offer as tutorials for college students.

Having been through the process of establishing a business, and continuing to grow and evolve the set-up, there is a lot of information I wish I’d had earlier. Perhaps as part of the photography course I studied at college.

We had some teaching on business basics, but actual lessons learned from somebody who’d been through the process of setting up a business would have been extremely helpful.

Compiling information through a blog will help me gather the relevant points in future in preparation for offering tutorial sessions.

12 Who’s your blogging hero?

I subscribe to the Bipolar UK newsletter, which includes links to their blog, Pendulum. The blog features posts from a range of people including mental health professionals, people suffering with bipolar, and friends and relatives of bipolar sufferers.

The contributors to this blog are all blogging heroes of mine. Sharing knowledge and experience is invaluable to other sufferers, and their friends and families.

13 What’s your favourite social media network and why?

There’s a lot to like, and a lot to be cautious about with any social media platform. They all have different roles to play when used for personal or business purposes.

Twitter is my favourite, for the simplicity of use. It doesn’t ask for a life story it simply presents extracts from your day.

Small amounts of text, combined with images, are sometimes more accessible than longer posts which might appear on networks like Facebook.

14 Anything else you want to share with us?

Whether your main occupation is blogger, or you blog about your main occupation, it’s important to have some personal projects on the go. I love photography, and I enjoy writing my blog about it.

Running personal projects alongside the ‘day job’ means I continue to learn and develop. It also provides a balance between photographing and writing for work, and photographing and writing for pleasure.

My current personal photography projects concern animal welfare and mental health; both are causes close to my heart.

Writing projects include a compendium of poetry which I have been working on for a number of years, and using words and pictures to draft a book on mental health issues.

15 Where can we find you? (blog link and links to any social media)

Find my main website at and my blog at http://www.thephotographersway.org.

From either of these sources, you can link to my Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts.

All featured photographs provided by Emma Lord Photography for use in this post and all associated promotion of the post.