Kat Carney, Swell & Stone

[00:00:00] Sanjay Parekh: Welcome to the Side Hustle to Small Business Podcast, powered by Hiscox. I’m your host, Sanjay Parekh. Throughout my career I’ve had side hustles, some of which turned into real businesses, but first and foremost: I’m a serial technology entrepreneur.

In the creator space, we hear plenty of advice on how to hustle harder and why you can “sleep when you’re dead.” On this show, we ask new questions in hopes of getting new answers.

Questions like: How can small businesses work smarter? How do you achieve balance between work and family? How can we redefine success in our businesses so that we don’t burn out after year three?

Every week, I sit down with business founders at various stages of their side hustle to small business journey. These entrepreneurs are pushing the envelope while keeping their values. Keep listening for conversation, context, and camaraderie.

When you think of wedding photos, you might think of classic moments captured: a white dress, a groom adjusting his tie, smiling faces in front of a church. These scenes are timeless and beautiful, but our guest this week wanted an alternative to traditional photos and cater to couples who wanted to get outside and get out of the box on their big day.

Kat Carney is an adventure wedding and elopement photographer and the owner of Swell & Stone. She photographs elopements and small outdoor weddings and has captured marital moments of happy couples from the deserts of southern Utah to the rocky beaches of Maine.

Kat is pushing the envelope and expressing her creativity daily with Swell & Stone and we’re thrilled to have her on the show today.

Kat, welcome to the Side Hustle to Small Business Podcast!

[00:01:41] Kat Carney: Awesome. Thank you for having me.

[00:01:42] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. I'm super excited to talk to you because I think your background is so fascinating and just what you do day to day is just so, so interesting. And it's going to be, I think, very interesting to our listeners, but first I want to talk about, how did you really become an entrepreneur the first time?

Was it with Swell & Stone, or did you have some kind of entrepreneurial experience, like when you were younger?

[00:02:09] Kat Carney: Yeah, well, other than when I was younger, I ran a babysitting business and had helped my brother with his lawn mowing business. So, I guess that can be considered my early entrepreneurial endeavors, but 

[00:03:21]Sanjay Parekh: Absolutely that counts, a hundred percent that counts.

[00:02:24] Kat Carney: Other than that, I did and I still actually run another photography business called just Kat Carney Photography, just my name with photography.

And with that, I did commercial and editorial work specifically in the adventure sports realm. So, I was shooting climbing, canyoneering, surfing – a lot of the same stuff that I do now except where people weren't getting married. It was just like people in the outdoors essentially. And I still do that to some degree, although it is becoming a smaller and smaller portion of what I do every year as Swell & Stone grows and I really focus more energy on that.

I started doing Kat Carney Photography in 2009, I think when I graduated college, but I didn't ever do it really full time until 2016, and then I started Swell & Stone in 2018 I want to say. So, from there it's been, but I've been working full-time in the photography realm for myself since 2016, essentially.

[00:03:29] Sanjay Parekh: Okay. So, coming out of college, you were kind of doing this as kind of a side thing, were you working for somebody else during that time, what were you doing as your full-time regular gig?

[00:03:39] Kat Carney: I had several other jobs, especially my first year out of college in 2009. You know, if you remember correctly, it was right after the housing crash and it was turmoil so it was crazy. So, I worked several seasonal jobs, I guess that's what I would call them for lack of a better word. I worked in Alaska and then in Colorado mostly like waiting tables or doing stuff like that. And then I got a job as a collegiate assistant volleyball coach, and I played volleyball in college also, so that I was like, okay, what skill sets do I have that I can... I have student loans to pay.

Like I need a job that's going to pay me money. Turns out that job didn't really pay that much money, but it was a job and so I moved to Southeast Kansas and I'm from Kansas originally, but I moved to Southeast Kansas for that. And for two years, I did that along with a number of other things. I actually worked at the small-town newspaper at the same time that I had the assistant volleyball coaching job, and I had like four or five other side jobs at the same time.

So, while I was working for all different kinds of people during that time, it's kind of like being an entrepreneur because I was juggling so many balls at once. But I was just like, okay, I'll just have seven jobs at once and pay off my student loans as quickly as possible because I feel trapped. When I think I owe people money, I feel trapped.

I was just like, let's just wipe that out somehow, and then I can do whatever I want. So that's what I did. I ended up in 2012, moving to Spain and playing professional volleyball for a year. Then after that and…

[00:05:27] Sanjay Parekh: That’s awesome! Playing professional volleyball. That’s great!

[00:05:30] Kat Carney: Kill two birds with one stone. I wanted to learn to speak Spanish and I wanted to play volleyball more. I was a coach and around it all the time and I was like, I don't think I'm done playing yet. So, I did that and I learned to speak conversational Spanish, and then I came back to the states and moved to San Diego.

And I was working for the Adams Avenue Business Association, but it's a small business association that assisted small businesses within a neighborhood in San Diego, and it was there really that I learned a lot of the stuff that I would later use for running my own business because I was dealing with small businesses all the time and helping them succeed and seeing what they were going through and learning their trials and successes and sort of taking some of that information when I decided to start my own or to go full-time with my own business.

[00:06:32] Sanjay Parekh: Okay, so let's talk, well, I definitely want to talk for a second. I know it's a diversion, but I want to talk about playing volleyball in Spain. How far did you get in doing that and when did you decide and how did you decide, okay, I'm done playing volleyball and I want to go back to photography?

[00:06:49] Kat Carney: Yeah. I only played for a year. I was invited to play the following year again, but I, so my senior year of college, tore my second ACL. I tore my first ACL when I was in high school, rehabbed it and was good to go, played in college. And then my senior year of college, right before the NCAA tournament, I tore my second ACL.

And so that was a real bummer and it felt like I had unfinished business because I was like you know, I was at my best ever at my peak and then I tore my ACL and I have no more eligibility to play in college. So, I was just like, ah, that did not go how I wanted it to go. So that's how I ended up going over and playing for a year, in Spain.

Ultimately, I decided not to for a couple of reasons. Number one, I missed my boyfriend who was in the states and two my knees were, I had pretty severe patellar tendinitis at that time. And it just felt like I was running my body into the ground, which is a crazy thing to say at 25 years old. But if you've been playing, I had been playing volleyball at that point for 17 years. And that's just like a lot of jumping and a lot of wear and tear on my body. And I was like, no, it's probably time to pack it in and you know, be healthier with my joints anyway.

[00:08:10] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, I think this is a common story with student-athletes that we probably don't hear that often. In fact, I had a friend when we were growing up, she went to Germany to play professional soccer, and ended up breaking her back.

She ended up getting a spinal fracture that ended her career. But amazingly, just like you, she's gone on to do great things. And it was like I guess in some ways a blessing in disguise because it has opened up new avenues. So, you came back, you started doing photography. Let's step back one thing like in college, you mentioned you started doing this right after, kind of for yourself on the side as a side hustle.

What did you go to college for? What was your degree in? 

[00:08:51] Kat Carney: I studied journalism, with an emphasis on photojournalism. So, it is kind of like this type of work is definitely in line with what I studied in college.

[00:09:01] Sanjay Parekh: Okay, so that this has been a passion for a long time for you, and you knew that you were going to go there eventually.

One of the other interesting things I saw in your background, was that you met your husband through adventure travel. I don’t know if this is the same person that was the boyfriend before.

[00:09:19] Kat Carney: Same person, yeah.

[00:09:22] Sanjay Parekh: Same person. Ok, so boyfriend, first, you met your boyfriend that became your husband. How did that happen? Where did you meet and how did the whole thing connect?

[00:09:27] Kat Carney: We met in the summer of 2008 on Lake Powell in Arizona. So in-between years of college, both of us were to, we found jobs on the site called Coolworks.com. Or cool jobs. I think it's coolworks.com and again, I was just waiting tables, but I got to go to cool places and that's actually, we went the next summer to Alaska together and did the same thing.

And a lot of the photos that you see, in Red Rock Canyon and stuff, in my Swell & Stone work, I first explored with him in the summer of 2008 when we were working in the Lake Powell area together.

And also where my love of the desert Southwest comes in, meeting him and spending that whole summer in a landscape that was totally foreign to anything I had ever seen before – it's like this beautiful, incredible alien landscape – was really cool. And then, we've gone to a bunch of other places since then. So, he's definitely a great adventure travel partner. He was the one who got into like canyoneering and then became obsessed. And then I'm like, okay, we need to, we've got to learn how to do this.

And now we've done hundreds of canyons together.

[00:10:47] Sanjay Parekh: I was looking through your photos. It looked like one of the photos, the wedding photos was in Antelope Canyon. Was that Antelope Canyon? Or is it one of the other slot canyons that looks the same basically?

[00:10:58] Kat Carney: Yeah, not Antelope Canyon. When working with clients, I like to give them some sort of sense of seclusion, which is somewhat impossible in Antelope Canyon.

Although Antelope Canyon is crazy beautiful and I have been there a number of times, never for work though. Just for enjoyment because it is spectacular and I do recommend people go check that out, but yeah, it is, there are a ton of slot canyons in the desert Southwest. And so many of them are intensely beautiful in similar types of ways.

But Antelope Canyon is actually, super unique in the way that the light comes down through the canyon. So yeah, I highly recommend people go check that out, but that it was in a different, in a different canyon that if you're familiar with the desert Southwest, I'm not going to name it just so it doesn't get overrun with people, but canyoneers will see that and know what canyon that is.

[00:11:57] Sanjay Parekh: I'll tell you, we went and we did a Southwest trip and went to Antelope Canyon and I was so impressed. Antelope Canyon is on a Native American reservation, so you have Native American guides that take you through there.

But the guide that we had – and I'm assuming this is true of all the guides that take you through there – they took our phones from us. They were like, let us take the pictures, let me take the pictures for you. And they knew so many settings on our phones and they made incredible photos that I don't think I would ever be able to replicate.

Obviously, you wouldn’t need that help, but I was so impressed by how much skill that they had as guides, but also as photographers for each of the groups that they were taking through.

[00:12:38] Kat Carney: The guides are amazing. They really are knowledgeable about the canyon. Obviously, they've lived there for a long time and it’s their home. They do so many things that you don't even know about like, I remember them saying, okay, well, we got a couple of rattlesnakes out of the thing this morning before we're taking you through. I'm like, thank you for that because I don't want to run into a rattlesnake while I'm going through this canyon.

[00:13:06] Sanjay Parekh: So that's really not something that, I get the adventure part, but probably not the part of the adventure you want.

[00:13:08] Kat Carney: That's like my worst nightmare getting bit by a rattlesnake.

[00:13:12] Sanjay Parekh: So, let's talk about how you kind of started this whole wedding photography part of it. Like how did you get your first client? How did that happen?

[00:13:21] Kat Carney: Great question. Yes. So, I was working in San Diego. At the same time that I was working that job at the businesses, the small businesses association, I was getting into photography more and more, or starting to think like, okay, maybe this is my next step, my next move. But I didn't know how to make it my next step or my next move.

And so, I started shooting traditional weddings. In my free time, they're mostly on the weekends, so I could do that. And very quickly realized like, this is not for me. I don't really like any part of this. I'm not interested in the imagery, it's a lot of repetition.

[00:14:10] Sanjay Parekh: Is it that it feels like it’s the same thing every time?

[00:13:21] Kat Carney: Yeah, it's the same thing over and over and over again. And I wasn't particularly interested in weddings at all to be totally honest. Like I don't really, this sounds weird and strange, but I don't really care about weddings in the traditional sense of like, I care about two people who are committing their lives to one another, but I don't really care about all the pomp and circumstance and, you know, lavish parties or anything like that. And so, the segue into Swell & Stone was when I realized that some people aren't getting married in that traditional type of way, and my first adventure wedding was in, so that was like 2013 and 2014 that I was doing that and realizing that, oh, the traditional weddings are like not my thing.

And I was like, I don't know how I'm ever going to make this work. And then in 2015, I had a friend whose sister was getting married in Deception Pass State Park in Washington. And I went up there and photographed her wedding and like that was the first time I realized, oh, people are getting married in really non-traditional ways. They had rented out these tiny cabins and the state park for all of the guests and they just played lawn games the whole time. And it was a beautiful view on a beach with the amazing forests up there. And there was so much to it that I liked and really, very little to it that I didn't like. And I was like, wait, people are doing this, this is possible. And so that was my first time thinking like, okay, this is a possibility.

And then, and over the next couple years, I started noticing in the wedding photography space, a trend of more people sort of getting married in that way and more photographers shooting kind of only specifically this type of a wedding. So, when I moved to the East Coast eventually in 2017, I started thinking more about that and then started Swell & Stone in 2018 and then have been doing that. And pretty much had full booked seasons ever since then. So, for the last three years, yeah.

[00:16:29] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, yeah, okay. I’ve got to ask, you've done this now for a few years. What is the one place that you like even to this day, you absolutely loved being there and taking photos there, you know, regardless of the fact it was a wedding, like, what is that number one place?

[00:16:47] Kat Carney: Oh, this is such an impossible question to answer.

[00:16:51] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. I knew it was going to be hard.

[00:16:52] Kat Carney: So, can I give you three, kind of? So, the desert Southwest, honestly, anywhere in the desert Southwest, particularly in Southern Utah, that whole area, there's so much amazing stuff there and the views are incredible. There's so much seclusion. You can be by yourself if you want to. And yeah, it's just incredible.

And now I primarily work in New England. And so, my favorite places to photograph in New England are like, there's a bunch of – people don't know this – but there's a bunch of islands off the coast of Massachusetts and the coast of Rhode Island.

And I love taking the ferry out, right. And those islands and the rock formations are incredible. Like it's incredibly beautiful. And then Vermont in New England also is kind of like, ideal with a wonderland of beauty, basically like with the mountains and the waterfalls. And if you've never been to New England in the fall, I highly recommend it. I think it's like the greatest place in the world to be in the fall.

[00:18:00] Sanjay Parekh: With like the leaves changing and everything?

[00:18:03] Kat Carney: Yeah, so many trees, so much foliage, people lose their minds. And rightfully so.

[00:18:08] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. One of my bucket list items – we've driven up, there, we’re big road trip people but we didn't get to do this – is the Ben and Jerry's factory up in Vermont.

[00:18:18] Kat Carney: I drive by it, I drive by it all the time. Like literally multiple times this fall, that I'm up there and I still haven't gone.

So that's also on my bucket list.

[00:18:28] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Yeah. You need to find a client that is really into ice cream and see if they want to do a wedding at Ben and Jerry’s, right?

[00:18:33] Kat Carney: Great idea, or just stop there as part of their elopement day, you know, stop a on your day here, we're getting ice cream.

[00:19:01] Sanjay Parekh: Okay. So, you know, with the business, you are kind of all over the place, right? You travel quite a bit. What do you do in terms of, like, dealing with managing the responsibilities and commitments of running a business? Are there tools? How do you deal with all of this stuff?

Because a lot of times you're not home, and like you've got to deal with the finances and the bills and the this, that, and the other, right? Scheduling – like, is there some kind of tool or a set of tools that you use, that for you is a lifesaver?

[00:19:32] Kat Carney: Yeah, I do have a set of tools that I use. One of them is called Dubsado, which is my customer relationship management system.

And I have all of my communication with my clients automated through that. So that's obviously incredibly helpful. I have emails pre-written basically for their information, like everything that they need to do or the info and so as we go through, because I also help, I don't just show up on their elopement day.

I help them plan pretty much every step of the process. So, I oftentimes pick out their ceremony spot or, you know, help them find the perfect celebration location where, you know, if they have five or ten of their closest friends and family with them, that they're allowed to like to drink alcohol and whatever in the outdoors.

And so, all of that goes through my CRM, Dubsado, which is incredible, really helpful. I also do all my contracts and invoicing through there which is amazing. I use QuickBooks Self-Employed to keep track of all my finances, which is awesome. And, honestly, I do most of it on my phone. I can just categorize and, do my mileage and like literally everything financial, where I keep track of my business is done on that.

Then for a gallery delivery which is like how I get the images to my clients, I use Pic-Time, which it's like probably one of my favorite things ever that has made my business better and easier on me. So, I deliver the images through there. So, clients can download both website and high-rise images, but they can also create albums and framed prints and all kinds of prints straight from that gallery. Where photographers used to maybe spend a lot of time after the fact helping clients make albums and all that kind of stuff, they can sort of self-guide themselves through that process because they want to create what they want to create anyway.

So, if I were to do it for them, I would have to go around and switch a bunch of stuff. So, this just makes it easy for them to see the layout and do it all themselves and I can't tell you how helpful and time-saving that has been.

[00:21:52] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. So, one of the things you said there just sparked a question for me. So, with your help, you're not just coming the day off just to take photos, you're helping a bunch on the front end to figure out. I think I saw this on your site too, like, hey, what happens when it rains? And you know, I'm still going to take pictures and document that as a part of the experience of that day.

But how are you finding these unique locations? I mean, you've got experience because you've been to a bunch of them and clients are probably taking you to some, but there's probably a bunch that you've never been to. And, you're like finding them somehow. How are you finding them?

[00:22:27] Kat Carney: When I was running Kat Carney Photography before I started Swell & Stone, I lived in a built-out truck for two years and I basically just traveled and worked and traveled nonstop so I have been to a lot of places all over the United States and, you know, I have photos of all of them because I'm a photographer.

So, when I visit places, I take pictures of the places. And so that was like how I started. And so, I recommended – clients were, you know, inquiring and then I would send them photos that I had taken while I had been on a hiking trip there or whatever. And that's how I ended up, you know, taking, guiding clients essentially to these locations and being like, well, I can tell you firsthand, this is an incredibly beautiful spot. And this waterfall would be like the perfect spot to say your vows or whatever. And so personal experience, number one of having been there.

And then second, if I haven't been there or, you know, somewhere that I've, or I have just a spot in my head that I know about, I use Google Earth a lot to show to show clients like, okay, this is what it looks like, the sun will be setting here at this time. You know, so there's, Google is a great tool in terms of, you can really travel, without leaving, you know, your couch or your desk or whatever it may be. And so, it's a combination of yeah, places I have been or places that I have wanted to go.

And occasionally, it's clients saying, well, this place is special and near and dear to our hearts. In that case, they know the location. And then you know, once I've been and photographed couples in each of these locations, It happens more and more that couples come to me saying, I want the experience exactly like so-and-so that I saw on your website.

[00:24:26] Sanjay Parekh: Nice, nice. And, and has the majority of the kind of experiences that you've done, have they all been in the US or has there an international exposure as well?

[00:24:37] Kat Carney: Yeah, so, I think almost entirely the US with maybe the exception of – well, no, cause I, that's not true. I've done work for my commercial and editorial stuff internationally, but I think actually Puerto Rico is within the US also, so yeah, it's all within the US and I haven't done Canada and Mexico. I've done other stuff there, but yeah. So, all the couples so far have been in the US and I think I'm going to keep it that way, just because finding work visas and all that is a bunch of logistical stuff that I kind of don't want to deal with for working outside of the US, so, yeah.

[00:25:20] Sanjay Parekh: Okay, yeah. I was going to ask that. So you think you would want to do that, but it's the logistics behind doing it that is preventing you?

[00:25:27] Kat Carney: Yeah, I think the logistics are too much. I already deal with a lot of logistics in terms of helping couples plan. I don't need to add finding myself work visas on top of it.

[00:25:38] Sanjay Parekh: Right, right. Is the company, is it just you, or do you have help in terms of organizing all of this stuff? And do you have other photographers or is it a one-woman show?

[00:25:46] Kat Carney: It is me. I sometimes hire other photographers to help with a portion of it. So, depending on, if I need a second shooter, I'll hire someone to come shoot with me. And I have an editor who for the most part does some culling which just means choosing the images that will eventually be edited, and editing. And that has been an incredible help in terms of getting some of my time back. I definitely still edit in terms of doing all of the final and finishing touches, but I spend maybe like, you know, I've gotten a huge percentage of my time back that I would have spent editing because I now have an editor, so that has been great.

[00:26:35] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. That's great. So, okay. So you obviously sound to me like you've made this leap, you love it. This was the right thing to do for you. What advice would you give to other people that are kind of teetering on the edge of, you know, running their side hustle and then thinking about going full time? Like what, what tipped you over to be like, yeah, I am all in? I don't want to work for anybody else. This is my thing. Like what advice would you give them to be like, yeah, you should do it or this is the right time to do it?

[00:27:07] Kat Carney: Oh, so I think there are a couple of things, like wanting to work for yourself is one of them, right? So, there are a lot of things that come with being a photographer that have nothing to do with photography.

So you have to, you have to be interested in all of those things as well. You have to be interested in working for yourself and running your own business and doing a lot of stuff that is not necessarily the art of photography.

So, if you have no inclination to do that, maybe figure something else out in terms of like, being able to do photography, but not running your own business because running your own business, I would say honestly is like 75% of it and the other 25% is like actually taking the photos and all that kind of stuff, yeah.

And then the other thing is you know, this particular niche that I'm in really made sense for me as a person, like the way that I lived my life before I even started doing photography at all, or, you know, the way that I've lived my life for pretty much my whole life, which is, I love being in the outdoors. I love nature and I love taking photos of people interacting with nature.

And so find something, a niche that is really true to you, and that might be different than shooting elopements in the outdoors. It might be, you know, shooting elopements in the city, or it might be shooting, you know, product placed somewhere or something like that.

So really, like, if you hate working with people, like, strive for a job that works with inanimate objects or something I don't know. But just make sure that it's true to you and to the things that you like doing because if you don't love doing it, you won't continue to want to do it every single day. And it is like a lot of work. You maybe didn't think it was going to be the case when you started doing it.

[00:29:03] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, I think that's one of those hidden things about being an entrepreneur that a lot of people don't realize or talk about. That there's a lot of stuff that isn't actually, you know, the stuff that gets written about, right?

Like you get written about by your business about photography, but like you said, probably the majority of your time is spent on not that. it's spent on like other stuff right? Exactly.

What is that one thing, like, I know what my one thing is that I hate in starting up companies. What is the one thing for you that you still continue to have to do because it's your business, but that you don't like?

[00:29:43] Kat Carney: Oh, gosh. So, I feel like I'm a weird entrepreneur in that I really liked the business side of things along with the artistry side of things and I think that's why it's been a great fit for me. One thing that I really don't like doing that I have to…

[00:30:01] Sanjay Parekh: Like maybe balancing the books or...

[00:30:04] Kat Carney: No, I kind of liked doing that. That's like, I like, knowing exactly where everything's going. I like, you know, having control of my own destiny. Oh, I know what it is. It's blogging and then keywording all of the images on my blog. So, it's such a tedious job that is so boring. And it's just like, it's almost mind-numbing, like keywording each of these images, so they’re searchable on Google, you know?

And, yeah, I should probably, that should be my next outsource, I’m realizing. I haven't done it in a while because I've had my busy season and now I'm going into my slower season and that's when I do all that mind-numbing work. So, yeah.

[00:30:51] Sanjay Parekh: See, there's, there's always something for an entrepreneur: Well, I do it, but you know, I really don't enjoy that part of it. So just, I, I've got two more questions for you. One, how do you define success for your business?

[00:31:07] Kat Carney: For me, success is to be able to continue doing what I love doing every day and not have to go get a nine-to-five job. So, I'm making it financially and loving what I do. I mean, that's Kind of, yeah, that's how I would break it down. It's pretty simple.

[00:31:28] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Yeah. It is pretty straightforward. Okay. So my last question is actually a tip for our listeners. You've had a lot of experience taking photos and unusual situations. So, let's give the listeners some advice for them when they're taking photos. Obviously, they're not going to have the same gear as you, but what's one of the best tricks or tips that you can give to them and what's maybe one of the things that they should avoid when they're trying to make, you know, some great photos of when they're out?

[00:31:54] Kat Carney: Yeah. So, the time of day is huge with photography. So, if you can be out at sunrise or sunset and take advantage of the golden light and, you know, the landscape, if you're shooting the landscape or if you're shooting people kind of, either way, it doesn't matter.

If you can take advantage of it when the sun is lower on the horizon, everything looks nicer than when it's straight overhead if it's sunny outside, you know, so you’re shooting in mid-day. That's like probably the simplest thing that if you are outside with your camera, with your phone, that will, the landscape looks so different than soft light versus harsh light, yeah.

And then, well, if you're taking photos of people, like, you know, almost all of what I do is people interacting with the landscape, I would say you avoid posing people as much as possible. And instead, interact with them. And, you know, I use a style that kind of gives action items every once in a while, but it's really like hanging out, having fun, enjoying the day and the whole experience.

And then also capturing like the candid in-between moments rather than, you know, moving a hand slightly one way or another way, because I feel like those always look forced versus, you know, if you're giving action items and just hanging out with someone, you'll get a lot more natural, basically, for lack of a better word, pose, just don't pose them, just take candids. Yeah.

[00:33:26] Sanjay Parekh: Don't pose them, make it seem like real life like it actually is.

[00:33:30] Kat Carney: Yeah. Like just live, just live, like it's actual life, and then take photos in the meantime.

[00:33:35] Sanjay Parekh: Well, Kat, this has been absolutely phenomenal and so interesting.

I appreciate you coming on the podcast. Again, Kat Carney with Swell & Stone.com is the website. If you're looking for a photographer and you're having an awesome wedding in a non-normal place. Well, hopefully, these will be the normal places, right? Then we'll say the other ones are the non-normal places are more normal.

[00:34:00] Kat Carney: Yeah. it’s becoming more and more normal. Yeah.

[00:34:01] Sanjay Parekh: It's becoming more and more normal, more and more fun. Visit [email protected]. Thanks again, Kat for coming on the podcast.

[00:34:10] Kat Carney: Thanks for having me.

[00:34:15] Sanjay Parekh: Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Side Hustle to Small Business Podcast, powered by Hiscox. To learn more about how Hiscox can help protect your small business through intelligent insurance solutions, visit hiscox.com.

I’m your host, Sanjay Parekh. You can find me on Twitter at @sanjay or on my website at sanjayparekh.com.