Should I book a photography workshop or one-to-one mentoring?

Workshops: technique, fast

Our underwater workshops put you in the water with models, lighting and direction for one or two days. You leave with new technique and new portfolio images. What a workshop cannot do in that time is fix your pricing, positioning or client pipeline.

Mentoring: your business, over time

Mentoring runs on a two to three month minimum for a reason — pricing changes, portfolio shifts and marketing routines take weeks to show results. Biweekly mentorship is $1,390 per month, weekly is $1,990 per month, and the group cohort is $990 per person per month.

A sensible order

If you cannot yet produce the images your target clients want, start with a workshop. If you can produce the work but are not being paid properly for it, start with mentoring. Creatives who do both tend to move fastest.

What you walk away with from each

A workshop typically ends with a shared shoot day, a set of images captured under guided conditions, and a group experience with peers. A mentorship ends with a personalized plan built around your actual business or portfolio, with accountability for what happens next. Workshops are good for a concentrated skill or technique in a short window; mentoring is good for solving an ongoing bottleneck that a single day cannot fix.

Workshops also tend to be cheaper per hour of instruction because the cost is shared across a group, while mentoring's cost reflects dedicated, individual attention to your specific work.

How to decide which to book first

Ask what the actual blocker is. If it is a discrete technical skill — a lighting setup, a posing style, an editing technique — a workshop or single craft-focused mentoring session can resolve it quickly. If the blocker is structural — pricing that has never worked, a portfolio that does not attract the right clients, a business that has plateaued — that needs the sustained, personalized format of monthly mentoring, because a one-day event cannot rebuild a business model.

• ✔Technical skill you want to learn once: workshop
• ✔Networking and community with other creatives: workshop
• ✔Ongoing accountability on a business goal: monthly mentoring
• ✔Deep portfolio or creative-direction feedback specific to your work: Private Mentoring

Can you combine the two?

Yes, and many creatives get the most value doing so in sequence rather than choosing one permanently. A workshop can supply new technical skills or fresh images for a portfolio; a mentoring session afterward can help translate that new material into pricing, marketing and client-facing decisions. Treating a workshop as raw material and mentoring as the process that turns it into business results tends to outperform either alone.

What to ask before booking either

For a workshop, ask about group size, what gear or preparation is required, and whether you leave with usable images or just observed demonstrations. For mentoring, ask about session format, cadence, and whether the engagement is genuinely built around your work or delivered from a fixed curriculum regardless of who is in the room.