I’ve been saying for quite some time now that the U.S. economy is changing and one of the most fruitful ways available to me to gather corroborating evidence of that is to talk to microbusiness owners.

That is because it often happens that, while the market giants whine and cry and lobby their Congresspersons to protect them from dastardly technologies, many microbusiness owners are figuring out new business models with which to face a changing marketplace.

Emily Nash is that kind of microbusiness owner. She is a trained artist and former documentary film photographer, and the owner of Albuquerque, NM-based Emily Nash Photography.

I spent almost as much time talking to Emily about her industry as I did talking to her about her company because the photography business is in a state of flux. The once-lucrative stock photography market has dried up, largely because the dominant market player has drastically reduced the prices they are charging for stock photography and, thus, the money freelancers make from those usage rights.

That same dominant market player has also hired staff photographers to produce much of the most salable work it formerly got from freelancers, adding to the pressures in the usage rights market.

Another source of work for freelance photographers &mash; and the space in which Emily Nash cut her teeth while learning how her industry works — is magazines and advertising. That part of the business is becoming difficult, as well, because the magazine industry is struggling and Emily tells me, if those magazines are not doing well, the freelance photographer’s telephone does not ring.

Then, too, there is a lot of new competition as many people are buying digital cameras and calling themselves photographers if they know how to take a reasonably clear picture and perhaps touch it up on their computers a bit. Emily and other true professionals in this business know that a photograph can be so much more than that, but they have to compete just the same.

It seems like a grim scenario and I’m told that many photographers have lost as much as six figures in income and are struggling to find their place in this very different landscape. Emily Nash has recognized that she needs to re-work her business model.

She is a fairly unusual photographer in that she recognizes that she is both artist and businesswoman. The very fact that she is even thinking about such a thing as a business model and a business plan makes her different from many creative business owners.

Both her parents were small business owners and she learned a lot from watching them, which turned out to be fortunate for her. “They’re artists doing business and its a bad mix most of the time,” she says of her peers. “And they don’t teach you at all in art school.”

Emily’s new business model involves corporate photography and, specifically, her ability to marry what she learned about advertising and marketing with what she already knew about taking pictures. She calls it a combination of corporate advertising and portraiture.

There are probably any number of corporate photographers but Emily adds value to her service by bringing creativity to a world that is, as she puts it, very left-brain. She has turned to a branch of the photography industry that is not considered particularly creative, and has injected creativity into it.

In fact, she says that some of the most creative people she has ever worked with are in the corporate world. “A lot of people are thinking outside the box in corporate. It’s extremely creative and not at all what an art student would expect,” she told me.

Most of the business people Emily takes pictures of are small business owners and most of them don’t stop to consider the notion that their file photo is a form of advertising. “They’re trying to convey a message without knowing what that message is,” she says.

The greatest challenges facing her right now come back to her business model and the fact that she has many of the headaches one might expect of a business rooted in the arts. She struggles to figure out how she can create a business “that’s not all about me,” when her service is so dependent on her particular artistic eye.

She struggles to find other sources of passive income to replace the usage rights she once sold through stock photography companies. As matters currently stand, her revenues are depending on her going out to take pictures; she wants to find another way to make money while she sleeps.

She has come under fire from some of her peers for “selling out” by going corporate. “I don’t want to be a starving artist,” she told me, “but some of them do.”

One of the most intriguing things about Emily Nash is that her eyes are firmly fixed on the road ahead. So, while I don’t have her answers, I’m pretty sure she’s going to find them.

She already knows the most important part — that there is more to both her photography and her business than taking pictures.