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How To Sell An Unplugged Wedding

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The bride slowly walks down the aisle with her dad. Its one of the happiest days of her life. But as she looks around her, she feels a bit unsure. She expected to see friends and family smiling at her. Yet it feels like a scene from a science fiction movie. All around her is a sea of computer screens. High and low, everyone fighting to get that one perfect shot. They jump out in front of her. Trip over the paid photographer. Talk during the vows. Even get the minister upset enough to send one guest back to his seat.

This isn’t what the bride had in mind when she played dress up all those years ago.

Yet in today’s world, digital is our life. Nobody goes anywhere without a mobile or tablet ready to go.

But is the paparazzi really the way to go for every experience we face?

How To Sell An Unplugged Wedding

Or is it time to pull the plug.

Having an unplugged wedding is definitely a sign of the times. And as a photographer, you can use this to your advantage.

Talk to your clients during the booking process

Unless your clients are CEOs of startup tech companies with mobile devices attached to their hips, they’ve probably experienced the “paparazzi phenomena” before.

Mention an unplugged wedding during the initial meeting. Talk about the benefits of having everyone enjoy the wedding – at least the ceremony if not more – without having a mobile device in their face. If you have horror stories, create mini albums showcasing examples. You can snap a photograph of Uncle Bob rushing up behind them as they have their first kiss. Or snap an image with the majority of hands in the air trying to capture the bride and groom with their phones and tablets. Prove the point – people are receptive when you have proof of bad outcomes. [Read more...]

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Why You Shouldn’t Have A Checklist For Your Wedding Clients

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Are you a wedding photographer? Do you use a checklist to let your clients tell you what images they want?

Stop handing them out and let your creativity soar. While checklists may seem like a great way to communicate with your client, they actually turn you into a subpar photographer. Here’s why.

It Is Unprofessional

You are a professional photographer. Do you really need a client to check a box telling you she wants a photograph of her and her new husband? As a professional, if you don’t understand the basic images that are needed to fulfill a wedding package, you shouldn’t be shooting weddings.

It Sets The Stage For Failure

Imagine you have a checklist with 200 photographs on it. The bride goes through and starts checking them – check, check, check – before she knows it every boxed is checked. It’s her wedding, she wants it all. Now you have the task of having to fulfill every check. Did you get this image? Yes. Oops, I forgot one, now what? Pretty soon you’re missing a lot of the wedding because you’re so worried about getting all the check marks. And if you miss one, the bride will pull out her checklist and ask you about it. Then she won’t be happy with the images you took; instead she’ll be disappointed in the one’s you missed.

It Limits Creativity

Every wedding is different. Every bride and groom is different. If you’re working from a list that says “close up of the bride”, “profile of the bride”, and on and on, you’re not paying attention to what is happening around you. You move from checklist, to pose, to shot, to check, and to the next image on the list. You’re not watching the groom sneak in to make the bride laugh. You don’t notice the bridesmaids off on the side dancing and twirling. You miss everything that will cause this wedding to be unique.

Why You Shouldnt Have A Checklist For Your Wedding Clients

Instead of working with a checklist, use what we call a wedding worksheet instead. [Read more...]

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20 Things You Should Be Doing Now To Improve As A Wedding Photographer

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1. Redo your samples. If you have a studio, frame some new images for your walls. If you meet with prospects regularly, create some new sample albums to showcase your best work. Remember to create samples based on what you want people to buy. We sold multi-album sets because we presented our prospects with multi-album samples. You will get what you show. So make it good!

2. Find a new album company that improves the look of your final product. You can check out my list of resources, or do a search for professional wedding albums. There are many beautiful options that consumers can’t purchase on your own – which gives them more reason to book you.

3. Get out of the office and meet people. Don’t just hit a Chamber meeting or a local networking group; work to find a wedding group. With places like ISES and ABC in many cities, you should easily be able to find a place where you can talk about weddings with peer vendors.

20 Things You Should Be Doing Now To Improve As A Wedding Photographer

4. Sign up for a bridal expo. From large, nationally organized events, to small expos put on by a few vendors, there is always an opportunity to set up a bridal fair and reach out to potential customers. Check out things like the Great Bridal Expo, or Google your area to find something near you.

5. Attend a photography conference. One of the biggest tradeshows for photographers is coming up in March in Las Vegas. WPPI has been helping thousands of photographers for years. From print competitions, to classes with the best photographers in the world, to a tradeshow that’s miles long and showcases hundreds of vendors, you’ll come away inspired. [Read more...]

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Why Great Wedding Vendors Should Be Your Best Friends

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If you photograph weddings, chances are you can quickly think of other wedding vendors you love to work with … and a few you hope you never see again.

We worked at one wedding where the videographer completely monopolized the bride and groom. He would follow us around to use all of our ideas, or jump in and start videoing as we were photographing intimate portraits with the worlds largest and most obnoxious light source. After a couple hours of this at the wedding location, the bride and groom had had enough. So we found ways to “sneak” off at the reception to allow the bride and groom some time alone, while capturing images the way they are meant to be captured.Why Great Wedding Vendors Should Be Your Best Friends

Likewise we have worked with many great vendors that we would gladly work with again and again. We referred each other because we knew what to expect from each other. The quality was always top notch. The service was always extraordinary. And we knew the bride and groom would be happy from beginning to end. They have been friends for many years and remain friends to this day.

If you are new to the wedding industry, building a relationship with your client may seem like the most important thing to do. And it is. Yet the relationships you build with vendors is what will build your business over time. You will only see a bride and groom once – at their wedding. Okay, maybe several times if you do other family members and friends. But if you become friends with other wedding vendors, you may work with each other a dozen times or more each year.

How do you build those relationships?

1. Start with your clients

What vendors will your current clients be using at their upcoming events? This is a great starting point for building relationships. A month or so before a client’s wedding, ask them for their list of top vendors: coordinators, videographers, caterers, florists, musicians, etc. Get points of contacts, and find out who you will be working with at the event itself. For instance, you may be working with a DJ service who employees 6 different DJs. Its great to know the owner of the company, just as its equally important to know who the DJ will be at your event. [Read more...]

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What Makes A Wedding Photojournalist Different Than A Wedding Photographer?

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What is the difference between wedding photojournalism and wedding photography? As we learned early on in our career, it’s a blurred line.

For many photographers, photojournalism simply means capturing the event as it happens. They pose the formals, and along the way throw in a few candids for good measure. Then they use those candids to promote themselves as a “photojournalist”.

But is that really photojournalism?

Not by my definition. I like how the Wedding Photojournalist Association says it:

What sets our members apart in the industry is their candid, documentary approach – a distinctly artistic vision toward wedding photography.

We offer a new perspective on wedding photography – quietly capturing the real moments as they happen for the bride and groom. It is our goal to use photography to tell the story of your wedding day, not dictate it for you.

Its How You Approach It

A candid is simply a photograph taken without the subject’s knowledge. And while a great deal of wedding images can be classified as candids, a selection of candids doesn’t mean you are a photojournalist. [Read more...]

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Wedding Photography 2012: Is A Photo Booth In Your Future?

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Add a photo booth to your 2012 weddings – go into detail about what they do, what the cost, how to promote etc

What do brides of 2012 want?

If you are targeting wedding clients, it’s the first place to start when deciding how to market your photography to newly engaged couples.

In too many cases photographers are creating packages that have been around for decades, offering services that are more than familiar, and not giving a newly engaged couple any more options than couples had 10, 20 or even 30 years ago.

And because more photographers are out there than ever, it’s a tough road to head down.

Head back in time 20 years and people were spending lavishly on weddings. But now that’s just not the case.

I found a great article that describes the new generation of wedding professionals in detail.

  • People are getting married later in life, and in many cases have a variety of commitments, such as houses and children, already in place.
  • The middle class is being eroded, meaning they don’t have the resources they once had. Borrowing against equity on a house or using credit cards is no longer the norm.
  • More players are in the industry thanks to the huge amounts of job losses over the past few years. They don’t have the experience or the investment that the pros do – but they do leave the consumer puzzled and uneducated about what high quality really means.

You simply can’t ignore what is happening in the industry. [Read more...]

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Ethics And The Never Ending Pursuit Of Wedding Photography

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Things always seem to work in trends. When one person has a question, comment or rant on a a particular subject or niche, I get the in multiples within that same niche.

That’s the way its worked lately with the niche of wedding photography, and in today’s post I thought I would share a couple of comments I’ve received in the past week on wedding photography that really opened my eyes.  Take a look:

“This past weekend we shot a wedding in Seattle, and had a girl there with a Rebel shooting. I didn’t mind, in fact, I got her involved instead of her stuffing herself in a corner and avoiding eye contact with me at all costs (because she knew what she was doing was incredibly disrespectful.) But that all changed when I jumped on to facebook to upload some sneak peeks for the bride and groom, only to find pictures already up…..and logo’d…..with the name of her photography business.

And the bride and groom signed a contract stating we would be the only photographers at the wedding.

Half of me wants to send a legalistic letter saying take em down right now, or die a legal death. The other half wants to take this poor, misguided stay-at-home part-time photographer with a kit lens to the side and explain having a Rebel doesn’t make you a business. Snapping someone’s wedding doesn’t make you a photographer. And if you’re willing to put a shot that you snuck of the first look up on facebook that you took through a window with glare and reflections….then….well….I feel bad for you.
*rant ended*” ~Stephanie

Stephanie has every reason to rant. This completely gets into a legal issue of what’s right and wrong, and how far some people are willing to go. [Read more...]

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Toot Your Own Horn: 7 Steps to Maximize Visibility After You’ve Been Published

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Guest Post by Lara White

When you see your work published, it feels incredible. It’s an amazing validation of the work you do and the impact you are having in your field. But what does it really do for your business? Do you start to fill all those empty Saturdays because you have a featured wedding in the latest wedding magazine? Sadly, no. While it is great to get published, if you want to see results, you need to take action. It’s not enough to simply have your name in tiny, tiny print next to a photo in a magazine. Most brides will not even see that. Brides are glancing through magazines for ideas mostly.

Once you’ve been published, that is only the beginning. You now have a tool that you can use to promote yourself and your business. No one else is going to do it for you.

Create a PDF

We purchased a scanner several years ago so we could scan magazine features and covers to make pdfs to share with brides and the vendor team responsible. You never know, the bride may email the pdf to all her friends and family that attended the wedding, or better yet, her unmarried friends. Hopefully vendors will do the same, or put the feature on their own websites and blogs.

Besides helping facilitate further spread of your news via the bride and the vendors, you also signal to the vendor team that not only do you get press coverage when you photograph and event, you also help them build up their press coverage by providing them with the tools they need to self-promote as well. I’ve seen other vendors proudly frame and display these editorial features like awards in their shops. [Read more...]

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3 Reasons Most Wedding Photographers Fail

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We’re one of the few photography companies that actually created a lucrative business out of catering to the wedding industry. In less than two years, we went from a general photography company to one that specialized in wedding photography, making well into the Six Figure level. Then we doubled our business. And again.

But it wasn’t always like that.

In the beginning, we did what every other wedding photographer does.

We decided to offer wedding related services. We created our first wedding brochure. And we charged and shot pretty much like every other wedding photographer out there.

Dig Deeper: Doubt To Confidence: What Was Your Magical Moment?

But very quickly something started to change.

We studied what the top names in the industry were doing. We learned from the best. And we quickly changed and grew. And we discovered 3 things that most wedding photographers did that were actually holding them back. [Read more...]

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3 Mistakes Photographers Make When Selling Wedding Albums

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If you photograph weddings, you probably have a package or two in which you offer an album. And in many cases, your package probably looks something like this:

  • Up to 5 hours of photography
  • Over 200 images on copyright-free CD
  • 20 page bridal album
  • 11×14 Portrait Print
  • Online gallery of your wedding photos to share with friends and family worldwide

The bride knows she will receive a CD full of images, and be able to view the images online, and share them with her family and friends from around the world.

She also knows she can take weeks or even months to select a few of her favorites, and have them put into a bridal album.

But it doesn’t matter what photos she selects, how they fit together, or how the will look side by side. She simply selects her favorites, and you as the photographer will force them into some type of order, and create an album from the final selection.

I’ve seen books like this.

An image of the bride walking down the aisle is set next to a formal of the bride outside at the reception. The first dance is placed along side of the couple kissing by the limo.

In other words, there is no rhyme or reason to the way the album is put together; it’s simply a hodgepodge of images thrown together to form a book of pictures.

Wedding albums aren’t meant to be a book of pictures. They are meant to be the story of the wedding day.

First Mistake: The Photographer Lets The Bride Make The Selection

If you allow a bride to choose her favorite images, she thinks from an individual level, not from a cumulative factor. She can’t see an album because it hasn’t happened yet. She doesn’t imagine how they will look together side by side; she simply chooses based on her best expressions, and her favorite moments.

When she receives the album, it will simply go on the shelf because it’s a book of pictures. It has no meaning – its just 20+ large images from her event.

As a photographer, you should be photographing a wedding to tell the story of the day. With wedding photography, photos work together in order to bring you back to the memories of the event itself. A formal out in the gardens is great, but it’s “just” a photo of the bride and groom. But when you have a series of images of the bride and groom walking through the gardens, talking with their flower girl, sneaking kisses along the way, it becomes a story – and a memory.

As a photographer, you need to think in story format. You need to take one photograph, and then another, and another – all to work together and provide an intimate look into the event itself. Its up to you to tell the story, and present the images in such a way that the bride and groom relive the wedding again and again. [Read more...]

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