wedding photography Archives - Behind the Shutter

How to Get New Clients From Wedding Vendors

As a wedding photographer, you should be filling your calendar with free leads from fellow vendors. I mean, aren’t they grateful? Haven’t they seen all the amazing photos on your blog? Without your images, no one beyond the guest list would ever see the flowers, fashion and decor they create—at least not in the appealing and professional way you photograph them. If you want to get on a wedding planner’s good side, see your name on a venue’s referral list or even become the go-to personal photographer for wedding vendors everywhere, consider the following tips.

5 Tips for Updating Your Social Media Strategy

As a wedding photographer, social media is one of the strongest marketing and branding tools at our disposal. It’s also the most time-consuming task, taking us away from our passion of running our own photography business. It’s the end of engagement season, so marketing is a top priority for wedding photography businesses. Social media is where most newly engaged couples hang out digitally these days, but that’s not the only way to get in front of them. How can you make sure you’re doing your best job at marketing when everything keeps changing?

Crafting the Perfect Client Experience

The customer experience is made up of many different parts. The most basic thing to understand is that it is the totality of all of your client’s interactions with your brand, starting from the moment they find you and visit your website, to the final delivery of their album. If you are a portrait photographer, those processes can be fairly quick, but wedding photographers will likely be with their clients for a year or more. Throughout that entire process, there are many different interactions that clients will have with your brand. One hiccup in any of those processes can affect the overall client experience and cost you future revenue.

LGBT Weddings: Being a Relevant Photographer in a Modern Age

I am frequently asked if the LGBT market is big enough to make it worth pursuing. Absolutely. Tapping into this market is a whole new obstacle. LGBT couples are unlikely to contact a photographer simply because they like our work. They need to feel secure that your business is a safe place. This doesn’t mean you have to know everything about LGBT couples or their history. It means only that they know you are someone who desires their business, free of judgment.

Building Mutually Beneficial Vendor Relationships

Recently I was looking at where my wedding referrals were coming from when I noticed that a venue I used to shoot at several times a year had completely fallen off my radar. We had not shot a wedding there in almost five years. How could that be? We picked up the phone, scheduled a meeting with their team and did something about it. Below is how we went from an afterthought to front-runner—and rebuilt a relationship and our portfolio along the way.

The Pros and Cons of Becoming a Wedding Photographer

So you think you want to become a wedding photographer? Be careful what you wish for. Yes, it’s true what they say: A career in wedding photography can be quite lucrative. For my wife Eileen and I (The Blumes), our decade-long career has allowed us to create a life of travel and comfort we never imagined. On the other hand, the vast majority of photographers who approach weddings as a golden goose get bitten, and there’s good reason for the burnout and high failure rates. This job isn’t for the faint of heart.

The Wedding Photographer’s Gear Guide: 2018 Edition

Photographers are well known for investing money in their toys. In fact, I would be willing to bet that many of us got started on this career path after realizing the cost of their new toys, and that we needed to charge people for pictures in order to just afford them. I am no exception to that. I love cameras, lights and new technology. We have so many options to choose from, but many that we crave are unnecessary. How do you choose the best tools to purchase? In this article, I break down my recommendations.

6 Tips for Rocking Your Next Album Design

If you’re not doing albums, shame on you. Not only is it a disservice to your lifestyle and family income, but it’s a disservice to your clients. Aside from the money to be made on albums, memories are best preserved in a tangible, clean format that’s easy to flip through. It’s your job to preserve those memories as best you can, and albums are an excellent way to do it. Whether you’re a beginner or a pro, here are six tips for making a great album.

The Value of Relationships in the Photography Business

Photography is an incredible hobby and profession. We get to visit amazing places, document memories for people, create art and even travel all over the world. But the business side is a different story. To finance this amazing hobby and turn it into a living, we have to charge livable wages.

Capturing Emotion on a Wedding Day

I don't want to just be a portrait photographer who happens to be at a wedding. I want to be a storyteller who captures the essence of people to tell the story of who they are in this time of their lives in an emotionally impactful way. Only recently have I evolved my approach from just finding the perfect light and artistic, beautiful compositions; now I find or create environments where authentic moments can take place. Through research and practice, I have developed a handful of methods to achieve emotional impact in my work.

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