AboutJohn Wilson Expertise Over 25 years specializing exclusively in professional wedding photography. I can answer most questions relating directly to wedding photography concerning the business, film, digital, traditional & digital labs, marketing, effects, pricing & packaging, shooting outdoors and in-studio with multiple flash, color management and creating magazine style wedding albums. I can't answer questions regarding other fields of photography. I am a full-time self-employed pro wedding photographer.
Experience About 25 years experience photographing weddings professionally. Past 3 years shooting digital exclusively.
Education/Credentials Going to photography seminars and reading all the wedding photography books I can find then applying the techniques and new styles I've learned with each wedding. You always need to grow and learn to keep up in this field. With each new wedding you photograph, you must challenge yourself to do better work than your previous wedding. You must always have the goal of making the wedding photographs for a bride & groom be the best photographs they have seen of any wedding.
Expert: John Wilson Date: 6/22/2008 Subject: Promoting Home Based Wedding Photography Business
Question Greetings John,
I'm wanting to start a home based photography business. I've been checking out your website and would like to ask a few questions. Do you have a blog? Why or why not? What are the pros and cons of posting your prices and pros and cons of publishing your current bookings on your website? What equipment do you prefer? Do you recommend participation in bridal shows? In my area there are a great deal of home based photographers and quiet a few established commercial studio photographers, what can I do to better compete against them? Any other suggestions would be very welcome. Thank you for your time.
Answer Hello David,
Thank you for your photography questions.
I do not have a blog. While blogs are all the rage in the marketing community, the fact is a blog is just another marketing tool which may or may not do anything for your business. I know of a vast number of photographers who are already too busy to properly keep their blogs updated. I'm one of them. Bottom line is this, if your photography sucks and is over-priced, it doesn't matter if you have the most hit blog on earth and it is the prettiest and bores everyone out of their minds as you talk about yourself and your life - you will NOT get any business. End of story. Simply because your photography sucks and it is over-priced. Now, when you offer GREAT photography that is fairly priced people appreciate you and they will contact you. If they choose to hire you, during the process of working with you there will be genuine interaction and getting to know each other - in the REAL way all of us human beings get to know each other. Blogs - you can't believe everything you read.
Posting your prices on your website helps to keep competitors from giving out false information about you. (I have had many brides come to me and tell me about being given false info about me and my services by competitors - so don't think it doesn't happen). Posting your prices helps to make sure potential customers know first hand if your services are in their budget. However, I don't like to give out an exact figure for everything I offer so more people will make an appointment with me for a consultation - which gives me the opportunity to sell our services in person - which in fact results in more bookings.
I use to post our bookings on our website so brides would know whether or not they should even spend time looking at my Galleries and contacting me. It is also a waste of my time to have to be answering the phone for brides whose wedding date I already have booked. I also use to like posting our bookings just to show that we really are booked well. Many competitors simply want people to believe they are heavily booked - just to create the illusion they are "in demand" photographers. This technique also creates the illusion that their prices must be fair since they are supposedly so well booked.
We have stopped posting our bookings on our website for several other more important reasons. First, I'm personally just tired of all the hits our website gets from competitors just wanting to see if someone who met with them turned around and hired me instead. I know of one photographer who knows he has lost a lot of weddings to me and he is known for talking negatively about me to wedding vendors. Also when a lot of aspiring photographers see our bookings, they want to go professional and for various reasons, they are out of business in a year or so. But during that time, they cut prices and left unhappy brides with bad photography and those of us who are established professionals with less bookings. We also don't post our bookings now because we have staff photographers. So we can book several weddings the same day. (But each photographer only shoots ONE wedding per day). So another reason for not posting our bookings is the time it would take to communicate availability on certain dates etc, for a number of photographers. It's now faster just to take the phone calls.
We prefer Canon equipment. For price, ease of use, features etc., the Canon 5D is the best camera for shooting weddings at this time.
I do recommend participation just once a year in the biggest and closest bridal show. As long as you do GREAT wedding photography and it is FAIRLY priced and you show it to HUNDREDS of brides ready to book their photographer, you should get more work than you can handle.
As I visit the websites of many other photographers, I see work which is technically incompetent/inferior but those people think they have the right to charge $4,000 and more for their services. Unbelievable! These are some of the same people who want you to believe they have all kinds of bookings. This in turn, attracts other incompetent and greedy people who now want to become photographers and charge outrageously high prices. All those people feed on unsuspecting consumers who already have an idea that professional wedding photography is going to be expensive. So those consumers pay. They end up with photography packages that are no better, or actually inferior to the work which I provide for almost half the price.
What is a fair price? If you want to do wedding photography full-time and be able to pay yourself a fair salary for your time, talent, labor, education, training, medical, dental, vision, retirement, advertising expenses, liability insurance, two weeks paid vacation per year, photo equipment maintenance, computer hardware maintenance, software maintenance and a few others - you have to have the talent to be able to net around $2500 to $3000 per wedding IF you book around 30 weddings per year. I don't recommend shooting more than 30 weddings per year since most people can easily get burned out. So you might want to consider your pricing based on 30 weddings per year. At first, you won't be able to charge enough. But if you believe that in a relatively short time you will be able to demand the prices necessary to go full-time with 30 weddings per year - than go for it. It is also a very rewarding career not just financially, but is often, for me, very emotionally satisfying when I see happy mothers and brides thrilled with the wedding photographs. Knowing their weddings albums will become family heirlooms for generations is also very satisfying to me.
Well, wedding photography should be left to those of us who are dedicated and committed to providing GREAT photography backed by great customer service provided at fair market prices. Professional wedding photography is really HARD WORK among those of us who strive to be creative, fair and deliver the highest quality products. It takes a LOT OF TIME to achieve all the results of a professionally ran business which is successful. If you are willing to EARN your pay as a photographer, you will become successful. Wish you all the best.
