Oh, joy of joys, it’s wedding season. Or at least it is where I live.
This will be the 7th year I’ve photographed weddings. I hear that’s a little longer than most, so I guess I’ve beat the odds. Somewhat.
I’ve wrestled with whether or not to keep weddings on my menu and I hear a lot of you are dealing with the same issue.
I enjoy weddings, I love them! Weddings are happy and everyone’s dressed up and pretty and in a good mood. There’s even free food if I play my cards right.
BUT…
I’m a one-woman show and an all day 12+ hour wedding is something that is very difficult for me. Oh, I can do it, no problem, but for two days afterwards, I just wanna lay down and die. It’s like running a marathon. Well, I’ve never run a marathon, but I bet those people wanna lay down and die, too.
I do have Mr. Wootness, who comes along to haul gear, and has 2nd shot from balconies during church ceremonies, but for the most part, I like to retain creative control over the images and don’t plan on hiring other photographers to shoot with/for me. The burden is all mine, so to speak. So, large and long weddings have become an issue for me.
Last year I made the decision to eliminate weddings. Within a week I had two calls from brides that were having very small weddings and only required a short length of shooting time.
Now, normally, this is the kind of potential client that wedding photographers tend to loath hearing from. For us, a wedding is a wedding is a wedding. I can only book one wedding per day. Some brides just don’t seem to “get” that and don’t understand that their “we’re just having a small wedding, ” or “we only need a few pics” or “we only need to hire you for an hour” negotiation attempts are insulting and impossible.
Brides, perk up your ears here: Please don’t ask us to book an entire day that we have already valued at being worth XX number of dollars for anything less than XX number of dollars. Yes, we may only have to work an hour or two or three for you, but we can’t use what’s left of the rest of the day to book any other wedding and recoup any income we have lost through negotiating with you. If we don’t have a “My Wedding’s So Small I’m Not Even Having a Cake!” package, don’t ask for one. M,kay?
So, anyway…
I had two brides with a need for photography for a length of time that wouldn’t actually render me useless the next day. What had before been impossible, now looked to be very possible. As an experiment, I booked both weddings to see how things went. Each bride received “up to 3 hours of wedding coverage” that included one hour of portraits with the bride and groom before-hand, the ceremony, and one hour of family portraits/formals etc afterwards.
Easy, peasy. One was a formal church ceremony and the other was held at a local vineyard. Both were lovely days, lovely brides, and the work load was reduced as well as the price.
This worked for me. It worked QUITE WELL.
For me.
Now bear in mind that I am not primarily a wedding photographer. The bulk of my income is from studio photography. I do not book every weekend with weddings, in fact, I limit them to twice per month. My studio is closed on the weekends and I prefer to have as much of those to myself as possible.
Instead of working for weddings, I have made weddings work for me.
I did a time study of those two weddings and figured a total of 15-20 hours of work for each one, so I must bear that in mind while formulating my packages and pricing, but overall, I think I’ve come up with a way that I can provide a niche photography service at a price point that makes both the bride and I happy. Yes, my prices may be as low as some of the newer photographers in town, but brides that would normally hire them, balk at the fact that I will not photograph their reception or work for longer than 3 hours, so I’m not attracting that market.
So here’s my point: If you’re thinking about ditching weddings for whatever reason, think of a way that you can still do them, but with eliminating the reason you find them objectionable. If you do it well, don’t quit, just modify your methods.
This, in the Quality* world, is called a “Root Cause Analysis.” You dig and dig and dig until you find THE EXACT thing that is causing the issues, and then you correct it, so that you eliminate the problem that has been occurring.
For example (simplified for you non-geeks):
Problem: Weddings physically drain me.
Root cause: Length of weddings. Events lasting 6 hours or less are much less likely to cause physical recovery issues.
Solution: Reduce wedding coverage to 6 hours or less.
BAM!
*Christine worked for twelve years as a quality specialist for an ISO 9000 certified manufacturing facility. She was a Certified Quality Auditor through the American Society for Quality, and still holds the Certified Quality Improvement Associate certification.