As I mentioned in last week’s tip, the slower winter months are a great time to get the different aspects of your business in good order for the upcoming wedding season. This week’s tip is to make sure the literature for your business is accurate and up to date. I would not only include brochures, business cards, pamphlets, contracts, and postcards in this category, but also the wording on your website or blog as well. Here are some important things to look for when looking over your materials:
Here in Minnesota, the wedding season slows down quite a bit this time of year. Why? Let’s just say I woke up to -18 F this morning and leave it at that. Now is a perfect time for those of us working in “cooler” locations to take a moment to wrap up any loose ends from 2008 and get refreshed for the 2009 wedding season. I suppose “refresh” could refer to mind and body but I’m mostly talking about your business literature and images in this case. Let’s focus on the latter for this week’s tip.
Start sifting those “Wow!” shot gems out of the hundreds, thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of images you and your staff snapped off last year. “What do I do if I have like 250 great shots picked out?” Well then I would suggest going into your closet, pull out your “World’s Most Awesome Photographer” T-shirt, put it on, pat yourself on the back and get your butt back in front of your computer ‘cause you’ve got more editing down to do! Be tough on yourself. Pick out what you think are your ten to twenty best “Wow!” shots from 2008. Much like Kevin Kubota touched on in PPS Episode #47, select the images that best represent the kind of shots you truly enjoy doing and want to do more of. Choose the images that best define you.
As the wedding photographer, we tend to be one of the first ones to arrive at the church or other such ceremony locations the morning of the wedding. This first usually involves finding the one unlocked door to get into the building followed by walking into a dark and very quiet sanctuary. This can be both refreshing and creepy at the same time. One of the advantages of being one of the first ones to arrive at the church is that you get your pick of the best locations to shoot from.
Do you find yourself falling back on the same outdoor location to shoot your engagement sessions? Even worse, do you do the same two poses on the same boring backdrops in your studio? Do all of your engagement sessions closely resemble one another? One of the easiest ways to break out of this rut is to shoot a couple’s engagement session at the location they got engaged at. Not only is it a new location for you, these images will mean so much more to your clients.
Now it’s true some of the locations your clients got engaged at won’t be reasonable to travel to for a quick photo session. If that’s the case, why not suggest doing the session at the place they first met? If all else fails, find out what the couple’s interests are and go from there. What do they like to do in their spare time? Do they have any similar hobbies? Say they let on that they love riding bikes together around a particular lake or park. Perhaps they frequent the same coffee shop and sit at the very same table every Saturday afternoon. Maybe you discover the couple is really big into taxidermy…awkward. Hey, I never said you wouldn’t end up in some pretty weird places, just not your “safe & comfy” locations you tend to favor!
Dropping this tip a little late today but happy W.T.W. everybody! With it being Earth Day yesterday, I thought I’d involve the object that swings us around once a year into this weeks tip. That’s right the Sun. Which, as the They Might Be Giants song goes, is “a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furness,” and obviously very important to us “light writers.” More specifically, when it sets.
