The Pro Photo Business Forum

Would you like some helpful tips on how to conduct a wedding consultation? This talk is great for beginning wedding photographers looking to jump start their business, and increase the percentage of consultations which convert into clients. We discuss the physical aspects of your meeting as well as the language to be used. We also cover follow up language to be used should your consultation choose not to book your services during your initial meeting.

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Without a doubt, photography is a luxury product when it comes to wedding and portrait photography. This fact is unfortnately only magnified in a recession. So, we need to do things that will help maintain cash flow.

For those of you who sell the DVD from your sessions, here’s a simple and effective idea.

“I am so glad to hear that you love all the images from your session. You know, you have the option of purchasing a DVD of your portrait session for $xxx with files large enough to print 8x10s and smaller. And, as an added bonus, all portrait orders placed after the purchase of your DVD will be 50% off.”

Giving you clients this kind of value is an interesting approach. What is your goal for an average sale from a portrait session? Price your DVD at this price.

The client receives all their images, with the value of being able to make reproductions on their own, and you have stimulated the possibility of making additional portrait sales with the 50% off bonus offer.

There are three basic habits that you must do every day to maintain your cash flow.

1. Return all inquiries the day they come in.  Try to do this within two hours.
2. Return all phone messages.
3. Confirm all appointments for the next day.

Fail to do these simple things, and watch your cash flow have a hick-up. Complete these simple tasks daily, and watch magical opportunity fall at your feet.

Are you folks familiar with Garry Winogrand?  If so, then great – this will make perfect sense.  If not, click on the link at the end to a short story written by a gentleman who took a workshop with Garry.   So, how does vague and seemingly unconnected start have anything to do with Wedding Photography?   Good question…

While I was sitting in a workshop with a mentor of mine, Don Giannatti from Phoenix, AZ, he was telling us a story about a photographer named Garry Winogrand. What set Garry apart (among other things once you read some biographies) was that he never looked at images right away.  Most of the time, he waited a year, sometimes two, before processing the film.  His thought was that he should have no recollection of taking the image because it would cloud his vision on whether or not it was a “good” photograph.

Of course, there were always exceptions.  So, it was noted that if Garry felt particularly excited about a photograph – or just wanted to see it right away – he would develop it immediately.  However, as I understand it, the norm was that the film sat in their canisters for quite some time before ever being developed.

So, as a Wedding Photographer – you certainly cannot allow your images to sit there for a year before you look at them.  You wouldn’t have any clients.  But, what you can do is go back after that year and look through the wedding to see if anything jumps out at you.  I discovered this by accident.

We are working on creating a few new sample albums for our studio – and one in particular was from a Wedding in June 2009.  We had, for some reason, never made a sample album from it.  We had a few favorites from that wedding that we had used in marketing and such, but I realized that I was looking at the images in an entirely different way because it had been a year since I had seen them.

What I realized was that as my tastes changed, and I had another year of education, photography, and experience behind me – I was able to see things in the photos that I hadn’t seen before.  So, I encourage you to go back through your weddings – with a more experienced eye than you had before.  Find some new photos – you can potentially enhance your portfolio without having to do too much work.

Stay tuned to the Pro Photo Business Forum – next week I’ll be posting a workflow article on keeping track of your favorite images that way they’re easily at hand for promotional purposes.

Thanks everyone for reading – below are some links referenced in the article.

A story about Garry Winogrand
Lighting Essentials by Don Giannatti

At the very VERY basic level of professional photography, we must provide “photos that don’t suck.” From there we can move to good photos, then great photos, then ground-breaking earth-shattering photos. But first, we must make sure that EACH photo we provide doesn’t suck.

For example, I’ve recently had several weddings/receptions held in venues with high, dark ceilings. It’s relatively easy to take great pictures when the venue is conducisve to photography, but more of a challenge when conditions aren’t great. So, I have adopted the following mantra: “Grainy” is acceptable, “blurry” is not. Direct-flash is acceptable, washed-out is not.

Now don’t get me wrong, I absolutely do NOT want to provide my clients with grainy photos, and I want to use lighting techniques that make folks say “wow.” I want every shot to be technically sound as well as artistic. But you could spend half a reception trying to set up and balance lights without really helping yourself. At the very VERY least you have got to end the evening with a card full of DECENT shots. If the client complains about high ISO or direct flash, you can explain the situation. How will you explain hundreds of blurry or severely underexposed shots? It may not be perfect, but get the shot.

Bryan Lindsey, Houston Wedding Photographer

Today’s tip is right out of my eBook “Actions You Can Take To Promote and Protect Your Studio“.

Format all of your compact flash cards before you leave your studio for a wedding.

Imagine you are photographing a wedding and it is late in the evening. You realize that the card you are shooting on is now full and needs to be switched out with another card. So you reach into your camera bag and pull out another Compact Flash card. You check to see if there are any images on the card, only to find the card is filled with images that you shot yesterday during a family portrait session. You know you have downloaded the family portraits already, and it is safe to erase them. You erase the card to make room for the images you are about to shoot.

It turns out, that you actually used that card for both the family portrait session AND earlier in the evening during the ceremony. Because you didn’t look through all the images on the card, you didn’t see the images you took earlier that evening. You just erased hundreds of images from your client’s wedding!

Make sure all of the memory cards you take to a wedding have been formatted before you leave for your wedding.

Add it to your checklist. Never erase a memory card at a wedding.

By Aric C. Hoek, owner and creator of Ten Houston Wedding Photographers

How can you use your blog to help sell more wedding photography? How often should you be blogging, and what should you be blogging about? How can blogging help you connect with the clients that are looking for your services right now?

Would you rather listen to this teleseminar on your iPod?

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As a wedding photographer, have you asked how much to charge for your services? Do you find yourself constantly changing your prices to off set a dry spell? Does your business feel like a sputtering car, busy one day and then dead the next?

If you have answered yes to any of theses questions, then you will want to listen to this lecture on Cash Flow.

Would you rather listen to this teleseminar on your iPod?

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Each week the PPBF gives its readers a new challenge to it’s readers designed to help their studios grow. Sometimes the assignment involves shooting, and sometimes the assignment calls for a particular action to be taken.

This Weeks Challenge:
Fill Flash

Have you ever looked at someone’s outdoor photographs and the face was so dark you couldn’t tell who it was? And don’t you just hate those “raccoon eyes” portraits? You know what I mean; the ones with big circles of shadow under your subject’s eyes?

This can really be a problem with outdoor portraits made with the sun shining behind your subject, directly toward the camera. If you photograph your subject and didn’t use a flash, chances are the subject’s face was too dark or had harsh shadows under the eyes.

You can really increase the quality of your photography with the right amount of fill flash. Fill flash will help to resolve this problem for you. This weeks assignment; use flash to illuminate your backlit subject.

The Process:

1. Complete the assignment and place the results on your own blog, linking back to the challenge post.
2. Post a comment on this blog entry that you have completed the assignment with a link back to your blog entry.   A link will be posted at the bottom of the assignment pointing back to your blog entry, thus creating a reciprocal link and helping with your SEO.
3. The winner of the assignment will be posted in the following weeks assignment.

If you wish, you can place the following graphic above in your blog post to show your readers your participation in the weekly challenge.

Links to completed challenges:
Houston Wedding Photographer, Aric C. Hoek of Solaris Studios has completed his challenge.
Professional Photographer Leanne Wildermuth – Artist By Nature has completed the challenge.