So you want to be a wedding photographer. You’ve spent £50,000 on every gadget known to man, and have spent 20 hours per day for the last few years on every anorak forum on the entire internet. What do you do next? Well our next lesson will cover this vital next step towards a career making big money.
Okay, you have to get a portfolio of amazing images together to wow prospective brides and grooms, but your photography is not good. Good enough to photograph the most important day in a couple’s lives, but not really good enough to actually show anyone, unless they are family, or other geeks who will be impressed by the f45 aperture or the HDR effects.
Well, there are a few ways to do this. We will cover some of them here.
Firstly, you could just wait until your photography ability is the right standard to do the job, then see if you can get some small weddings of family and close friends. Small intimate, low budget weddings, where the expectation levels aren’t so high. The pressure is less, and you have more time. Once you feel you are capable of taking on THE MOST IMPORTANT DAY IN SOMEBODY’S LIFE you can start to aim for slightly bigger weddings.
Another way is to hire some models, and shoot some images, but ALWAYS point out wherever the images are shown that this is NOT a real wedding. Otherwise you are fraudulently showing people work that wasn’t under normal wedding constraints.
Another option is to attend some workshops, but usually you are not allowed to show the images, as someone else did the difficult part for you. IF the person running the workshop has given permission to show them, you should ALWAYS indicate on any images used, that they were shot under supervision, using models.
Or, you could get a job working in a hotel, or join a band, maybe start a catering business or anything wedding related, that will get you at the weddings. Bring your camera along, and without asking the photographers permission, or the couple, take some pictures of the reception and put them on your website. Nobody will know you never actually did the wedding, and chances are the official photographer won’t even know you have used them. They probably won’t be cheeky enough to ask you to remove them, because after all, you own the copyright, despite whatever they have in their contract. Then you need to display these images, get some paisley pattern pyjamas, and hey presto you are an official bona fide PJ wedding photographer and ready to take bookings. The bookings will roll in, because you have a clever marketing trick of being cheap as chips. The fact that there is no marketplace for your business as it is already oversaturated should not put you off, as you are ‘different’. Nobody else is doing HDR shots of the reception, and nobody has thought of the clever idea of not even being at the wedding. You cannot fail. If it all goes tits up and people are unhappy, too bad as you still have the other job anyway. Seemples.
Lesson 35 “The right tripod for PJ photography” will be online next week.
