Dumb tricks that get photographers hired.

THIS IS AN ENGAGEMENT SESSION I DID IN DOWNTOWN PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND WITH AN UPCOMING WEDDING. THE ENGAGEMENT SESSION IS A REALLY GREAT TIME TO HANG WITH THE BRIDAL COUPLE.

So this will be a quick little blog. It’s poking at some practices that we (not me) as photographers sometimes do to bait potential customers. I’m just listing a few that you might see at a bridal show, online or a face to face meeting. This also will touch a little bit on style of photography as well (some tricks that I do employ to a degree). If you’re a photographer, bride or groom then you may agree or disagree. Feel free to comment at the bottom. This is really only my insight from over ten years of shooting weddings and developing my approach. This is my opinion and of course there are many roads to Florida (my analogy I most often use). I know a photographer, lets make up a fictional name and call him Bill G. He would get soo mad whenever he saw anyone doing photography different than he did it, it wasn't the proper way he would always mutter. This photographer only happens to shoot a few events a year now while I have shoots a few times a week. Anyways.. all roads eventually lead to Florida. Every photographer has a different method and this is only to highlight what some of the masses do when they’re not trying to stand out.

Free engagement shoot with all new bookings! Okay, I always offer an engagement shoot with every wedding, that’t only normal to me because i’m going to be spending the entire day with you and… I want to know that you’re both semi-normal and that we somewhat get along and like each other. The engagement shoot is also a great time to run through poses, get a few nice photos for save the dates.

So back to how this works at a bridal show. Everyone is going to give this away and they’re going to put a “value” on it or an exact price or possibly use the word bargain along with this. The engagement shoot costs the photographer nothing but his time and when you bundle up your fee for the wedding day along with any tangibles (flash drives, albums), then a little extra time on the front end isn’t a big deal. Every photographer is going to include this, you might have to poke and prod a bit, but get it. But never think that the photographer is some sort of saint for offering this.

Positive side of things, take the engagement shoot with the photographer you want to book your wedding with, it’s a good trial to see how you vibe with each other. Even if in the end they charge you for it as extra it’s still a small investment to know that your wedding photos are going to be what you want.

Dates are filling up fast, better book with me now. This may be true. I had to turn away almost forty brides last year because I can only shoot one wedding at a time. If you need a few days or a week to mull things over then that’s totally reasonable and responsible. There are popular dates out there that happen every year. Typically i’ll have one or two dates that people are pining after every year, but only those who book early get it. If someones offering a one day deal only then pass on it. This is your wedding and if your photographer can’t wait a day or week to book you then maybe they don;’t have that much business to begin with or too much business to properly accommodate you.

Free album with all 2020 bookings, an eight hundred dollar value!!! OMG, you better book right now, that’s a killer deal. Wait! There’s the internet, With absolute certainty I know that any of my brides can find a decent album for two hundred dollars. I also know that once I send them an album they could do a little research and figure out who I use or… just ask me directly. When I book a wedding I do the albums at cost, give or take twenty dollars, this means that I have no incentive to up-sell you on getting one. It’s not that I don’t want you to have an album, in fact I do. I just don’t want to charge you eight hundred dollars or more for one and lose a wedding over a book, I also don’t want you to say “we aren’t interested in an album” and all of a sudden i’m taking eight hundred dollars off the total. So for me it’s always easier to just be super transparent on this. I would much rather charge for what matters, the photography. I’m putting value on my time and skill, not the material things. You’re paying for someone to show up, not mess up and deliver some amazing images.

Quick photo I had of an album that I had made for around two hundred and fifty dollars. fifty pages and glass cover.

To be completely transparent and honest I will say that there are eight hundred dollar albums and northward out there. Some of them are amazing companies that put out a quality product. I have friends that sell using these beautiful albums and that’s great. I’m only warning you about people that are pushing a free album in attempt to make you “Buy now now now!”. A great salesmen is going to present, not pressure. A traditional mark up on products is three hundred percent of their original cost if not more. It’s much easier for me not to have to explain the price increase if someone ever tracks down where I get my albums, so I do it at cost.

So if you’re a photographer you may have a problem with this next part. Multiple packages and A la cart pricing. So this allows photographers to move things around and still keep the price in their favor. This also can add to some confusion when trying to figure out the price. Sure, I can add this, let me give you a deal on this other thing or this is going to cost more because it’s not bundled with this, so you want this but not this other thing, or that’s an additional charge because of…

It’s too much to shift all these tiny pieces around all the time. I always want to make sure you get a good deal so I just find out what you’re looking for and give you. price on that, putting the majority of the fee on photography, not the tangibles or things that don’t cost me anything. A la cart pricing “can” be a way to steer you back to the packages. Once you add up everything that you want you realize that the price is more than the package. So now you’re considering the packages again and now you’re back to shifting things around. Again, going to play myself up again. I only offer one package so that I can just take away whatever brides aren’t interested in vs. shifting packages around or slowly building up the bill.

Gratuitous photo of myself.

Additional photographer, more coverage. Okay. This is true to a degree. You end up with more photos, more people in more places. My goal is never to up-sell you on what you may not need. If you’re getting ready near each other somewhat or if you have under a hundred and fifty guests then it’s pretty easy for me to accommodate you. Most brides that come to me are pretty educated on wedding stuff by the time they get to me and I know they’ve researched me and my work, so I’ll never want to push something on them that they already have an inkling that they don’t need. Your photographer should be pretty up front and either say yes or no, not yes and yes to a second shooter (our term). If you want photos of you walking down the isle from front and back then you’ll want a second shooter. If you want photos fo your grooms face as you walk down the isle and you walking down the isle, you don’t need a second shooter. If you’re both getting ready at a hotel and you want coverage of the both of you then you don’t need a second shooter. If you’re getting ready four towns away from each other and want coverage of the both of you… you may want a second photographer.

When I use a second shooter (photographer) I usually charge whatever money i’ll actually be giving them. They have an easy job, they show up, have fun, shoot and eventually leave sans memory card. I’m only using a portion of their photos in the end, we all have pretty high standards when it comes to photos and we’re all very picky as photographers. Be weary of any photographer pushing services that you don’t think you need on you. Do your research on this subject, ask Jeeves (old reference).

I couldn’t find any of my photos with crazy filters on them, so I’m using a photo of a wonderful meal I had, yes I have a cell phone case with my logo on it. I’m branded up.

Here’s what else grinds my gears, yes I went there. Everyone calling their photography their style or vision when… they’re just using a downloaded preset (sometimes they even pay for these) on every single photo or desaturating the photos. I’m not going to say I don’t like these photos, some of them are great. I love the look but, yes there’s a but. Someday in the future when you want to see what that moment actually looked like without grain and desaturated reds and oranges and way to much work on highlights and shadows you won’t be able to. Because that filter is there for life. What I like to do is capture the actual colors, correct color temperature and exposure. It takes seconds to throw a filter on, but I don’t think I could ever call it my “style”. I’ve wrote a bunch more about it here.

So here’s what i’m trying to get across, look at their skill as a photographer. Do you like the way they frame a photo, is the exposure at least correct. Take a look at their whole portfolio, not just weddings. See their range and skill as a photographer because a wedding is essentially a marathon of photography. We’re constantly pushed and pulled throughout the day to get operate in any conditions, bad lighting, difficult people and situations, hot and cold and also our gear matters. I’m getting away from my point but basically if a photographer is calling his desaturated photos his style and trying to play up how artistic he is… take a second look. If he’s saying he’s a natural light photographer.. run! One more warning sign to look for is selective color, thats when a photographer turns down all the colors except for one. This makes everything black and white except for those red roses, making it an iconic photo. This is gimmicky, simple and a stupid trick that people can now do on their cell phones… so why would a wedding photographer be doing this? Steer away from white vignetting as well, that’s a huge warning sign that your photographer is behind the times in style.

So this is a shot THAT A NATURAL LIGHT PHOTOGRAPHER COULDN’T GET. THIS WAS SHOT WITH TWO OFF CAMERA FLASHES. ONE FLASH BEHIND THEM ON A SNOOT SO THAT THE FLASH DIDN’T SPILL OUT ONTO THE BRANCHES OF THE TREE AND THE SECOND LIGHT BEING HELD BY ANOTHER PHOTOGRAPHER WITH A TIGHT GRID TO FOCUS THE MAJORITY OF THE LIGHT ON THEM.

A natural light photographer is a scary thing for a wedding. There’s only so many hours of the day that are bright during a wedding. Eventually it gets dark and then what? If someone’s mastered how to take photos in daylight, that’s great. But you’re going to want your entire wedding covered and if they can’t navigate around a flash and some interesting light then you may want to look elsewhere. Again, they’ll have some amazing photos and they may be a talented photographer but please for wedding sake make sure your photographer uses lights! Imagine if you bought cabinets for your kitchen and the cabinet maker told you that he can only put the hinges on the outside of the cabinet and not inside because that’s not his style. I love a good analogy.

Depth of field, making something sharp and something pretty damn smooth. At a quick glance you already know this wasn’t taken with a cell phone, so automatically it’s already leaning towards the only conclusion you could make, a professional photographer took this with a professional camera.

Here’s another trick that I do employ. Shooting at a very low depth of field. This means whatever i’m focused on is sharp and the rest is out of focus. It does make for a pleasing photo. I also know that regardless of the situation when I use this little trick that whoever sees the photo regardless of proper assessment sees a professional image. They know that a good camera or good lens is somewhere in the equation and whoever can afford this good lens or camera must be a professional photographer. Quick example, lets say I tattoo’d someone and it didn’t look half bad and I show off that tattoo. To those of you who don’t know, I might be a professional tattoo artist, but look at the rest of my work and realize that maybe… not so much. So again, look at someones portfolio, if that’s their style, everything shot in low depth of field, then maybe pass. It’s a simple trick that I do use, but only when it’s called for. These lenses are primarily used to work in extremely low light, not just for a blurring (bokeh) effect.

So here’s an example of my Canon 200mm 1.8 lens. The reason this looks unique is because of the size of this lens and also the hefty price tag. This isn’t a lens you can pick up in your local best buy.

So i’m going to admit to something horrible. I use my gear to get brides and grooms. I have some cool lenses. I have a fisheye lens that is pretty much useless except for some random cool photos here or there. It’s sometimes fun to use during a wedding reception or sometimes in tight spaces but mostly useless. I also have a two hundred millimeter lens that is no longer produced that can shoot at an incredibly low depth of field which produces a spectacularly amazing image that looks like non other. I have many others which I could list. I use these lenses to get new business sometimes because I know the common person will see the image and be wowed. But the main thing I want to point out is that I can still use the most basic, boring, cheap lens to get an amazing image regardless of depth of field or any other curiosity the lens may entail.

So to round this out, investigate your photographer, get to know them. Don’t go with a photographer because they’re rolling back the price quickly or throwing in a freebie as soon as you blink or move your chair in the meeting. Make sure you love their work, that they don’t use car salesmen terms in regards to your wedding package. If you see the word budget, value or deal then calmly and quietly get up and say that you have to make a quick phone call and get out of there. Just like then you buy a house, car or anything of value, research, know the terms, know the differences between photographers and make a very educated choice on who you go with.

Click here to see some of my photography or call me at 508-471-0069 to ask me any questions you might have.

Wedding workflow

So this post is purely for photographers, maybe geared more towards wedding photographers perhaps. This is not going to be a blog where I incorporate lots of visual aids, i'm not a Buzzfeed article. If you know Lightroom or have just started using it then you will be able to follow along. If you're a bride or groom and don't know what Lightroom is then this probably isn't for you.

     So what I concentrate on is keeping things simple. It can be very easy to misplace a photo if you don't know what you're doing in Lightroom. You can add a filter that doesn't show certain types of flagged photos or you might not have photos from 2016 or 2015 included and miss a photo that you needed asap. Okay, so i'll go through everything from the beginning.

     So first off, any of my edits have usually been thirty seconds or less on a photo. I'm working with four thousand photos when shooting a wedding and between sorting, processing and delivering I have gotten pretty efficient. I'm mentioning this because I want you to understand that I don't treat my catalog like a golden goose. If my catalog becomes corrupt or has an issue and I have to restart from scratch, it won't be the end of the world. I may lose all of my edits but i'll always have my photos which is the most important part.  

     I sort my photos by YEAR, MONTH, DATE. If I need to get photos of a race from two years ago all I have to do is search my calendar on my computer or phone for RACE. Once I have the date I just look through my catalog for these photos.   

     I do have two catalogs, one on each computer. My main computer is used for managing storage between two eight terabyte external hard drives. This catalog has everything from 2007 to 2017. I'm currently teetering around five and a half terabytes but it goes up and down each year depending on how harshly I treat my past work which i'll explain more about in the next paragraph. The second catalog I have is on my MacBook Retina, this is my workhorse. It's fully loaded and meant for travel and speed. I'm able to take all my wedding photos and work through them non stop without being confined to my office or apartment. My favorite place to work is actually Starbucks. So this catalog of photos and edits on my MacBook is stored on a Lacie Thunderbolt hard drive. I'll talk more about what I do with these photos later in this blog.

     Another benefit of having everything in one catalog is access. You can keep doing triage on your photos, sorting through them and pulling out the bad photos. When years go by and you get better at photography you will be better equipped to judge your past work more critically. Every year I spend a few weeks to go back through my old photos and trim out the chum. God forbid I expire before i'm suppose to and someone is charged with sorting through my photos and see all my bad photos (I mean bad composition, blurry and other issues). I've heard other photographers talk about how inexpensive storage is, it's not trust me. I upgrade my hard drives every year due to concerns of proper backups. Hard drives fail so you should regularly upgrade. I use my hard drives pretty heavily as well. If I have a bride or past client that wants photos from their shoot I don't want to give them any bad photos. If you even show a client a bad photo there is a chance they may think it's great. Here's what happens when you show that bad photo, they say it looks great and you know it doesn't. They start showing that bad photo and telling everyone who took that photo. So I really only want my good photos out there. If it's something important then yes, save the photos, no biggie. But for me I don't want to have sixteen terabytes of good photos mixed with bad photos.

           Sorting, yes, no. It's that simple. Yes to a photo, it's good and you like it and want to share it and you want people to know it's on of your photos and i've used too many ands in this sentence. No means that you don't like the photo, it didn't come out good, bad composition, un-saveable, blurry, unflattering. When you get rid of a photo you're also saving the environment. You're also saving your wallet from having to get a bigger hard drive prematurely. So for those of you not in the know... P is for Pick or YES, X is not Reject or NO. While in the library module you have to make sure Auto Advance is clicked on under the Photo menu at the top. Okay, so now that we have all the photos and we're selecting P or X and working through the photos we realize it may not be going as fasts you would like it. This can be for two different reasons. You have to make sure all standard previews were built for the photos. Otherwise you will have to wait a second for the photo to render each time you click through the photos. Control A and then Library menu, Previews, Build Standard Size previews. Now wait and once it's finished restart your sorting process. Another reason the photos may be going slower as you pick through them is you're in the DEVELOP module. You will be able to sort while in this module but it will be a little bit slower.  

     The best part about sorting with P and X is you can do it with one hand. The more you do it the faster you'll get with it. I promise once you've done it with a half dozen shoots you'll be a master. Now here's what you do once you've selected all the bad and good photos, once you've flagged everything as a YES or NO. Now you can DELETE REJECTED PHOTOS. Now keep in mind once you've deleted these files they are moved to your trash bucket on your computer or Mac. Please please please make sure you don't have deleters remorse over your photos. This is just how I work and if it works for you then it works for you. Lightroom really allows everyone to process and do their own workflow the way they want. This is just how I work. Okay moving on.

     Once you have deleted the rejected photos by clicking the Photo menu at the top of the screen and scrolling down to it you can repeat this whole process again. So what you'll want to do is go through all of the photos and repeat this process of saying yes or no to all of the photos. I will typically do this several times if not more just because I want to make sure that my client or bride & groom get the best photos they can. You'll start to notice that you now have just really nice photos in your catalog. It will be a pleasure to show, friends and family your photos without having to delicately explain why some of the are bad.  

     Now that you are down to just your good photos you are ready to start editing. I don't use presets btw for anything. I process my photos a little bit differently and don't want everything to look exactly the same as every photographer on Instagram or Pinterest with a yellow decontrasted light flared photo. So here's what I do next. I take one photo and I apply a few general edits on it. First I add anywhere between +5 to +15 on contrast (This helps give enforce a more sharpened look) and then +5 to saturation (You should be shooting RAW and your phot may be a little flat because of it) and then +1 or +2 on clarity just to add a little bit of edge to everything. I'll also make sure Profile correction is on and sometimes i'll add increase sharpness and add a little bit of noise reduction. Once i've done this singular edit to this photo i'll want to apply it to all of the photos. I move back to the main Library loupe view by hitting the G key. Select All (Control A or Command A) and i'll mouse over to the side triangle to reveal the window to the left where it says Sync Settings. I select Sync Settings and I make sure everything is applied. Keep in mind if you decided to adjust exposure on this first photo it will apply to all of the photos. So once all these basic edits are applied to everything I can start going through with more edits. if you've noticed I don't do much with my editing. I really try to get everything correct when I actually shoot the original photo. I don't try and follow up my work with corrections. It makes my life a lot easier when I take a good photo and work from that to make minor adjustments. I'm not huge on filters, fake looking scenes and such. I would much rather get the correct tonal range and add some lights in the scene to break a subject from the background or add a dynamic little flare by using my flash a certain way. It's way too easy to add all these afterwards.   I wrote about that a little more here.

     While in the DEVELOP module you can navigate your mouse over to exposure and it should change the color slightly from Grey to white notifying you that your cursor is selecting this certain option. While the mouse sits over exposure you can now use the arrow keys to adjust exposure and also move between photos. This means you can go through all of your photos with out having to move around your mouse non-stop. I like to apply all of my exposure edits to all the photos like this. I'll eventually go back and do cropping on all of my photos to make it more pleasing to the eye. Some photos may require additional adjustments like Shadows or adjusting highlights. 

     Once I have done all my edits and i'm happy with my work i'll export the photos to a custom named folder. Once the photos have made their way to where they're suppose to be. This is usually my website IShotYourWedding.com which is made through Pixieset.com. Any photos that I really like will end up on my Facebook or Instagram. I'll also take a few photos that i'm happy with and put them in a separate folder called "Images", I know i'm super creative. This is just a folder that links to my Wallpaper and Screensaver that allows me to keep seeing my good photos. When i'm done getting the photos to where they need to be I delete the JPG files. I have no use for them. I have a finished copy on my website if I need to show them and the really good ones I have in a folder and on social media. I find it's much easier to get rid of them and it also keeps my desktop very clean and provides a really nice focus for me to get work done now.

     After most shoots, always weddings I take my photos and back them up to my Lacie thunderbolt hard drive. I sort through them as quickly as possible and then those get backed up to two eight terabyte hard drives. When I am no longer using the photos on my MacBook or travel drive as much I delete them because I have them backed up in two separate locations. This allows me to keep my computer relatively clean. If my computer ever gets stolen I don't lose out on photos and because I have a MacBook and good practices it's very quick to get back on my feet as far as editing goes. 

     I hope this is helpful to the photographers out there with a massive workload. This is a little bit of the magic behind my smoke and mirrors. This is not a shortcut to work, this still takes a great deal of time to do correctly. I'm not breezing through any photos. In fact most  weddings I take four to five weeks because I'll work on the photos every few days that way I'm looking at them with fresh eyes and processing everything in my head on which is a good photo and which is a bad photo. I always want to make sure my best foot is forward. If you don't have Lightroom yet i would highly suggest you go and sign up for Adobe's photographer plan which gives you Lightroom & Photoshop for only $9.99 a month.  Feel free to leave me any comments or criticism on this post.