5 things I wish I knew when I started shooting weddings

Last week I shot my 120th wedding – it’s been 6 years since I first started photographing weddings professionally.

To some of you reading this, that may seem like a lot. To others, it may sound like I’m just getting started!

Whatever the case, here are a few of the things I’ve learned along the way.

(If you’d like to learn more, check out my mammoth article on wedding photography tips.)

1. You can’t make a living shooting destination weddings

After sharpening my skills and gaining valuable experience at local Sydney weddings for a couple of years, I decided I wanted to explore the alluring world of destination wedding photography.

Between 2017~2018, I shot weddings all over the world: New Zealand, Bali, Sweden, UK, Spain, Canada, Japan, Sri Lanka… not bad, considering I was being flown all the way out from Australia!

Whilst this was a lot of fun, I soon realised that it wasn’t a great way to make money. Sure, the clients paid for the trip and my wedding fees, but the long-distance travel and extended time overseas soon took its toll – the numbers simply didn’t add up.

As a result of showing more destination weddings on my website, I’d attract more overseas shooting enquiries… and slowly my local wedding enquiries started to drop off.

Long story short – shooting destination weddings in exotic countries isn’t as glamorous as it might appear! It’s definitely a lot of fun, and great for your portfolio, but it isn’t a long-term plan if you intend to make a living from wedding photography.

2. Posing sucks. Direction rocks.

We all want to be 100% candid wedding photographers. Wouldn’t it be great if our couples were completely natural in front of the camera, falling into beautiful poses without our intervention?

Unfortunately, this is seldom the case – sooner or later you need to learn how to pose your couples to elevate your photography.

However, there’s nothing worth than stiff, awkward poses, especially ones that don’t suit your couples’ personalities.

I quickly learned that trying to replicate what I considered to be great-looking poses created by other wedding photographer, was not a recipe for success.

Sure, it’s fine to start your couples off with some kind of aesthetically-pleasing pose (that’s what Together Cards are for), but directing couples is the key – the ‘pose’ should be a fluid thing, that moves and changes, adapting to the subjects and their energy and relationship with each other.

3. Presets should be the last option

Wedding photography presets seem to be everywhere these days. Have you ever considered how easy it is to make them yourself?

After all, it’s usually just a load of different slider settings – that’s why on Shotkit we decided to offer some free Lightroom presets, to save everyone some time and money!

When you first start out with wedding photography, it’s easy to get tempted by all the nice-looking wedding photography presets being sold by the ‘popular’ photographers. While there’s nothing wrong with buying a preset or two to find your ‘look’, you’ll learn much more by simply having a play around with the various options in Lightroom.

Buying presets can be a never-ending quest to replicate someone else’s work. It’s not just a matter of having the same gear and presets as your favourite photographer – you’d also need to be shooting in the same light as them, not to mention knowing how to actually take and edit the photo in the same way…

In short, save your money and sanity, and go it alone… at least at the start. When you’ve hit a wall with your own editing and need a different perspective, then it might be time to see how another photographer is doing it. (Just don’t assume that their preset will be your magic bullet!)

4. Marketing is more important than being an artist

This one’s a sad truth, but it’s usually the best marketers that are the most successful as photographers – not the best artists.

Sure, there are some outliers – those rare, gifted individuals whose names we all know, who seem to be successful just because their work is incredible.

Whether or not that’s actually the case, one thing’s for sure – just like with any other business, marketing is extremely important if you want to succeed as a wedding photographer.

While social media does have its benefits, it’s also an uphill struggle – you have to keep ‘feeding the fire’, and it soon feels like a lot of wasted effort.

I chose instead to focus most of my efforts on SEO, and in doing so, got to the point where I was attracting new wedding clients passively (rather than hustling for them over social media!)

I’ve written two books (More Brides I & More Brides II) which share all my most effective SEO and marketing techniques which have helped out over the years.

If you’re struggling to attract new clients, or simply want to keep attracting clients over the long term, I recommend you check them out – use coupon code NINJA for a saving.

5. Get organised before you get busy

When I first started out shooting weddings professionally, I thought I’d be able to manage my bookings using an Excel spread sheet. I only had about 10 weddings booked in my first year, so investing in anything more than that seemed like a waste of time and money.

How wrong I was! Even if you’re still counting the number of wedding bookings you have on the fingers of one or two hands, now is the time to set yourself up properly.

Investing in a great CMS like Studio Ninja during a slow period where you have some free time on your hands can mean being prepared for when things really start to get busy.

Unless you make the switch from a dodgy home-made spreadsheet early enough, you’ll be forever playing catch up – setting up a brand new CMS when trying to deal with multiple clients isn’t a fun experience… I should know!

A good CMS handles all the boring but important administrative tasks that don’t have a direct correlation with your bottom line. This frees up more of your time (and brain-power) to concentrate on the money-making activities – blogging, SEO, advertising… whatever it takes to get those new client enquiries flooding your inbox!

I know that when you’re first starting out with wedding photography, another monthly expense doesn’t sound very appealing. However, think of it as an essential business expense – you can write it off at the end of the tax year, and it’ll help you manage your clients more efficiently and professionally. It’s a sound investment, trust me!