How To Make Money Photographing Weddings
Weddings are a special occasion where pictures are often taken. Like wine and cheese, wedding and digital photography go hand and hand. Therefore, the happy couple is great people to market your digital photography service. You can begin by contacting wedding planners and trying to set up a deal. Wedding planners have the ability to recommend a variety of services to the entire wedding party. By creating an excellent relationship with a wedding planner, you could be very successful in your venture to sell your digital photographs.
Since wedding planners are not willing to risk their reputation, they will only work with well established, experienced photographers.
Therefore, it is important that you have a wedding portfolio in place. Before you contact wedding planners, if at all possible, try and get some testimonials from satisfied wedding parties. However, all hope is not lost if you are not at this point yet. There are a variety of ways you can establish your wedding photography services.
If you do not have a wedding portfolio, you will first want to offer your photography services to a wedding couple, simply for their testimonial. Be sure to keep the copyright to your photographs so they can then be used when you go to create your wedding portfolio. You might be able to locate a prospective bride through close family or friends or through other networking activities.
Once you have at least once wedding under your belt and a positive testimonial for your portfolio, you can start looking for additional wedding to photograph. Generally, word of mouth is the best way to gain additional customers. However, you can also check the local newspaper for wedding announcements. If at all possible, contact the bride and offer your services.
You can either send out a promotional package by mail or you can try contacting the bride by telephone. Additionally, you can offer to take pictures at the bride’s home prior to the wedding. When photographing a wedding, you can get some beautiful candid shots of the attendants helping the bride put on her veil or flower girls primping in front of the mirror. When looking to photograph a wedding, also offer your services for other wedding events such as a bachelor party, bridal shower and rehearsal dinner.
Generally speaking, these are not services that photography studios typically offer. Therefore, be sure to incorporate this as one of your unique selling points. Other marketing venues include florists, wedding chapels, limousine companies, wedding boutiques, tuxedo stores, bakeries specializing in wedding cakes and so forth.
Ask if you can leave some of your wedding brochures or pamphlets where customers will see them or make arrangements for a referral fee. Another unique suggestion is to work with a scrapbook artist who specializes in wedding scrapbooks or wedding memory albums. Scrapbook artists use photographs, decorative paper, mementos, journaling and a variety of embellishments to create stunning, unique albums that truly are works of art. In order to find a scrapbooking artist, you can either contact a local scrapbook store or run a Google search for “scrapbooking artist.”
You might be able to find locate a store manager who is willing to pair up with you for such a project. Last but not least, if you are considering a wedding digital photography business, always keep in mind that everything is about the bride. If you keep the bride happy, everything else will fall into place and go well.