Book Your Wedding in 2019

It’s only February which means that you still have time to book vendors for your 2020 wedding, and even for 2019. Many couples don’t know this but prices for vendors can fluctuate depending on a variety of factors including your date, location, and time of year. This is one of the advantages of working with a boutique vendor instead of a corporation where prices may be set all year round since they focus on volume.

For a business run by a small group of people, such as my studio, there’s often wriggle room and pricing strategies that clients can take advantage of. Think of an old school mom and pop store run by a family that may be neighbors of yours. Things are a bit more high tech and complicated now but the human connection is still an important factor, especially when it comes to wedding photography.

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2020 is going to be a big year.
August 18th, 2018. January 19th, 2019. July 7th, 2017. These have been some of the most popular dates in recent years due to their memorability. 8/18/18. 1/19/19. 7/7/17. See what I mean? Many couples want a special date for their special day which drives demand higher and the prices as well.

I predict that 2020 is going to be a big year and I’m already being flooded with requests. A nice even number year like 2020 is definitely going to be in high demand. Can you guess which date in particular would be the most popular? My bet is on October 10th, 2020.

But what does that mean for you? Many couples are going to wait after being engaged to get married in 2020 so the demand in 2019 is going to be lower than usual. When the demand is low, prices usually go down as well which means that couples may be able to find bargains more easily!

In fact, I’m telling you right now that from speaking to other wedding professionals, 2019 has been a down year all across the board. I’m not just talking about photographers, either. I’m talking about reception venues, wedding planners, florists, and more. It seems that everyone is waiting to get married in 2020!

Economic Forces
It really is a simple formula: As demand goes up, prices go up. As demand goes down, prices goes down. There’s a direct relationship between how much a vendor is able to charge and how many people are looking for services. I always use this example as a reference, but a wedding date on a Sunday in the dead of Winter is going to have lower demand than a Saturday during the Fall. Most vendors are looking to book as many dates as possible and they’re willing to lower their prices since it’s better to work than not.

Take Advantage: Be Early
Even if your wedding is in the late 2020’s I would recommend that you start looking for vendors RIGHT AWAY. Everyone knows that all the good vendors and venues get booked up more than a year in advance. There are only so many weekends in a year (and even less premium dates) so it’s important to at least start doing your research now. Remember: more hurry, more money. If you procrastinate, you’ll end up rushing to find vendors which means that it can get more expensive.

Book your Vendors
2019 is a FANTASTIC year to have your wedding. If you don’t want to bother with all the trouble of finding vendors for such a high demand year like 2020, you’re going to have a much easier time. You’ll find that vendors have more availability and their prices might even be lower. If you haven’t booked your venue yet, don’t care about special dates, and are looking to save money, I would suggest having your wedding in 2019.

The Importance of an Engagement Session

An engagement session might seem like an unnecessary additional cost but it’s value goes beyond the resulting pictures. I always recommend an engagement session to my couples and here are some reasons why:

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Save The Date
If your engagement session is far enough in advance of your wedding day, you could definitely use professional pictures for your save the dates. I recommend having your engagement session about a year in advance of your wedding date so that you have enough time to print and send out the save the dates.

Pictures for Display
Whether on your wedding day at your workplace, or in your home, engagement session pictures can be framed and put on display to add a personal touch. It fills my heart with joy when I arrive at the reception and photographs from the engagement session are displayed everywhere. It really ties in the look and feel of the wedding to see actual pictures of the couple.

PRO TIP: Consider a style of photography that contrasts from your wedding. For example, if your wedding is in the city, have your engagement session in a more natural setting. Alternatively, you could go for the same look and feel to complement your wedding as well!

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Flexibility
Unlike your wedding day, the engagement session is much more flexible. You’re not locked into a date so if the weather isn’t what you wanted or something comes up, you can always reschedule. It’s a more casual session so you don’t have to worry about making mistakes or keeping to a schedule.

Creativity
You’ll likely spend most of the wedding day in a dress or formal wear so an engagement session is a great way to express yourselves creatively and go for different looks. I always recommend my couples bring a couple of wardrobe changes: one formal and one casual, to vary the look of their pictures. But go wild! Make it a Harry Potter theme or Game of Thrones. Dress up in costumes. Bring props. The sky’s the limit!

Practice
In my opinion, if for nothing else, this is the most important reason why a couple should consider adding an engagement session to their wedding photography package. It’s not ideal for the couple when I show up on their wedding day and start taking pictures of them only for them to feel awkward and not know what to do. The engagement session, to me, is a chance for me to teach the couple what poses work best and for them to get used to being professionally photographed. That way, when it’s time for the big day, there are no surprises.

How to Have the Best Wedding

I've photographed over 400 weddings and every one of them have been different! There are, however, a few suggestions that may help make your day truly exceptional.

Planning
First and foremost, the more prepared you are, the smoother your wedding will go. The devil really is in the details. When it comes to planning, it helps to go through everything systematically and don't be afraid to delegate! Visualizing your day from start to finish also helps. All you should worry about on your wedding day is getting married.

Organic Moments
Let the moments in your wedding happen organically. It'll mean that much more when it's personal to you. It's easy to get lose yourself in Pinterest boards and Instagram accounts but don't forget that it's your wedding! Use resources as inspiration for your wedding instead of trying to reproduce what others have done for theirs. BE YOU!

Roll with the Punches
No matter how carefully planned your wedding might be, things won't always go the way you want. And you know what? That's totally okay! There's a term called "wabi-sabi" in Japanese aesthetics which basically means perfection in imperfection. It's better to let your story unfold and enjoy your day than it is to fixate and stress.

I photographed one wedding where the person in charge of the rings had lost one. That person was devastated but it broke the tension and made the ceremony that much more fun. (The ring was eventually found in a field)

Timing is Everything
It might seem like a long day, but in reality it flies by. Schedule your day accordingly by investing more time in things that matter to you and less elsewhere. I almost always provide a shoot schedule that helps break down your day into chunks so you have a better sense of where your time is going. The more guests you have, the more time management matters!

Positioning
Place yourself in situations that make you happy. If something doesn't make you happy, have someone else do it! Your vendors are happy to help and lend their expertise (at least I am), and of course so are your bridal party, friends, and family.

Wedding planning is difficult and can be overwhelming at times. Don't be afraid to ask for help and don't take things too seriously. Remember what the day is about and enjoy!

Reviews Culture

This is kind of a taboo topic.

When I shop online the very first thing I look at are the reviews. Overtime, I've even fabricated a somewhat complex algorithm to determine if a product is worth purchasing based on them. How many reviews does it have? What's the overall number of stars? What is the content of those reviews? What is the 1 star to 5 star ratio? Etc.

It's kind of ridiculous.

But I get it. People want to buy things that other people recommend. At least, for mass produced products, I completely understand.

There are some fundamental problems with buying things this way, though. First, literally anyone can leave a review. Sometimes the review will say "verified" to imply that the person purchased the product. But from what I understand, this is easy to get past. The scary thing is, a no name brand can pay people to leave tons of 5 star reviews on a bad product and the average consumer is none the wiser. This happened to me once when I purchased a computer mouse that ended up being terrible.

I think they're called sponsored reviews.

Second, the same goes for bad reviews. Literally anyone with an internet connection can leave a bad review. A competitor. A stranger. A troll. To safeguard this, companies give business owners the ability to dispute a review but only according to their guidelines. This means that, typically, as long as the review doesn't include hate speech, swears, or less than PG content, it stays regardless of whether or not it's real. These safeguards are essentially worthless.

The companies that host reviews want as many as possible and are very hesitant to remove them because the more reviews they have, good or bad, the more money they end up making.

I haven't dealt with this personally, but I've heard so many horror stories of businesses ruined because they couldn't get negative or fake reviews removed.

Now to be fair, some business are just bad and deserve negative reviews. That's fine. But for people like me that offers a service, it can be detrimental. You see, I don't offer a mass produced product. Every client, every wedding, every guest that I encounter at a wedding is different. Since I am not a robot, but a person offering a service, my relationships with them are equally unique. 

Since the name of my business is my real name, literally every interaction I have with anyone, casual or professional, can come back to me. Bad break up? A vindictive ex girlfriend could get all her friends to go online and leave bad reviews. (just hypothetical) My personality rubbed someone the wrong way at a wedding? They could go online and leave a bad review!

In fact, it could literally be something I said in this blog or any others that might trigger someone. It takes just minutes for them and they may enjoy the satisfaction of hurting someone, but for me it would take days if not weeks of fighting with review sites to take them down, if at all.

Thankfully, I haven't had to deal with any of this and my reviews so far have been stellar. I've been blessed with such incredibly amazing clients that absolutely astound me with their thoughtfulness and warmth. But I've also encountered people in my personal and professional life that just by nature hate everything or are just having a bad day when I crossed paths. It's just life, and it's just the way people are. We're impulsive, prone to mood swings, have emotional scars, and we're largely a product of what has happened to us.

But in the middle of all our human weaknesses, we can love, be selfless, and choose to be happy.

Let's be real. On my end, I can't really do anything about our reviews culture. All I can do is be honest and offer the best services I can with enthusiasm and sincerity. It's a good thing that I want the best for my clients, honest to God. It occurred to me the other day that I have a job where I would never want to call in sick. And just for that, I count myself blessed.

UPDATE January 24th, 2018:
IT'S HAPPENED. Not to me, but to one of my photographer friends. She woke up this morning with three fake reviews on her Google listing, all negative, from people she doesn't know. I don't envy the headache that's about to follow for her to get those reviews removed.

Weird Things I do at Weddings

When you've been at it for a long time, like an old married couple, it's inevitable to pick up some weird habits and idiosyncrasies. Here are a few weird things that I do at weddings:

Fidget Finger
If you look at my trigger finger while shooting, you'll notice that it's constantly flicking the shutter button. It's not that I don't have control of a rogue index finger, but a habit of the past when cameras didn't have the greatest autofocus and I had to constantly make sure the focus was on point before firing off the shots.

The Death Stare
The Devil is in the details! I've made many a couple and bridal party slightly uncomfortable by staring at something with aggressive, but hilarious, intensity. In these moments, there's a million things running through my brain as I try to tune everything else out and focus on and visualize how all the details work together in the frame.

The Maniacal Laugh

Mayor Bob Terwilliger, aka Sideshow Bob from the TV show, The Simpsons. Not my work, courtesy and copyright of Fox Broadcasting Company.

I'm not exactly sure why I do this, to be honest, or what exactly triggers it. I think it's when I'm particularly pleased with something, I burst out in this maniacal laughter that can be startling and possibly quite upsetting for those who don't know. For those that do, they get excited too! I had one bride run over to me when she saw me laughing, saying, "I know that laugh!" eager to see how the photo turned out. She was pleased :)

The Camera Flip
I'm not sure when I started to do this, but when switching from portrait to landscape, I don't take the camera away from my face. Instead, I flip it one handed for a quick transition. I think it's pretty sleek. No one's picked up on it, though, so maybe it's not as cool as I think it is.

That's about it, from what I can tell. Maybe my past clients know of others!

The Boutique Advantage

It's no secret that the wedding industry is incredibly saturated with an overabundance of photographers. I pray for all newlyweds out there trying to find the perfect wedding photographer for their wedding!

With every year that passes and every new camera launch, it gets easier and easier to enter into professional photography. The market is flooded with fickle new photographers looking to make a quick buck or woefully unaware of the hard work it takes to not only be successful but be competent.

Furthermore, unfortunately, often times the wedding photographers that get the most business do not necessarily produce the best work. There are other variables at play such as how much they pay for advertising, SEO, and reviews (yes, I've heard of photographers paying for fake reviews).

It's only natural, then, that the wedding photography industry evolve to a point where there are mega studios employing dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of photographers nationwide. The typical mega studio runs like a corporation: there is a department for customer service, sales, editing, managers, directors etc. The photographer only has to show up on the wedding day, shoot, and be done.

There's great value in a photography mega studio for the potential customer. They have access to the portfolios of many photographs who have presumably been screened for competence, to dedicated customer service representatives and other benefits of a multi level corporation.

It's like buying something from a big box store or online where the choices are seemingly limitless versus a specialty store. Why purchase expensive bread from a dedicated baker when it costs a fraction of the price to purchase bread from a grocery store?

But I'd like to make a case for the boutique wedding photographer. 

The boutique wedding photographer runs a much smaller operation than mega studios. They may only employ a handful of people, if any, and runs most of the business themselves. However, unlike the relationship a customer has with a mega studio, the relationship of the client with the boutique wedding photographer is much more intimate.

First, flexibility. As in the example of the bakery vs grocery store above, it can be as simple as the baker knowing your usual order or the ability to personalize your bread to your specific liking. You can't get that from a loaf in a bag that's been mass produced.

Second, integrity. I confess, when I first started my career nine years ago, I started with the mega studios. It was amazing. All I had to do was make one 10 minute phone call the week of the wedding, show up and shoot for a set number of hours, and ship/upload the photos in the next couple of days. But after a couple years of doing this kind of work I felt like I lost my artistic soul and felt it was incredibly unfair for the wonderful couples I got to shoot. As a photographer, it's imperative to me that I connect with my subject. For couples, I want to understand their unique relationship so that my photographs of them will reflect that. Shooting for the mega studios, I didn't have the opportunity to get to know my clients and I ended up producing a product, not artistic work.

Third, quality. This is the big one. Not having met or gotten to know the wedding photographer beforehand, the client has no idea what to expect. You see, unlike a product that has been mass produced by a corporate system, the boutique wedding photographer is motivated to produce the best quality of work possible due a combination of having far less volume and the ability to listen to the client's specific requests. A personal connection between the wedding photographer and the client goes a really long way.

And that's the photographer I want to be. I want to be your personal wedding photographer. I want to know and understand the unique connection that you have with each other and capture it for years to come.

Stop Defending Wedding Photography Pricing

Before any wedding photographers reading this post jumps down my throat, I want to remind them that I am also a wedding photographer and to read all the way through until the end because I do offer a way better alternative.

The most common argument that I see for wedding photographers defending their pricing is the following:

I [the wedding photographer] am justified in charging what seems to be a high fee for my services because my professional equipment costs a lot of money, I have to pay for professional association fees, insurance, employees, continuing education and other business related expenses.

Some take it even further to include living expenses such as car payment, rent, child care etc. I'm not going to point fingers because wedding photographers have notoriously large egos and they may come after me if I start listing links. A simple Google search will bring up an abundance of examples.

But by the logic above, the cheeseburger I buy at McDonald's for a dollar and some change is grossly under priced and its real worth is untold thousands. 

Let's break down the argument using the same logic that wedding photographers use for a typical hamburger franchise:

Equipment fees: thousands of dollars
Employees: $9/hour
Training: hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars
Franchising fees: thousands of dollars
Other expenses such as napkins, fire extinguishers etc.
Total price of cheeseburger: Thousands and thousands of dollars.

You see my point.

I think it can be exceedingly damaging for wedding photographers to defend their pricing by basing it on the cost of doing business. I would never tell my clients how much it costs to run my business as justification for the prices I charge. They'd think I'm either nuts, an idiot, an amateur, or all three.

Instead, it's much more beneficial to both the industry and the wedding photographer to base pricing on value. For example:

Your faucet is leaking. You don't know how to fix it so you call the plumber. The plumber tightens a bolt and fixes it in five minutes flat. The plumber charges you $20. Do you get upset because all he did was tighten a bolt and it only took him five minutes? Of course not. Because you're paying for his expertise and the convenience of not learning everything there is to know about fixing faucets or getting your hands dirty.

Another example: you go to the emergency room because your ears hurt. The doctor looks into your ears and says you have too much ear wax and flushes them out for you. He charges you $400. Do you get upset because all he did was squirt warm water in your ears to get rid of ear wax? Of course not. Because it's the middle of the night and you were at home with your ears hurting and you had no idea why and thought you were going deaf or possibly a brain tumor so you got in your car and drove to the ER at 2 in the morning. 

That totally wasn't a personal experience, by the way.

(yes it was)

But my point is, pricing is not based on the cost of doing business, but rather the perceived market value of the products and services the business offers.

Think of everything the wedding photographer actually does:

  • Shoot a variety of subjects in a wide variety of conditions
  • Shoot all styles of photography including products, landscape, portraits, journalistic, etc all under time constraints and pressure from the venue, family, client etc while maintaining a professional and courteous demeanor
  • Culling, editing, and proofing
  • Album design
  • Dealing with emergencies
  • Planning and logistics
  • The invaluable convenience and trust of having a professional take your photos
  • The ability to capture split second photos made possible by years of experience
  • Instinct that developed over untold thousands of hours of shooting in all kinds of situations
  • A once in a lifetime event (hopefully)
  • Expertise in all areas of photography including lighting, cameras and lenses know how, mixed lighting, how to make water look silky or how to blur out the background etc.

Not to mention the impossible to quantify items such as talent, personality, years of unique experiences, ability to lead and make decisions, the wear and tear of shooting multiple weddings every weekend etc etc the list goes on and on.

That's what the the client is paying for.

And you'd rather base your pricing on how much it costs to be a wedding photographer? Doesn't that seem really cheap to you? I'll stick with the incredible value that a wedding photographer provides.