Projects Series

This is the third in our series of projects for 2011.

Other posts:

• Becoming an award winning photographer
• Your best images of 2010

How we shoot a wedding

(Your 2010 wedding retrospective)

Yesterday we talked about collecting images that sold well in 2010 in order to gain a new perspective on what your clients really like and perhaps discovering what type of photographer you are.

Today’s project is about bringing all of your best images together (the ones that sold well and your favorites).

Call me a traditionalist but there really is no better way than doing this than in a book or album.

I’m going to start off by saying that this really shouldn’t be used as your main portfolio tool. Read any article in bridal magazines or websites that give advice about choosing a wedding photographer and one of the most consent nuggets of advice is ‘ask to see a whole wedding’.

This book doesn’t necessarily have to be printed using your best supplier (as it might get quite expensive).

One company that really stands out for me here in the UK is Bob Books – www.bobbooks.co.uk who offer excellent and affordable hardback, photographic and paperback books. There are of course many others that offer simpler products but my advice would be to keep it simple.

For the type of book we want to produce we don’t need any elaborate designs or over photoshopping (unless that is your thing).

I am truly a photo purest at heart and a retrospective like this should be about the photography not the latest plugin you’ve been using. It’s more of a guide on what you do on the day rather than what you do in LightRoom.

How do you shoot the day?

Think about how you photograph a wedding and divide it into different sections:

• Bridal prep
• Groom prep
• Ceremony
• ……etc

Go through your best images from each section and make sure you have roughly an even amount in each.

An easy way to do this is to create a folder on your desktop for each section or stage of the day and drag and drop images into them.

You can (if you’re really organised) do a simpler thing using tags and ratings in your editing programs.

By the end of this process you should have a pretty accurate overview of how you shoot a wedding.

There are a few things you’ll want to keep an eye on:

• Try and have the same amount of images in each section – if you have too many in one section then you might want to separate that particular stage of the wedding into subsections – for example – ‘reception’ might become ‘first dance’, ‘speeches’ and guests ‘mingling’.
• Have at least 3 different wedding represented in each section – Even if you only use three weddings for the whole book it’ll maintain the consistency. If you have a whole section from one wedding.
• Don’t include too many ‘chance’ shots – unless of course you’re confident you can get a similar image.
• Choose images that illustrate exactly what you do - This is how we do group shots – This is what we do when we come to your house etc
• When creating the pages for your book keep it as simple as possible - one image per page is always nice

The finished product

What you should have when everything is printed and delivered is a fantastic visual aid which will help you talk through exactly how you go about photographing each wedding. These books are not so much about showing off your very best work but about informing and educating clients on what to expect.

How big you make your book is up to you….. but remember you don’t want to bore prospective clients (just think how many wedding images they’ll have been consuming before they see you)!

Not only that, you’ll have a retrospective of the year which is great to look back on and compare in the future…. give it a go… it’s a throughly enjoyable exercise!