Last Updated: February 14th, 2020
Good wedding photographers have a combination of photography skills, people skills, and business skills.
At the core, photography talent will play a huge role when you are actually photographing the wedding. Being able to adapt to a variety of lighting conditions, and capture people looking their best is crucial. Your wedding photography portfolio will be built on the look of your images – and it’s pretty easy for most people to tell a “good wedding photographer” from a bad one on this alone.
For most wedding photographers, being able to provide great customer service and run a photography business will be of equal (or greater) importance to having actual success as a wedding photographer in the long term.
After all, you can have the best pictures in the world, but if people don’t like working with you for some reason – or if you’re not making enough money to sustain yourself – then things will fall apart pretty fast!
In this post, we’re going to show you how you can become a good wedding photographer.
All the tips we provide here have been personally tested by us, since we’ve managed to go from having no idea what we were doing to being good & successful wedding photographers ourselves.
Photography Skills
Wedding photographers are, first-and-foremost, photographers.
If you are wanting to turn wedding photography into a career or are just wanting to test the waters and see if it’s right for you – you should know that being an experienced photographer will help you in so many ways.
We have been into photography since a young age. It was a hobby and a creative outlet as we went through our teenage years.
When we decided that wedding photography was something we wanted to pursue, it meant really refining the skills we already had.
It turns out – wedding photography is a combination of most photography disciplines!!
“Wedding photographers” need to be able to take great…
- Portraits
- Details
- Environmental Shots
Because of this, we have to pull on all of our knowledge to get the best shots throughout the day.
In addition to our photography skills, we’ve also had to make investments into our photo equipment to help us achieve professional quality throughout all of our images.
People Skills
A good wedding photographer needs people skills, too!
This comes in the form of providing good customer service to your clients.
Each client can be different, but a few things we see consistently include:
- Being responsive before the wedding if they have any questions
- Get back to emails quickly, and be open to setting up phone calls if needed to discuss
- Be positive – sometimes clients can be really stressed out and even hard on themselves, so being able to be a good voice during the hard times is an excellent thing to bring to the table
- Show your clients you are organized, professional, and going to capture the best images no matter what
In addition to your clients, there are also many other people you will be interacting with as you take photos during the wedding day. Capturing shots of the wedding guests, the family formals, the bridal party shots – all of these require that you have a good way of interacting with everyone to get great shots!
Business Skills
Most wedding photographers run their own businesses.
Unless you happen to just be a second shooter for another established photographer or are working for a wedding photography chain like George Street Photo, you will need to have business skills to make it.
While running a business is really the farthest thing from being a photographer, this is the area where most wedding photographers will likely fail. Even a great photographer might struggle with running the business side of things – and that will ultimately dictate if you’ll be able to do this long term.
There are many things that go into running a business, but a few of the things that have really stuck out in our minds over the years have been these:
- Be willing to build your portfolio and charge what you are worth
- Make business decisions that benefit your clients and yourself
- Know that it will not be easy, but it will be worth it
If you need more help in this area, we put together a great post – The Wedding Photography Business Starter Guide – to help you do just that!!
If you want to become a good wedding photographer, being able to pull on photography skills, people skills, and business skills will all be essential.
If your unsure of yourself or what you are capable of in any of these areas, don’t worry! The good news is…a lot of these skillsets come with time and experience.
We have learned a whole lot in our several years of running a photography business. We didn’t just wake up one day and suddenly know how to do bookkeeping, know how to handle some client concerns, etc. But, we worked through everything one by one. If you are willing to ask questions and put in the work, you can become a great wedding photographer that takes pictures people love and has personal success.
Wedding photography really is a dream job!