The Wedding Photography Business Starter Guide

Last Updated: February 14th, 2020

Starting a wedding photography business can be a daunting task.

We know the challenges and triumphs very well as we’ve been running our business for over 2 years now. Early on, we learned a lot of things the hard way as we pieced together what we needed to do every step of the way. Overtime, as we became more and more established, things would become much easier.

If you are a photographer wanting to break into the world of professional wedding photography the right way, you’re in the right place!

With this guide, we will walk you through the steps you will need to take to properly get your business up and running. We should warn you – it is going to be hard work. BUT! If it’s what you really want – if wedding photography is your goal for a career – you can absolutely do it.

Guide Outline

Before we get started, we want to share with you the high level topics we’re going to be discussing in detail here. Our goal is to provide you a comprehensive resource to help you start your own wedding photography business.

Here is what you can expect to read about in this post:

1. Introduction – About Us
2. What’s Your Purpose?
3. How to Setup as a Legal Entity
4. Business Expenses, Accounting, and Taxes for Beginners
5. Define Your Brand
6. Setting Up a Website
7. Get Organized
8. Gear Investments
9. How to Price Your Wedding Packages (3 Pricing Models)
10. What Other Services Will You Provide?
11. The Importance of Customer Service
12. How to Get Your First Client
13. How to Meet Prospective Clients?
14. Our Recommended Booking Platform
15. What About Contracts?
16. Refining Your Photography Skills
17. Learn How to Pose the Couple
18. Wedding Day Stories – What to Expect
19. File Storage Suggestions
20. Post-Production: How to Cull the Wedding Day Photos Quick
21. Post-Production: Editing the Wedding Day Images
22. How Do I Get a Consistent Photography Style?
23. Client Galleries – Options and How to Deliver
24. The Follow Up(s): Thank You & Ask for Reviews
25. Tips for Selling Prints
26. Business Longevity Discussion: Diversifying Revenue Streams
27. Your Questions Answered

1). Introduction – About Us

Wedding photography is a career path that found us.

We’re Jes & Chris – a husband and wife team that has been shooting weddings for over 2 years now as Hand and Arrow Photography. To say the least, it has been a long journey – and we’re getting to the point where our personal and professional successes are worth sharing with others in hopes of inspiring other photographers to join in and do the same.

Our enjoyment of photography stems from shooting together at a young age. We’ve known each other since we were 13 years old, and now coming up on our 30’s…we definitely feel a bit older, and a little wiser (but just a little bit). Of course, not all hobbies and passions translate into jobs. Through school and a number of other jobs we’ve held over the years, our biggest enjoyment has been doing things together.

What inspired us to become wedding photographers?

When we decided to get married in the fall of 2016, we had experienced the ups and downs of wedding planning first hand during our year long engagement. One of the things we really took notice of in this process was our own wedding photographer (shout out to Hannah with Sparrow & Lace Photography).

Ultimately, the experience of getting married, seeing a photographer in action and realizing our own potential through this process, and (maybe most importantly), realizing we could be around each other even more – set us on the track to start our own wedding photography business.

These feelings have guided our every move for two years.

It’s an intense passion for us at this point. It’s one that we’ve sacrificed much for, but it has been a ride that is worth it in our experience.

If you’re inspired and ready, let’s go!

2). What’s Your Purpose

One of the most difficult questions you will need to answer before you start your own small business is: what’s your purpose?

There are many reasons for needing a good answer to this question.

On a personal level, we have come to realize that wedding photography is not an easy career option. You can’t just do it passively like a desk job. Don’t get us wrong – it can be great fun and a joy, but it can also be very tiring and even mundane when you’re stuck responding to emails, updating accounting spreadsheets, and having yet another phone call meeting.

Outside of this, it’s also important to realize that small businesses often go out of business, with the reasons for this happening ranging from having too little money to sustain itself (probably an obvious reason) to simply never providing a product or service that was necessary in the first place.

Today, photographers are increasingly common as photography has become more and more affordable. In 2014, statistics were released that identified roughly 200,000 professional photographers operating in the US, of which over half were self-employed. You may have heard it before – it’s a saturated industry. But, that doesn’t mean its impossible to break through. We’re evidence of this ourselves!

The key? Have a concrete purpose for being a wedding photographer, and be willing to work very hard.

Success comes, but it does take time.

Remember: we’ve been on this two year track, and we’re not getting off the train yet!

Your success will be built on a solid foundation defined by your purpose.

Achievement seems to be connected with action. Successful men and women keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit! – Conrad Hilton

3). How to Set Up a Legal Entity

Now that you have a sense of who you are and what you have to offer the world through wedding photography, you are ready to really get started.

Most wedding photographers start off by second shooting with other already established professionals. Simply shadowing can be a good way to learn about the industry without fully dipping your feet in. We highly recommend doing this if you haven’t already!

Once you’re ready to take your wedding photo business into the real world, it’s crucial to incorporate. Incorporation is just a legal term for making your business real in the eyes of the government – and getting to do all the fun things that comes along with that.

Business Types

There are several business types you have to choose from depending on a variety of factors (most heavily impacted by the amount of money you’re making, number of employees, etc.). We’ve listed a few of these below:

• Sole Proprietorship
• Limited Liability Company (LLC)
• S Corporation (S Corp)
• Corporation

Generally speaking, most independent wedding photographers will be running as a sole proprietorship or an LLC.

By default, sole proprietorship status is attributed to every single person business. There is paperwork filing to make this official, but the legal system treats people as this simple classification by default as well. In truth, this business status offers little in the way of protection for you, and is not ideal.

Setting up an LLC is likely the preferred option – and the choice we went with. There are some great advantages that come with starting an LLC, most significantly the limited liability of you (as an individual) for things done by the business. For example, if you were to be sued for actions taken by your photography business, only your business assets would be vulnerable – not your personal assets.

Some folks may become an S Corp (we’d only recommend after speaking with an accountant), and an actual corporation filing would likely go to photo studios with a number of photographers and other employees shooting under them and likely making a good chunk of change.

4). Business Expenses, Accounting, and Taxes for Beginners

With your business officially setup, you now get to dive into the real fun of business ownership. While we love photography, doing these things tends to be pretty mundane, but absolutely necessary.

All of these topics get pretty intense – it’s why there have been a number of books written on each, and entire college courses dedicated to them. We’re going to give you a quick run down of each and suggestions based on our experiences getting to know them all over the years.

Business Expenses

Most of the things you purchase can be deducted from the taxes you owe each year.

This includes camera equipment, props for styled shoots, hotel rentals and plane tickets (when traveling for business), office supplies, advertising, and so on. If you’ve ever wondered how some photographers can come to own all this cool and expensive gear, it’s likely because they are operating as a business and writing those purchases off their taxes. More on this in a second.

Another area for really powerful savings comes by tracking your mileage. In 2018 we’ve earned over $4,500 in a tax deduction from all the driving we have done. The easiest way to do this is to track mileage with MileIQ – an app that helps automate this process. You can read our review and guide, or check it out yourself and use for free up to 40 drives. If you end up needing to log even more, upgrade to a paid plan and you can receive 20% off your first year by using this link.

Accounting

One of the tougher parts of running our small business was learning all about bookkeeping. We have to admit, we were never all that great with math in school, so this wasn’t exactly our favorite thing. Fortunately, with time we’ve learned how to do it, and it’s actually quite easy to do on your own.

The way we see it, there are 3 ways to approach accounting (just choose the one that makes sense for you):

1. Accounting in Excel by Yourself. We started off using this approach. We found a solid bookkeeping template online, and started tracking all of our sales and purchases. Early on in your business, this might make the most sense given the only cost will be for Microsoft Excel (which can be purchased for 70$/year).
2. Accounting with a Paid Program. The next step up involves purchasing a dedicating accounting software. There are many available. Some popular options are QuickBooks and Gusto. They both have an array of features – all of which are dedicated to making business accounting an easier process. These types of platforms offer a tiered pricing structure, but on average will cost around 300$ – $400 a year to be functional for a photography business like ours.
3. Hire an Accountant. Both of the above options are great if you’re willing to do your own accounting. Some people just aren’t cut out for it, or have a little money to spare to pay a CPA (certified public accountant). This is something we are considering ourselves, but aren’t quite to the point where we feel more value in paying another person to do something we have under control ourselves. As you might imagine, hiring an accountant is going to be the most costly option, but the time savings could make it well worth it!

In addition to the above, you will also want to keep good records of your purchases and sales. This includes retaining all of your purchase receipts and invoices. This is not difficult to do – especially so if you make a lot of online purchases where records are easier to recover (ie: you’re less likely to misplace a receipt).

Taxes

All of these “business things” overlap with the taxes you owe the government. In practice, if you write enough things off, you can end up not owing a huge amount of money – and in some cases even potentially have the government owe you some. There are a couple types of tax we pay as an LLC:

• State Sales Tax – here in PA, it’s 6% of our sales that include physical goods.
• Federal, State, and Local Income Tax – These are the most significant taxes. The amount owed fluctuates depending on how much net money is made.
• Payroll Tax – This is the tax when we decide to pay ourselves.

5). Define Your Brand

Finally! You can now put the boring business stuff behind you. Your focus can now be on some of the fun aspects of starting your own photography business. Your brand is the core component of your business. A great brand can sell just about anything.

Defining your brand can take a good deal of time, and shows itself in many ways including the look of your website, how you talk (on blog posts, on the phone, in real life), and so on.

The first areas people tend to focus is on their business name and logo.

Choosing a Photography Business Name

Some photographers opt to name their business after themselves (like “John Smith Photography”), while others choose a name in a different way. There is no right or wrong way to go about choosing your business name, but you do want to choose something that you feel represents you (as a person) and what you want your photography service to represent.

Creating a Memorable Logo

Making a logo can be a simple or complex as you’d like. Some of the best logos are, frankly, just really nice text. Often simplicity is the best approach, but experimentation at this stage is key to find something that feels just right.

In our little world, creating a logo was made easier by Jes’ background in graphic design. She made the logo for our wedding photography business. She also created the logo seen here on FFL, too!

If graphic design is not your area of knowledge, you can find a professional to make a logo for you. There are some decent and inexpensive options on Fiverr, and countless graphic designers you can get in touch with online to have something created.

6). Setting Up a Website

The most significant expression of your brand as a modern wedding photographer is your website presence. This is where you will house your portfolio, talk about your service, and enable people to reach out to you directly through your Contact form.

Website creation can be as simple or complex as you want it to be.

For simplified website functionality that you can build from scratch to look great, Squarespace is a great option (this is what we host Hand and Arrow on). You can get a jump on your design by purchasing a Squarespace template as well.

If you want a more advanced site, we’d suggest using WordPress through Bluehost (our recommended web hosting used for Formed From Light). Paid themes provide more immediate access to better functionality, and there are some great ones at pretty low cost. We run this website on Soledad by Themeforest.

7). Get Organized

We’ve been covering a lot of really intensive topics – some of which may be entirely foreign to you. To give you a little break, we want to cover something really easy to understand, but that is critically important to your success.

Having organization in every aspect will allow you to run your business like a well oiled machine. Some businesses fail as a result of not having good structure, which is a really sad reason if we’re honest considering it means these companies could have lasted and made people a lot of money – if only they were built on a solid foundation.

Some of the key ways we have become well organized include:

• Structured email account using Microsoft Outlook
• Contracts and invoices filed by client
• Chronological file keeping of receipts and sales invoices
• Camera bag that carries all of our equipment
• Proper scheduling of shoots, weddings, etc.
• Create wedding timelines for our clients

8). Gear Investments

Every professional photographers needs to be using professional level equipment. It is virtually impossible to compete in image quality with others if you are not using what they are using (or better). This isn’t to say that gear is “everything,” but it is a very important aspect of the service you are providing to your clients.

As two photographers, in the span of 2 years we have spent around $50,000 dollars upgrading our camera bodies, camera lenses, flash setups, accessories, and so on. In a world where a camera body, such as the Canon 5D Mark IV, costs $3,000 – you can see how this can begin to add up quickly (we have 3 of those by the way).

Getting the money to invest in your gear can be a challenge. Unless you are fortunate to already have a lot in savings or someone willing to invest in your photography business, you will need to get the funds together “the old fashion way.”

The options available for investing in better photography gear:

• Taking out a business loan. If you qualify, a business loan can fast track you to money that can be spent to buy equipment upfront. Of course, like any loan, you end up paying a whole lot more in the long term. It is also easy to default if your business ends up going under, or if you suddenly are not interested in photography any more. We don’t really recommend this route, and didn’t do it ourselves.
• Self-fund through a second job. Many starting photographers (ourselves included) hold a day job to help keep the finances afloat. Unfortunately, the real world is challenging and we need to pay bills, keep ourselves fed, and so on. Some of our earliest business investments were done out of our personal savings accounts.
• Self-fund through client fees. As you begin to book more weddings, you can reinvest the money you earn into your equipment. We paid for around 90% of our equipment in this way. As we became more experienced, we raised our prices more and more. Over time, enough bookings came in that we could pay for all the gear we needed.

The Investment Phase

For a good period of time, we referred to the first 1.5 years of our wedding photo business as being the “investment phase.” During this time, pretty much every dollar we earned as a business was reinvested into our gear and other expenses.

We did not pay ourselves from any of our business earnings for 2+ years. This is a crucial thing to understand if you are considering opening your own wedding photography business without having a steady income stream as you would have with a second job.

Our Gear

The first things we purchased were upgraded camera bodies and a few better lenses. We were very smart to only purchase what we really needed first, then over time we were able to add additional things to round out our photography gear kit. We also began to purchase products that would benefit the business side of things such as Honeybook, MileIQ, and so on. This is discussed in more detail throughout this post.

If you are wanting to know more about the photography equipment and business products we use, check out our Resources page where we have compiled many of these things in one place.

9). How to Price Your Wedding Packages (3 Pricing Models)

Wedding photography pricing is where you define how much your service is worth.

We can admit this is not easy to do. Frankly, you will probably end up getting it wrong the first few times. The goal with pricing is to strike the balance where you are making enough money to support your personal and business needs, and also effectively representing your skill set. Not to mention, pricing in a way that makes you competitive with other wedding photographers in the market.

We have observed a few different types of pricing models often used by wedding photographers:

1. The Package Model. This is the simplest way to price your wedding photo packages. You put together predefined packages that state the number of hours you work, additional sessions (such as an engagement shoot), and any addition things that would be included such as prints or an album. Your prospective client can reach out to you and say “I’m interested in your Silver Package.” It’s pretty simple!
2. A La Carte Only Model. In this pricing model, you provide a list of services and products to your prospective client, and let them select everything they want and need. You have a cost attributed to every item on your list, and at the end, simply add everything up and charge. This is a model that tends to work better for in person sales.
3. The Guided Choices Model. The option we work based off is this one, though the actual term for it is something we only recently discovered in a post by The Modern Tog. In essence, this pricing model blends both the package model and the a la carte model to create a structure that is more appealing to the client. It provides the structure of packages with the flexibility of adding or removing things an a la carte sale would allow.

Our package pricing has evolved over the years. We’ve learned there isn’t a clear-cut “good” or “bad” way to price yourself. The most important things that define our pricing strategy are the following:

• Transparency. We keep our prices visible on our website, and are very open about the costs of our services and products. We know some photographers opt to hide their pricing behind an email, and we understand the psychology of this, but it’s just not something that works for us.
• People pay for quality. We have increased our prices significantly over the years. We raise our prices any time we feel like we can (usually represented by making a lot of sales and receiving a lot of inquiries). No photography service is the same, and if anyone has an issue, wants a discount, etc…we usually politely decline and move on. We offer value to people’s lives, and make the experience of having photos taken painless and fun. Our customer service is also a very significant aspect of our sales pitch.
• We need to make enough money to pay our bills and live. Ultimately, our prices need to reflect a reality of needing to make enough money to live. If people want an inexpensive photographer, there are many available on the market. If people want us, then we need to be paid in a way that can support our business and personal lives.

Did you know? – We spend around ~40 hours per wedding package sold. This includes meetings, phone calls, email exchanges, engagement session shoots, wedding day shoots, traveling for the shoots, photo editing, and so on.

Need more guidance to get your pricing right? Check out the Photographer Pricing Guides by Signature Edit’s.

10). What Other Services Will You Provide?

Most wedding photographers will provide other photography services, too.

The most obvious of these services are engagement sessions as this enables you to work with the same type of clients, and even the same clients in many cases. In our experience, offering e-sessions is essential as it can allow you build a relationship and trust with your clients before their wedding day (you know – one of the most significant and stressful days of a person’s life).

But while engagements are easy and make a whole lot of sense for a wedding photographer to add to their service lists, you can also expand your studio to cover other photo areas such as:

• Family photography
• Portrait photography
• Commercial photography
• Event photography
• Maternity photography
• Newborn photography

For us – we primarily do photography for couples. We do it almost exclusively, actually. On occasion, when requested, we do all of the above types of shoots as well. While many successful photographers can shoot in a number of niches, often the most successful hunker down and just focus on one or two.

The reason for this?

Take this simple thought exercise:

You are looking to book a wedding photographer. You stumble upon websites and portfolios for 2 photographers in your area you really like. One photographer has a portfolio that spans all types of photography, while the other just showcases couple’s shoots and weddings. At face value, we’re more likely to trust going with the person who appears most dedicated to our needs. Which one would you choose? Share with us in the comments and we can talk about it some more there!

11). The Importance of Customer Service

Before we go any further, we want to take a quick moment to talk about the value of good customer service.

In our humble opinion, small businesses live and die by their ability to serve their customers well. Fortunately, in practice, it’s not particularly difficult to do – respond to client questions in a timely manner, make yourself available within reason, and go above-and-beyond when it makes sense.

This approach helps you to grow your reputation as a must have wedding photographer, and benefits the people who pay with their hard earned money for your services, too. This service shows up from time to time throughout your entire relationship – and it’s important to be aware and respond effectively.

12). How To Get Your First Client

Every established photographer knows the challenge that is involved in getting that first paying client. We honestly spent months just trying to figure this out ourselves. There is probably nothing more uncomfortable than sitting around with a new $3,000 dollar camera and not having any work to put it to use.

So, how do you get that first client?

How do you make it happen?

Well, there are probably 100 different ways to approach this.

Our first client came through Thumbtack – a website, in it’s current state (which is different than we first used it), that we don’t really recommend. They have changed their tactics, and it feels quite predatory towards photographers and other professionals using the service. With that said – if you do want to try it out, just know your mileage may vary.

Other options we know people use to find their initial clients include:

• Craigslist
• Social Media (Facebook and Instagram especially)
• Referrals from family & friends

The one thing you can expect from all of these places is that your first few bookings will be done on the cheap. It’s difficult to get around if you don’t have a lot of experience and a well defined portfolio.

13). How To Meet Prospective Clients?

Meeting prospective clients is an important part of running a wedding photography business. There are many options available to you thanks to modern technology – even though a face-to-face meeting might still be preferred if it’s possible. We talk about some of these options that we employee, and mention a couple of pros and cons for each.

• Email meeting. This might sound odd to you, but there are a good number of people willing to hire a wedding photographer after just a few emails. It’s especially strange when these people are about to drop several thousand dollars on this person. We’ve experienced this a few times in the past, but have recently moved to requiring at least a phone call so we can chat together before signing a contract. This is often beneficial for the client so they can get to know you a bit more, but is also valuable for you as a photographer to help identify if there are any “red flags” that come up that might be otherwise hidden via an email.
• Social media meeting. Much like an email meeting, chatting via a social media platform like Facebook or Instagram has also in the past been sufficient enough for people to book with us. In the same vein, this is a great place to start a conversation – but we need at least a phone call here, too.
• Phone meeting. The most common type of meeting we will have is over the phone. It’s easier to get a feel for someone in this way without even having to leave your house. We don’t love phone calls – because it lacks the ability to get a read on people like seeing them face-to-face, but it’s much better than just talking through text.
• Skype meeting. We often set up Skype calls with people who live really far away from us. We’ve been hired by people living in entirely different states, so it’s not realistic to expect to meet up somewhere for coffee and a chat. Skyping together is a great way to meet digitally because we can see each other. It’s as simple as that.
• In person meeting. The best way to meet prospective clients is in person. 95% of people who meet with us book with us. It’s not foolproof, but it’s a great opportunity to really connect and feels much less sterile than other ways of interacting.

The biggest tip we can give you if meeting a client in person is to meet at a location you designate. If you work from your home (like we do), we suggest it be another location in a public. We have basically designated a local Starbucks as our meeting spot – and tell any prospective clients this is where we meet. The most serious people tend to not have an issue with this at all!

While some photographers may offer to meet half way (and we used to!), we’d suggest against this. These consultations are usually done for free and can be quite time consuming, the least a prospective client can do is meet on your terms.

14). Our Recommended Booking Platform

Okay – now that you got your first client to reach out to you, and you’ve met with them in some way, it’s time to get them officially booked. This is one of the weirdly fun parts about small business ownership – getting to see your vision become a reality as someone actually decides to book with you.

There are many ways to approach this. Some people still meet clients with a paper contract to sign and collect payment in cash or check. In our opinion, this is a dated approach, and highly inconvenient much of the time.

Our recommended booking platform is Honeybook.

It’s a customer relationship management (CRM) platform specifically designed for wedding vendors. We have used it for the majority of the life of our business when we realized we needed a way to book clients that wasn’t inconvenient for them (it includes online contract signing and accepts payments via debit/credit), and made our lives easier to keep everything well documented in one place. You can read more about what Honeybook has to offer in our comprehensive review.

Just want to check it out yourself? Use the links below!

Our Gift to You – 50% off Honeybook

As long-term and successful users of Honeybook, if you sign up using our referral link, you will be able to take 50% off of your subscription for the first year. Given the 30-day free trial period you can sign up for, and the Honeybook subscription cost for the first year being just $200 – it is easy to see why this could be a great value for you.

15). What About Contracts?

While using Honeybook is easy for sending contracts, actually having a valid one written up can be more difficult. A great starting point is to check out some free wedding photography contract templates available online.

You will likely want to customize your contracts to reflect what you are specifically offering your clients. Some of the things you will want to make sure is in writing include (note: this isn’t a comprehensive list!):

• What is included in the client’s package
• Where the wedding day will be taking place
• How much time you are booked for
• How payment will be handled & what is expected as an upfront retainer
• A cancellation policy (what happens if a client cancels on you?)
• An Artistic release
• Model release

This has been made a little easier for us as Chris (the guy half of our photography business) has a legal background and is comfortable with contract verbiage. If this is not something you have background expertise in, we highly recommend seeking out a contract lawyer to have a proper and legally binding contract drafted (yes – this will cost money). There are online alternatives such as LegalZoom where you can have the same sort of thing done – it may potentially be cheaper, too!

16). Refining Your Photography Skills

With all of this business talk, it’s easy to lose sight of the thing that attracted you to starting a photography business in the first place.

At it’s core, though there are times where it feels like we are doing more of the business side of things, our passion is really for the photography we get to do. Our love is for couple’s portraits, but wedding photography is much larger than this!

Continuing to educate yourself and refine your skills as a photographer is essential for capturing beautiful images time and again. We’ve considered ourselves to be quite good photographers in the past, but every wedding day brings with it new and unique challenges, some you may have never faced if you have just taken photos as a hobbyist.

The learning experience never really ends. We’ve shot over 30 weddings now, countless other types of sessions, and every time we show up at a new venue we have to put our technical and compositional knowledge to the test. It’s not always easy, but it is always worth it!

The best way to refine your own photography is to simply go out and practice again and again. At times, shooting under pressure (such as for a client) is another great way to learn. We’ve occasionally tried out new techniques throughout our wedding days, which is totally fine so long as it isn’t all you are doing.

Photography Education Options for You

If you want to be more prepared and have a solid educational background, there is so much free content available online that you can review and learn from. Some recent article’s we’ve written include:

• The Ultimate Couples Photography Guide
• 3 Huge Tips for Photographing Children on the Wedding Day

If you want a more intensive learning experience, you should also check out some online photography courses. Digital Photography School’s 31 Days to Become a Better Photographer is a great start.

17). Learn How to Pose the Couple

Based on our experience, we’ve been comfortable with the technical aspects of photography for a long while, but the real area we needed to hunker down and learn was how to approach portrait posing. A quick look through our portfolio can probably reveal to you that we’ve really begun to learn what we need to do to get the best reactions for our couples – but it wasn’t always this way.

Our first big step to refine our approach to posing was moving towards the use of prompts instead of trying to forcefully pose our clients. This has led to a lot more authenticity in our images.

We started our foray into this approach by picking up The Unposed Field Guide. As you can see in our review, we no longer see that as the most valuable resource (and it doesn’t help it’s a bit expensive for what you get). A recent alternative we came across is Digital Edit’s The Candid Couples Posing Guide.

18). Wedding Day Stories – What To Expect

If you’ve never actually shot a wedding before, or have limited experience, you should read up on some of our first hand stories from weddings we’ve shot to help get a sense of what you can expect. Obviously, working with people can bring with it plenty of unique challenges and even odd situations, so you really should be prepared for anything.

Story #1: Crammed in a Hotel Room

One of our most common experiences from shooting weddings is starting out in a small hotel room. This wouldn’t be difficult by itself, but most of the time it’s with a large bridal party and some family. 10 guys in a room for one? Check. Over time, we’ve learned to work with spaces like this. It’s best to also be lighthearted and joke around too if anyone makes comments, and try to give people space when they are putting on their pants.

Story #2: Family & Friends Be Crazy

We’ve heard many other wedding photographers recount having clients that were difficult. Luckily for us, we’ve had no experiences like this. Instead, when shooting a wedding with upwards of 200 or 300 people, on occasion we’ll see the craziness come out in friends & family at the wedding. Most of the time, it’s all harmless and makes for a good laugh – seeing grandma out on the dance floor collecting cash in her shirt is probably one of the better experiences we’ve had during a reception. 🙂

Story #3: The Bridal Party Drinks A LOT

While some weddings are dry, and people occasionally aren’t big drinkers, most of the time the wedding party is waking up from a bender the night before – and enjoys their share of alcohol in the morning. As with everything, most of the time things are just fine and people are more “funny drunk” than anything. Sometimes, especially when it comes to bridal party portraits, it can make for a more difficult time – but just remember to relax and go with the flow. Breaking things up with some candid prompts often helps (we like to play a game of whisper down the alley with the party for example), and sometimes telling people exactly what to do is good, too!

Story #4: Other Vendors Can Be Cool & Strange

One of our favorite aspects of shooting weddings is getting to work alongside other vendors. Seeing the great floral arrangements and even the venue itself is awesome because we’ll be incorporating so much of this into our shoot. We work most closely with videographers and wedding coordinators when they are available, and in our experience it can make for a unique challenge but often a great experience.

There is probably a million stories we could share with you.

If you’ve already had a few of your own, feel free to share with us in the comments!

19). File Storage Suggestions

Now that you have shot the wedding day (and survived the wedding day – we really need a shirt that says “I Survived…The Wedding”), it’s important to make sure you are backing up the files effectively.

As hobbyist photographers, it’s easy to get set in a simple way of just keeping files on your computer and that’s it. For professional photographers offerings photos as a product, we actually recommend taking more proactive steps than this to keep your client photos safe.

At this time, we have a large number of SD cards (we recommend SanDisk Extreme Pros) where we keep all client images until they are finalized and sent out in a client gallery. We also dual write RAW files to two separate cards – a great function of the Canon 5D Mark IV. Upon getting home, we also immediately backup our photos on our external hard drive (a WD My Passport). We keep another copy of the RAW files on our laptop during the photo editing process. This means that the images are stored on 4 separate physical locations quickly.

You can also consider online storage options such as through Dropbox – whether used permanently or as a temporary housing for photos while you edit.

We’ll talk more about client galleries in a few steps where we end up storing the most important files, too.

20). Post Production: How To Cull the Wedding Day Photos Quick

Now that the images are successfully backed up, the next step will be to cull them down.

On average, we take around 3,000 – 4,000 photos per wedding across both of our cameras. It probably is a little excessive, and shooting some “full day” weddings has probably contributed greatly to this figure. As you can imagine, when we get home it can be tedious to cull them down to images we actually want to take forward into the editing process.

When we first started our wedding photography business, we would cull our photo sets in the regular computer finder window. This is extremely slow, painful, and tedious. It would take hours just to do this.

The best solution we have come upon to speed up this process is Photo Mechanic. Using this simple program, we can now cull big wedding sets down within 30 minutes.

21). Post Production: Editing The Wedding Day Images

With photos culled and the images selected you want to take forward and edit, this is where the fun starts. While it can be pretty time consuming, it’s actually the best part of our job where we get to sit back on our couch or at our desk (we move around), throw on The Office, and work.

We do the majority of our photo editing in Adobe Lightroom. For some images that require more intensive editing (like removing a bad looking background), we will take the select images into Photoshop to make corrections. Generally speaking though, probably 98% of our work is tied to Lightroom.

If you want some serious photo editing tips, check out our guest post on Kicksta – 8 Photo Editing Tips from a Photographer.

At it’s core, our approach to photo editing begins with using quality presets. Some we’ve used in the past include:

• SleekLens
• Mastin Labs
• With Love & Embers
• Lightagram
• Signature Edits
• BeArt

Your choice of preset pack will be based on price and editing style. Today, we use our own custom made presets as we’ve come to establish our own photo editing style.

22). How Do I Get a Consistent Photography Style?

The key to long term success and your ability to attract new clients is to have a consistent portfolio. The use of presets will help you out in this area pretty significantly, but your photography style is not only equal to how you edit your photos.

A consistent photo style can also be found in the following things:

• How you approach posing
• Your use of light
• Consistent compositions

The best kept secret (that isn’t really a secret) is maintaining your portfolio and social media feeds only with images that suit your photo style. Given that every wedding comes with unique situations, it may be the case that not every photo you provide to a client will adhere to your rigid style 100%.

In our experience, this is especially true for random shots requested during a reception – such as a quick shot of the bride & groom with their family or friends. While these are great shots, they don’t really represent our “style” or brand, which is why we tend to keep them off our websites (but let us be clear – we do show these to prospective clients as a part of a full wedding gallery).

Being selective of images you display is important, and really a photographers marketing 101 class in the making. Keep your Instagram feed consistent, and you will find more inquiries rolling in as a result.

23). Client Galleries – Options & How To Deliver

Now that you have done the miracle work of editing the wedding photos for your client, it’s time to package them up and deliver. There are many ways to go about this, but the two we highly suggest include:

1. Provide a custom flash drive. Flash drives are a simple storage medium that allows your client to have their photos backed up somewhere physical. We suggest WoodyWoodClick because they are reasonably priced and you can add your logo on the USB’s to add some flare.
2. Provide an online gallery. Digital galleries provide the most immediate gratification, and having photos stored in this way also allows for a great backup in case photos are otherwise lost. For this, we use Pixieset – a really well regarded platform in this space.

If you want to read more about Pixieset, check out our review and guide. If you’d rather just check it out yourself, please use our link for this. One of the great benefits of Pixieset is the inclusion of an online print store where clients can make purchases as well – a really cool extra way to make some more money!

24). The Follow Up(s): Thank You & Ask for Reviews

First – congratulations for making it this far!

Running a wedding photography can be very hard, but it’s also rewarding to see your work finished and get to send it over to your client. We’ve had times where working has been so difficult, but even a simple email back saying “WE LOVE THEM!!” brings a smile to our faces.

While delivery of the galleries might fulfill the contract you have had with your client, it’s important to do a follow up and ask for reviews. We normally just ask in your emails and link out to our Facebook and The Knot pages. Having these reviews is so essential for social proof, and helps you to grow your business because prospective clients often will look at these to help decide if they should book you or not.

While not “necessary,” another good thing to do is write a thank you card and sending to your client. We usually include one of these when we ship out the gallery USB drive, and it’s just another added touch to make your business more personable.

25). Tips for Selling Prints

While digital files are usually included in wedding photography package costs, prints are usually an upsell. There are two main ways to approach print sales:

• Active sales. This would involve actively selling print options to your clients. Sometimes this is built right into a package price (such as saying the Gold Package includes a 8×8 album). Other times, this is done as an in person meeting after the gallery is delivered (called in person sales).
• Passive sales. This involves not pushing prints, and instead just leaving an option open (as would be found on a Pixieset gallery) for people to order photos.

How you approach selling prints (if any at all) is entirely up to you.

For some wedding photographers, it’s the main source of revenue for their business – meaning they sometimes offer cheaper wedding packages, but sell prints at crazy prices.

For others (like ourselves), we do not emphasize prints as a priority. Instead, we create our package pricing so that our service is well paid for. Print sales are just on top of this, and a welcome thing to say the least. As we are flexible, if we are requested to add an album to a package – we absolutely do. We also leave the door open for sales through Pixieset in this passive fashion, which works okay enough for us.

26). Business Longevity Discussion: Diversifying Revenue Streams

The most successful wedding photography businesses make a concerted effort to diversify their revenue streams.

As is sometimes said, putting all your eggs in one bucket is never a good idea. While selling wedding packages and shooting weddings is great, the reality is we all have limits on how much work we can take on. Thinking long term, in 20 years hustling around a wedding venue will likely be more challenging, too.

While the sky is the limit when it comes to this, some common ways wedding photographers expand their businesses include:

• Blogging and monetizing through ads, affiliate links, etc.
• Creating eBooks to educate and inform
• Create online courses about photography and business
• Create in person education seminars
• Charge for style shoots

No matter your approach, the most critically important thing is to make sure you are providing a good value. If you are expecting people to pay for a product or service, they receive something valuable from it!

27). Your Questions Answered

Finally – you’ve made it to the end!

We want to make this final section a resource for you to have your questions answered by us. Leave your questions in the comments below, and we’ll come through and update this post periodically to help you and the rest of our community.

We’re going to start off by listing a few common wedding photography business questions we’ve come across and have been asked previously by others.

What do you think the best domain name is for a local photographer?

Your domain name should reflect your brand first and foremost. These days, your domain name matters a lot less to search engines. Actually providing valuable content does! The biggest recommendation we can give you to attract local search engine traffic is to use localized keywords (such as “your location + photographer”), and tag all of your images!!

Do you get anxious or nervous before shooting a wedding?

The simple answer is: yes. Weddings are nerve wracking things. While we always handle them well, it’s hard to not be nervous beforehand. While you can do a whole lot to prepare, it’s impossible to know what to expect with 100% certainty. Usually upon arrival, all of these feelings subside and we get to work. But, yes, it is completely normal to feel like this before the wedding!