Well, it’s been quite a year. I got married, I cut my final staff photographer strings and went 100 percent freelance, and my business exploded. I photographed people from Barak Obama and John McCain to Brooke Shields, Kathie Lee Gifford, and the president of the Dominican Republic, just for starters. I won top 10 awards in all three quarters of the prestigious Wedding Photojournalist Association awards that I competed in. Exactly one year ago I found an in-stock Nikon D3, and thus spent the year with cameras that constantly astounded me and never got in my way. And, of course, I met countless wonderful couples and was honored to photograph some amazing weddings.
Having been married this year, I realized a few things about what people should want from a wedding photographer other than “takes really good photos.” Communication, comfort, and constant attention to details throughout the entire process are key in ways that are hard to foresee. I recently expanded my business, hiring a business manager to make sure that every last detail has another pair of eyes on it, which is a tremendous step. But I’ve also thought about something else. What a couple really cares about when they look for a photographer isn’t what they did for someone else; it’s what they’ll do for them. There are good ways and bad ways to answer that question. Just looking at the few photos on a portfolio site isn’t enough — not only are they just a few photos, but they could be models, from a workshop, etc.
A frequent piece of advice people get is that you should always see a large number of photos from one wedding. That’s good advice, but I said to myself, “Wait a minute. Which wedding are photographers going to show?” The perfect one. The one where the weather was amazing, the couple loved the camera, the kids were cute, the day was long and varied, there were fire dancers, who knows. But weddings aren’t always like that. This year I’ve seen an outdoor ceremony get rained out, an indoor ceremony be inaudible thanks to overhead rain (those were the same wedding!), an outdoor reception in 100-degree weather, a 50-mile an hour wind knock over EVERYTHING (those two were also the same wedding, and I won an award for the shot). I’ve been given five minutes for formals where it should have taken an hour. I’ve shot weddings in severe pain after falling, I’ve gotten into car accidents on the way to weddings.
And that’s life. What you really want from a wedding photographer is someone who can shrug all that stuff off and take great photos anyway. So I’ve started showing slideshows from EVERY wedding in 2008 to my couples, including all of the weddings above. The last thing someone wants is a photographer who has done great work in the past but just decides your wedding is something to “get through.” One of my second-shooters told me that at her wedding, her normally fabulous photographer decided to shoot almost everything with a fisheye. Ugh.
So here, to end the year, is the list of slideshows. It’s not complete, because slideshows tend to be the last thing I do in delivering photos, and because some couples have told me they didn’t want their photos linked to on the Internet. But it’s still a pretty good look over the Year that Was.
Christina and Sebastian, 6/22/08
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