My last blog post was about my feelings regarding how to price my work as a wedding photographer, and this post is linked, in that I want to talk about building a name and a business for myself as a wedding photographer. I have enjoyed taking photographs of people for almost as long as a I can remember - way back to my school days, when I would carry my father's old Pentax S1a around with me at any opportunity (a fantastic tool to learn on, by the way, as it was entirely manual!) And the photographs I got the most satisfaction and pleasure from taking were of my friends, having fun and enjoying themselves - I got good at being both a participant and an unobtrusive chronicler of social gatherings. Unfortunately, it turns out that just being good at taking photographs which people are happy to see themselves in, rather than cringe at the memory of, is not enough to become someone who takes photographs for a living. I mean, you might indeed be the best in the world, but nobody's going to hire you if they've never heard of you!

And this brings me to my current situation, of having photographed a goodly number of weddings, but by no means having a solid or dependable income from it. The problem is that I enjoy almost every aspect of wedding photography, even the pressure of getting those really important set-piece images, but the one thing I've never got comfortable with is the business of actually finding clients. I have always felt that slight reluctance and ambivalence due to the market prices I was putting myself against. Combining that with having a full time job meant that I never really committed to putting the necessary work in to market myself. Time to change that though! I have decided that I really do want to combine teaching and photography as twin parts of my work, which means that I need to start being serious about finding clients. Now, how to go about it...?

This might seem like a strange subject for my first blog post - I mean, I'm clearly shooting myself in the foot here - but it's a topic which I have to grapple with every time I contemplate the industry I work in. You see, I cannot seem to shake the ambivalence I feel when it comes to valuing my photography, and therefore deciding what I should charge.  A survey published recently in the UK showed that the cost of the average wedding is now around the £28,000 mark, and as anyone who has been involved in planning a wedding knows, merely breathing the 'W' word has a seemingly magical effect on the quotes you receive... Why should this be? Could it be that the industry as a whole is built on the same business model that the beauty industry utilises so effectively - namely, making people pay over-the-odds for things they don't need by instilling a sense of fear? 

To give some context to my quandary, let me tell you a bit about myself: Outside photography, I am a primary school teacher. I have been teaching for over six years, and in that time I have worked as both a full time, and a supply teacher across state and private schools. A full time teacher is in school for 195 days in the year, but our contracts do not place any upper boundary on the number of days or hours worked, stating only that we need to work as much as is needed to deliver the teaching. Most primary school teachers work on average between 59 and 60 hours per week during term time, and then continue to work for significant portions of our holidays as well. I say all this not to complain about how poorly paid teachers are, but because it underpins my idea of what my time is worth. If I take into account the weekends and holiday time I spend working, I don't think I've ever earned much more than about £120 per day, despite having been on what I consider to be a fairly good wage. That's £120 for between 10 and 12 hours of work in a job which requires a significant amount of education and ongoing training, because just like photographers, teachers always want to get better at what they do.

So just how does this affect my thinking? I do a few different types of photography, and outside wedding work, I tend to let my teaching salary structure my rates. That is, I generally charge about £150 per day, taking into account my time taking the photographs and then editing - and that strikes me as a good deal. It's slightly more than I earn teaching, I can fit it around my school commitments, and the types of photography I do are low-stress (compared to weddings!) and enjoyable. Even so, I am aware that I am charging significantly less than a lot of other photographers, but I have very low overheads (no studio), I am lucky enough to have an alternative source of income, and I live beyond the reach of London's ludicrous cost of living. When it comes to photographing weddings, however, I seem to have let myself become affected by the market rates. The survey I mentioned earlier suggests that the average amount spent on the photography is now over £1,000. That's £1,000 for probably around 8-10 hours shooting and then maybe double or triple that doing the post-processing - more than double what I earn as a teacher. And that's just the average! It doesn't take long looking at photographers' websites to realise that many are charging a great deal more (although to be fair, they will often include second shooters at those prices). Now I absolutely don't want to sound as if I think photographers are ripping their customers off. Shooting a wedding is a high-stress job where you only get one chance to get a lot of the most important images, and where you have to produce a large number of beautiful photographs which hang together to tell a story - a lot of photographers simply won't touch it! Not only that, but there are only so many days in the year that you can actually work, as people generally want to get married on the weekends - preferably not during the winter! Then there's the cost of all the equipment, insurance, repairs, software, travel, training, marketing and everything else. It's complicated. Even at £1,000 a wedding, you need to ensure a fairly steady stream of work to earn a decent salary if that is your mainstay.

So where does that leave me? Who wouldn't like the idea of earning £1,000 or more for two or three days of doing something they love, producing something which will give a lot of joy for many years to come? On top of that, if I were to charge at the rate I earn from teaching, no bride or groom-to-be (not to mention other professionals!) would ever take me seriously. So I am back to where I started - I charge the market rate, but I can never seem to shift the niggling feeling that I'm charging more than I can justify. I absolutely love photographing weddings, but I sometimes wish I wasn't part of an industry which seems to go out of its way to use the fear of disaster to make people spend so much. I mean, £28k is enough for a very healthy deposit...