A year of education

As a business owner in this saturated industry of wedding photography, it’s essential to continue your education, and to constantly improve your craft. Of course, this would be essential even if the industry was not flooded with new photographers each week. We decided a long time ago not to pay much attention to the hustle and bustle of the industry, and instead we’ve made it a point to keep our heads down, focus on doing what we do, and do it well. Over the years, we’ve spent a lot time building a business, learning as we go through trial and error. Marketing, advertising, shooting style, customer service, and our general approach to our work has transformed over the years. As we move into 2016, we are finally starting to feel confident in our business, and so we’re going to lean back in the other direction now, focusing again on improving our craft, on the photography itself. Now don’t think we haven’t spend any time over the past couple of years working to improve our photography skills. We certainly have, but that specific type of education has been tossed in with the rest of our journey. This year, will be the year of education for us. Back to the books we go, with the intention to relearn skills and possibly see things from a different, more seasoned perspective. We’ll add new skill sets and knowledge to our arsenal of photographic understanding, with the hope that our work will become more consistent and refined. Now that we understand fully, the type of photos we want to take and why we want to take them, it’s time to dig deeper and get better and better. We refuse to be good enough, we want to be amazing.

 

So what are we going to be doing all winter with “nothing to do”? Ha! Well first of all we have more to do now than we do during wedding season. Besides bridal shows, new couple meetings, contract management, taxes, accounting, book keeping, studio management, styled shoots and the always fun marketing/advertising we’ll be doing a lot of this…

• 12 week online photography course
• One on one mentoring sessions with some of the best photographers in the industry
• Seminars and conferences
• Styled Shoots (developed to challenge ourselves in areas we don’t typically see on wedding days)
• Reading, reading, reading! We have several books sitting on our night stands, and even more digital guides from our industry friends that we plan on getting through this winter.
• Competitions! Entering your photos into a competition is an amazing way to see where you stand and how much growth you have ahead of you.

 

 

One conference we attended recently, The Event by Justin and Mary, was an outstanding way to kick off our year of education. Justin and Mary put on an incredible day of talks from industry leaders and the day covered more than we could have imagined. We left feeling so inspired, and full of information. Justin’s lighting class was probably our favorite of the day, and that’s not just because we adore him! This man understands light. He’s a light genius!

Being snowed in (yes… still) is the perfect time to sit down and start up one of those classes. In fact, we’ve got our hot tea (berry for Betty, mint for Maggie) and we’re ready to sit down and get to work. Here we go!