A Day In The Life :: Off Season

It’s going to be 73 degrees tomorrow here in the DC area. It’s a wonderful reminder that Spring really is around the corner, and those snow days will be long gone. Warmer days also signal to us, that the off season is coming to a close and it’s time to get ready for wedding season! The past few months we’ve been working in our wedding off season, the time of year when most couples are not getting married, when we set aside time to do different kinds of work without our cameras in hand. As this time comes to a close, we thought we’d share a look into what our off season looks like. Hopefully this helps answer the common question “must be nice to have 3 months off, what do you do with all your free time?” Ha!

Once Christmas rolls around, weddings and engagement sessions no longer fill our schedule and we have a lot more time available for business related tasks that need our attention. There is so much more that goes into running a wedding photography business outside of taking pictures. There’s a business to run. Over the past several weeks of our “off season” we’ve taken a few iPhone, behind the scenes photos (when we remembered to). We wanted to do a recap of what off season looks like for us to help our couples, our friends, and anyone considering wedding photography as a career path understand how much hard work, hustle, and fun this job can be.

 

Bridal shows!

The first weekend of January, right after the holidays, it’s time for us to get into bridal show gear. In fact, we spend most of December prepping for bridal shows so we’re ready to go after New Years. These are wonderful, fun days and we love spending the time together! This display wall doesn’t set itself up though… there’s moving truck rentals, hammers, nails, touch up paint, the dreaded task of hanging those large prints, wiring lights, putting the floor out and trying not to break anything in the process. These days hanging out in our little nest away from home are some we look forward to all year long. Thanks to the hard work and amazing skills of a dear friend of ours, we debuted a brand new booth this year! Now we finally have room for folks to come inside and spend time chatting with us.

These shows are a lot of hard work, but they’re also a huge part of how we keep this business going. Bridal shows are where we meet almost half of the couples we work with, and finding just the right couples takes time. In the weeks following big bridal shows, most of our hours are spent corresponding with interested couples, answering questions, and having consultations in our studio. We do two big shows like this in January every year, which means the month of January, and some of February, are almost completely dedicated to the work that goes into bridal shows.

 

At the studio

Without weddings to photograph, you’d imagine we get some weekends to ourselves. You’d be wrong. When new couples want to come sit down with us for consultations, we need to work around their busy work schedules. That means we’re usually at the studio every weekend. These marathon days of new couple consultations are a lot of fun though, and we don’t mind a bit! We drink a lot of hot tea and coffee, and we snack on more pastries than anyone needs to eat in a given day. Spending time at our nest, welcoming new couples to the flock, and getting to know each other over yummy snacks is always fun to us.

During the week, we also spend a lot of time at the studio doing super fun stuff like cleaning. Cleaning! Someone’s gotta clean the bathroom, vacuum the floor, dust the furniture, and organize the storage room. Yeah, that’s us! We don’t hire a cleaning service, we do this part of the job ourselves.

We spend time packaging welcome gifts, designing albums, packaging albums, taking inventory, reordering materials and supplies that are needed, and keeping the books up to date with all the new contracts that come in.

Education

You never get to settle. You never get to stop learning, stop pushing yourself to be better. There is a constant uphill climb you must embrace as photographers in this industry, and when you find joy in the work it takes to outdo yourself, it makes this part of the job rewarding. In the off season, we get to devote a lot of time to improving our craft, and enhancing our skills as photographers. This off season we traveled to meet with our favorite and most inspiring photography duo to be mentored and coached by them. We learned so much from this one on one time, and it’s an investment we will use well in the 2016 wedding season. We attended a full day conference full of talks, discussions, and an overwhelming amount of information we can implement into our business. We researched, read, took online courses designed just for wedding photographers, drank a lot of coffee and even snuck in some breakfast here or there (something we don’t often do when the schedule gets super busy). This is probably our most favorite part of the off season. Having a little extra time to spend learning is very rewarding and, we hope, very useful.

Taxes!

Spoiler alert… when you own a business and get paid for the work you do, the government gets to have some of that income too. No, you do not get to throw all of that money into a checking account and just live off of it. Tax time will bite you in the ass once, and when you feel the pain of owing a ton of money in taxes you’ll never let that happen again. Luckily for us, we have a certain level of terror when it comes to taxes, so we’ve always made sure to work with amazing, professional accountants who help us keep track of our estimated taxes. Betty is the boss when it comes to all things finances, and she spends much of the off season preparing the taxes, gathering information, and working with our accountant. Maggie drinks coffee. The good news is, Betty is a pro and actually enjoys balancing checking accounts!

The fun stuff

Off season is when we get to do the fun, extracurricular stuff photographers and creatives love to do. This year we jumped feet first into a huge rebranding project, and we’re still working with our designer to bring our brand to where we want it to be. That requires a lot of hours spent discussing our vision, our ideal clients, the experience we want to provide, and our “why”. We’ve been busy writing new personal bio’s, a brand executive bio, mission statements, tag lines, website content and magazine content. Woosh! There’s a lot of work that goes into a rebrand! But it’s all been fun, and we make sure to sneak away for yummy lunch meetings every once in a while. We’ve also had the pleasure of collaborating with other industry professionals on a big styled shoot that’s set for March. One thing we love is playing dress up, and getting to spend a morning in a bridal salon with our model, trying dresses on her for the styled shoot is our kind of off season fun!

So there you have it! A run down of what we are up to when weddings are not happening every weekend. There’s little downtime, but we do make sure to spend some time regrouping and recharging our batteries for the wedding season ahead. We’ve had a great off season, even if it did keep us busy, and we are so excited to start photographing weddings soon!