You, Me, and Everything In Between

Let’s get rolling

This blog, this course, this website, this podcast; it’s all designed toward the beginning wedding photographer.

Okay, so I’m a little ahead of myself. I don’t have a podcast up and running. One day.

Eventually what I am trying to build here is a connected community where people considering the business, just getting into the business, and growing in the business can all use to support and learn from one another. My intention is that people will be able to choose what they need and want from it, whether it’s the course, or just the blog, or mentoring, or the photographers who belong to the social media community that will support all this.

The course is designed for you if:

• You’re daydreaming about being a wedding photographer.
• You’re starting out as a wedding photographer.
• You’re already a wedding photographer and you want to be a busier wedding photographer.

The course is not designed for you if:

• The money is what you dream about.

To be honest, nobody is getting rich being a wedding photographer. Rich means something different to everyone, but I am guessing that, across the whole planet, there are very few people who are living the lavish lifestyle solely on the income of being a wedding photographer, despite what their lifestyle looks like on social media.

I am making a living as a wedding photographer. It pays my bills. Sometimes it takes me to some pretty cool places. It keeps me comfortable and in a secure space. I don’t drive a Mercedes, or anything even remotely similar. I drive a Subaru.

But that is all by design. Remember this term for later: “personal overhead.”

If you see this as a career because you think it will be crazy money and you want crazy money, you are in for a disappointment and shouldn’t be here. Because most of us who do this for a living, we do this because we love it.

If you don’t love it, you don’t have any business messing with one of the biggest days/events in peoples’ lives.

My goal here, initially, is to remove a little of the mystique that shrouds wedding photography to outsiders and make it more accessible to you. One of the biggest blocks for rookies in this career is how scary it looks when you don’t have the experience. I want to help you get past that. I want you to have the confidence it takes to take it on and to love it.

Because one of the secrets of being good at this is loving it. When you love it, you bring that to every wedding and every couple, and they love you back for it.

We’ll start with some simple things and we’ll work to keep things simple, even when we get into the higher level stuff. When it gets technical we’ll learn some shortcuts that, again, helps keep it simple.

Remember that word, too: simple.

Starting out

We all pretty much start out similarly. No matter how popular or pricey or famous or semi-famous we may seem or believe we are, we all had the same humble beginnings. We turned something we love into what we see as a success. The paths vary a little here and there, and the definition of success is just as varied, but the spark and the desire were all the same.

Me included.

The one thing that changed everything…

I took a photography class in high school. It paid my way through (my first attempt at) college. I set it aside for a bit while I worked in corporate America and raised a family, but expecting a departure from corporate life, I refocused on it. I dreamed of it being my ticket out. I thought I would just start with portraits and maybe even stay there.

And then a friend asked me to do their wedding…