Did I Save Myself a Headache?
A person tried to haggle me down on a price for a ‘full day’ of coverage.
They wanted me to provide 10 hours of coverage for less than my full rate so they would have some money left over to help them buy the services of a videographer! (They actually said this.)
I said, ‘Sure, I would love to subsidise the cost of your videographer for you’ ( I didn’t actually say that).
What I did say: ‘I’m happy to work with your budget. If you have a budget of X, then that buys you 8 hours and not 10.’ There’s no way I would offer to work more for less. My pricing is here in case you were curious: View wedding photography pricing
Eventually, he said he’d book 10 hours at my full rate. Hooray! Or so I thought, until the guy expressed that he wasn’t happy for any photos taken at his wedding to be used anywhere.
I get the whole ‘privacy’ thing. But, here’s how I see it:
I don’t want to limit myself in how I can use my own photos. I rely on photos that I take at weddings to market my business.
Case in point: it was only after seeing photos that I had taken at other people’s weddings that he enquired with me in the first place.
It didn’t feel right to shoot for someone who’s not prepared to do the same in return.
So, I walked away.
What are your non-negotiables? What would stop you from walking away from a sale?
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How I Got the Shot
It’s never a chance happening that I’m in the right place at the right time.
This one won a Fearless Award. It came about from pursuing an idea, failing, then sticking around to capture something better than I had anticipated. This is all part of the discipline of being a documentary wedding photographer.
It was captured when I photographed a wedding in Derbyshire (one of my photography workshop attendees joined me for the day, too, to get some hands-on experience at shooting a wedding).
The venue had no outdoor space, and the children were running riot. This gave me some interesting things to shoot.
At one point, the bride was sitting down at a table, and the children were running around in the background. My initial idea was to capture a photo of the children playing with the bride in the frame for storytelling.
I tried a few different compositions while the bride remained seated, but I wasn’t happy with them.
After the bride had left the scene, I continued shooting.
A child was rolling around on the floor and used the now-empty chair as a framing device, waiting for the child to roll into place.
One of the guests then reached for his glass, creating a previously unseen bit of juxtaposition.
In the final edit, I cropped in to make the humour more obvious.
Cheers To Everyone Who Attended My Workshop
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