[Leica] Candid weddings in black-and-white

[Mike Johnston <michaeljohnston@ameritech.net>]

> One thing that I'm thinking might help is the fact that I live in a major city
> area (Washington, DC) where there is probably room for a niche product. I'm
> not looking for volume here. I mostly do corporate events so I'd actually be
> happier if I can keep the numbers of weddings low and the quality and price
> high. I was thinking of
> around $2000 with RC print album to begin with, or a little more if I end up
> going fibre. But as I say, I have never tried marketing this before, so maybe
> $3000 would get me the clients I really want better than a cheaper rate. :)



Onw of my best projects (best because it is completely finished <g>) was a
candid wedding I shot in Vermont for my childhood best friend. It's almost
*beyond* photojournalistic style, all shot with a Canon EOS RT and Kodak
P3200 film. It's pretty iconoclastic in style. I started shooting the night
before at the rehearsal dinner, and finished up the day after the wedding as
cleanup commenced. 

There was another wedding photographer there, a pro who was married to a
cousin of the bride, who was doing ten standard, color Hasselblad shots as a
present to the couple. Well, my friend had no interest in standard, hokey
wedding shots, so before the event we discussed what I should do about the
pro, and my friend grinned and said, "Put him in the pictures." So he
appears in three or four of my pictures--in one, hurrying to get in front of
the four parents as they approach the reception. In another, you see his
set-up shot of the assembled family, with his arm coming out of the
foreground, directing the group into place, as my friend grins at *my*
camera. It's pretty funny.

My book consists of 40 11x11" fiber-base fine prints edited from some 300 RC
workprints from about 1200 shots, mounted in a handmade book with wooden
covers (Hawaiian Koa wood, if you want to know). It took me a year to finish
it and based on the time and materials I put into it, I figured that if I
were to do the same thing professionally, I would have to charge _at least_
$3,000 for it--more like $5,000 if I wanted to be comfortable (I was making
my living as a photographer at the time).

Don't underestimate the amount of work that has to go into a project like
that. Depending on what you expect to bill your hours at, you may actually
end up _losing_ money at $2K per wedding. It's a far cry from editing from
proof sheets and ordering the prints from a lab.

My advice if you want to do this sort of thing professionally is, find a
wedding for which the couple has already hired a standard professional
wedding photographer, and offer to do an "artistic" candid book for free.
And then build two books--one for them and one to use as your selling tool
to show what you can do. As you make your example, pay close attention to
the time and expense you put into it, so you'll know what to charge. If I
were going to do it seriously, I'd charge $7,500 per wedding and hire two
other shooters to help me get more film to work with, and I'd make the final
presentation even more gorgeous (and it was gorgeous). And I'd certainly
never sell anything that wasn't my very finest work--you don't even want
that out there in the world. That's how you keep your prices low, not high.
<g>

The nice thing about charging more is that you could keep your workload down
and keep yourself fresh. If you could charge $7,500 per wedding you could do
20-25 per year and make a nice living, probably clear $75-100K for yourself.
That's the other thing: you have to gauge how many weddings you'd have to do
and guess at whether you could stand doing that much wedding work (this is
the downfall of many a wedding photographer--they just don't realize how
many weddings they need to do to make a living, and what a damn grind it is
to have to do that many). You'll actually end up being more comfortable and
doing better if you charge more, the problem being that you have to offer
something for that money--like excellent, dependable, distinctive work. If
you're going to charge $5K for a wedding, you have to be good. And you have
to make *sure* you never f**k up.

<g>

- --Mike